New marketing horizons: The russian–soviet law microfiche project

Although microforms have made important contributions to scholarship in recent decades by preserving and dispersing scarce or unique materials, their potential for creatively advancing the state of knowledge in a particular discipline has hardly begun to be realized. The microform industry has especially neglected: (1) using microform to collect and collate materials which by reason of war, accident, ignorance, or sale now lie in widely dispersed collections, thereby enabling scholars to consult and compare items in their proper chronological sequence or relationship; (2) pricing and packaging microforms in such a way that individual scholars, as well as institutions, become potential customers. Both considerations figured prominently in this author's approach to developing the microfiche project on Russian-Soviet law, published by the Inter Documentation Company (IDC) in Zug, Switzerland.1 What follows is a brief account of the origins of the project, some of the problems encountered, and interim conclusions on the experience.