Because of the breadth of the field and the interests of the faculty, coordination between a number of campus selectors is a must. Geographical coverage is irrelevant to anthropology. However, the activities of other selectors, cited in the coodination section above, focus the Anthropology bibliographer's activities on the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. Because of the absence of an Oceania selector at Cornell and consistent with the Department's interest in the area, the Anthropology bibliographer is the principal selector of materials from the region. Similar circumstances apply to Gypsies in Western Europe.
Anthropological collections have a series of particular characteristics.
Because of the centrality of field work to the discipline, anthropology collections stress report literature published by university departments, research bureaus, scholarly societies, etc., outside the mainstream of scholarly monographs and journals. The importance of accumulated knowledge to anthropologists makes historical collections and retrospective materials of importance. The language of publication is irrelevant to anthropological collections. Although English predominates, all languages, European and indigenous, are collected.