The staff of Harvard University's Tozzer Library, one of the leading libraries of anthropology in the world, compiles the file. The library has long collected in very great depth. Its books and serials titles, included in RLG's Anthropological Literature file, are unmatched. As valuable as Tozzer's holdings are, of equal value is the access to them provided by the indexing of individual articles. One critic has noted that, because of the vast amount of scholarship reported in articles rather than in books, library catalogs bring under bibliographic control barely 2 percent of library contents.
Few institutions are able to index their collections to the level of individual articles.
Indeed, when RLG first offered the Anthropological Literature file in 1993, the machine-readable records, from 1984 on, were created that way. However, the Tozzer, a specialist library, in the 1920s requested that its staff undertake card indexing of its journal articles, and many of the articles in symposia and other edited collections. They did this retrospectively. That vast card file, formerly available only on microfiche in a few libraries, with access by idiosyncratic subject headings, has now been converted to electronic form and has been added to the Anthropological Literature file, which now has almost a half-million citations in its database, covering the entire period of anthropology as a scholarly discipline. The library continues to add 10,000 citations a year to this great compilation of the whole of anthropological scholarship.