Acquisitions For Area Programs

grated, cross-disciplinary, total approach to a particular geographic area of the world coupled with the intensive study of the major lan-guages of the area. The U.S.Office of Education in its support of language and area programs under the National Defense Education Act has emphasized a contemporary focus as an additional element in the definiti0n.l The areas subjected to this kind of study have varied from time to time and have on occasion been characterized as the non-Western world or the underdeveloped countries. The former qualification scarcely applies to Latin America, nor the latter to Japan. A glance at some of the definitions of ''areas " indicates that these are the areas of the world outside the North Atlantic Treaty Organiza-tion. To put it another way, the areas studied are those that have been outside the mainstream of American academic interest. Or to speak from the viewpoint of a librarian, the areas consist of those parts of the world from which acquisitions are most difficult. American academic concern with the non-Western world goes back more than a hundred years. Yale, for example, appointed a professor of Arabic and Sanskrit prior to the Civil War, and Sanskrit studies were established at Harvard, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins well be-fore the end of the nineteenth century.2 The early programs tended to be confined to a single discipline in the humanities and showed more concern with the past than with contemporary affairs. In the 1930's W. Norman Brown and others began to adopt an interdiscipli-nary approach, to include the social sciences as well as the humanities, and to look more to the present. The process was hastened by World War I1 and its aftermath. The Army Specialist Training Program, aimed at producing specialists in Asian and African languages, in-cluded interdisciplinary survey courses along with the intensive lan