College and Research Libraries BOOK REVIEWS Introduction to Information Science. Comp. and ed. by Tefko Saracevic. New York: R. R. Bowker Co., 1970. 751p. This book is a collection of sixty-six pa- pers by various authors. Most of the papers have previously been published elsewhere, and all are quite recent. (Only three pre- date 1960.) Most of the papers are impor- tant: Maron and Kuhns on probabilistic in- dexing, Swets on system performance, Leimkuhler on library systems analysis, Barko and Bernick on automatic classifica- tion, etc. Because these papers have ap- peared in journals as disparate as ETC, College & Research Libraries, the Journal and Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, American Docu- mentation, Nature, etc., their collection into a single volume is a signal service for which we owe Professor Saracevic and The Bow- ker Company a debt of gratitude. Because most of these papers have not previously been collected, and because their general quality is so high, this book should be pur- chased by every library that has even a minimal collection in the area of librarian- ship or information science. A very regrettable feature of the volume is that in his general introduction, the edi- tor does not help to clarify what this disci- pline that he calls "information science" is, but rather perpetuates and further com- pounds the confusion that is rampant in the promotional literature of ASIS, the bulletins of schools of "information science," and oth- er publications. True, "information science" is, as Professor Saracevic states, a "nascent science," and we should therefore not ex- pect a totally unambiguous definition of the field-especially since practitioners of even long-established disciplines often cannot do so for their own fields. Nevertheless, we do have a right to expect Professor Saracevic to explain whatever obvious lacunae and 144/ Recent Publications gross disparities occur in his own definition. The evidence presented in this volume suggests that the discipline it represents- whether one calls it "information science" or something else-is substantial and shows vigorous signs of approaching maturity. This makes it all the more regrettable that the editor has so misled the reader-par- ticularly the reader who is new to the field and has not yet learned to discount the grandiose claims information science usual- ly makes for itself-about the nature of the discipline to which the volume is an intro- duction. It should be stressed again that Professor Saracevic is not alone in defining information science more broadly than he conceives it in practice. Even the constitu- tion of ASIS delineates the Society's area of interest as "information and its transfer" which is clearly not the Society's interest in practice. For example, the ASIS Journal would almost certainly not accept an article, even of very high quality, on the sb·ucture of Swahili, or the imagery of Keats, or prob- lems in teaching arithmetic to ghetto chil- dren; yet all three articles could quite rea- sonably be subsumed under the rubric of "information and its transfer." (But then the Journal of ASIS has not kept up with what is going on in its parent society: it calls itself, in its "instructions to authors," a ". . . journal in the various fields in docu- mentation." However, this states better than the constitution of ASIS what the real in- terests of the majority of the Society's mem- bers are.) A final minor complaint: This book will probably be used primarily as a sourcebook. It is therefore regrettable that it does not contain an author index. This might have been more useful than the rather poor sub- ject index that is provided.-Kelley L. Cartwright, School of Library Service, Uni- versity of California, Los Angeles. Planning the Academic Library: Metcalf and EUsworth at York. Harry Faulkner I j I I Brown, ed. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, En- gland: Oriel Press Limited, 1971. 97p. 30s. net. This small volume is the edited record of a collection of informal papers given by the two internationally famous academic library consultants, Dr. Keyes D. Metcalf, Librarian of Harvard College, Emeritus, and Dr. Ralph E. Ellsworth, Director of Li- braries, University of Colorado, at a short course on Academic Library Planning held at The York Institute of Advanced Archi- tectural Studies in 1966. As the foreword indicates ''brevity has dictated the elimina- tion of certain contributions and most of the discussion." This is unfortunate, in the opin- ion of the reviewer, because often the most meaningful results of a gathering such a~ this are the questions asked and the ideas which surface in the unstructured discus- sions by the participants. From its title, if indeed titles nowadays should be somewhat descriptive of a book's content, one would suppose that the major thrust of the work would be in the direction of the actual design of academic libraries. To a considerable extent this is not the case. Rather, the contribution made to the literature and thus to a part of the planning process is the verbalizing of the philosophy of the underpinning of American academic and research library development and plan- ning since the 1940s, and the special rela- tionships that should exist between archi- tects and librarians. Any librarians who have ever been consultants can see their own experiences mirrored and will appreci- ate how often these experiences become "sticky wickets." Such candor in discussing the pitfalls of library planning on today' s campuses is indeed refreshing. The work is entirely verbal; there are no illustrations which would seem a must in a book on library planning. There is a rath- er curious omission of a discussion of that re- cent American phenomenon, the undergrad- uate library. There is no statement on light- ing, and one final deficiency is the absence of an index. Together, Drs. Metcalf and Ellsworth have been involved in some phase of the planning of over 600 major libraries. This makes anything they have to say regarding library planning significant and important. However, there is just no way that this Recent Publications I 145 book should be purchased ahead of Met- calf's Planning Academic and Research Li- brary Buildings, 1965, and Ellsworth's Planning the College and University Li- brary, 1968. These two titles remain the es- sential tools for librarians, architects, and consultants.-Kenneth S. Allen, University of Washington Libraries, Seattle. Allen, Kenneth W. Use of Community CoUege Libraries. Hamden, Conn.: The Shoe String Press, Inc., 1971. Use of Community College Libraries, by Kenneth Allen, is a survey report that will interest many persons who feel strongly about upgrading the quality of higher edu- cation. If taken seriously, Allen's study could help in accomplishing this task. As a result, all those who believe that learn- ing can be facilitated by incorporating a li- brary dimension into the educational system should take it seriously indeed. The reason why Use of Community Col- lege Libraries could contribute to such a goal is because this work supplies one more clue as to how students and faculty mem- bers perceive the teaching function of to- day's academic library. Unfortunately, Ken- neth Allen's investigation shows that the perception is still considerably out of focus, and in doing so it becomes only the latest in a long line of surveys indicating that "the heart of the college" is anything but the center of the academic enterprise. The impact of this study will come more from the data collected, and the conclusions which follow, than from the manner in which they are presented. This is because the entire work is organized in the form of a doctoral dissertation, even to the extent that the author subdivides the first chapter with such captions as "Statement of the Problem," and "Limitations of the Study." Allen's survey deals with information that was obtained from faculty members and students at three community colleges. To gather these data, the author designed a number of questionnaires which could be used in conjunction with circulation records that were available from the same three Illi- nois schools. Mter assembling this consider- able amount of information, Kenneth Allen analyzed the material to determine whether certain attitudes and given circumstances, such as the number of hours a student was