College and Research Libraries though the hearings include some testimony in support. A momentary glance backward to Melvil Dewey's nineteenth century justification of unequal pay for equal work indicates how the concept of protection has been used to women's disadvantage. Referring to librari- ans, Dewey claimed that since man, in con- trast to woman, can in an emergency lift a heavy case, or climb a ladder . . . or can act as fireman or do police duty, he adds direct value .... Woman . . . almost always receives, whether she exacts it or not, much more waiting on and minor assistance than a man in the same place and therefore, with sentiment aside, hard business judgment cannot award her quite as much salary. Although this argument is rarely used to- day, in practice its consequences endure, and its philosophical underpinnings remain tenacious. (If anyone doubts this, just read some of the testimony in this volume, or turn to page 527 where a senator quotes Kipling on motherhood.) The ERA would undoubtedly help to shake loose this Vic- torian holdover. Throughout the May 1970 hearings there were lively and dramatic interchanges, and sections of the testimony bear out the edi- tor's introductory suggestion that the con- gressional committee room is "an authentic source of American theater." Some of the scenes are as revealing as the official docu- ments. The preface states: "Our purpose in pub- lishing this volume is to make accessible to the public in a hardcover edition the record of influential government operations, to make obtainable what might otherwise be ignored." A commendable idea! But priced at nearly four times the $3.25 original, this edition may be ignored, too. Edited by a Barnard English professor in conjunction with Congressional Informa- tion Service, the book is, essentially, a somewhat shortened reproduction of the 800-page hearings with a reorganized plan of arrangement, and a few additions. It pre- serves most of the original text, including the occasional typographical errors. Unlike its model, in this edition the complete oral testimony is brought together in one, smooth-running flow, and most of the docu- mentary material is reassembled in a sep- Recent Publications I 75 arate section organized in pro and con se- quences. Deleted are those documents and statements the editor deemed repetitive, along with almost all of the prepared testi- mony (about 200 or so pages, all told) . The result is a much more readable vol- ume, whose essential content has, with a few exceptions, been maintained. The revised and added indexes however, lack the important identifying information about witnesses and documents provided in the original; and because of the rear- ranged textual sequence, more link-up be- tween documents and documents and testi- mony is required than these indexes supply. First introduced in 1923, shortly after the 19th amendment extended the vote to women, an equal rights amendment was in- troduced again in nearly every subsequent session of Congress. The hearings reprinted in this book contain the first legislative tes- timony on the amendment since 1956; but it is unfortunate that the otherwise informa- tive introduction does not mention later rel- evant hearings which took place before this book was completed. Hearings were held by a Senate committee in September 1970, and by a House subcommittee in March and April 1971. However, the editor does include some colorful excerpts from the Congressional Record not in the GPO edi- tion, which neatly convey the character of the longer range ERA controversy. Ap- proved by Congress forty-nine years after it was first introduced, the constitutional amendment now awaits ratification by the states.-Anita R. Schiller, University of California, San Diego. Hyman, Richard Joseph. Access to Library Collections. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1972. 452 p., index, bibliography. ISBN 0-8108-0434-4. LC 77-169134. Of the three parts to Hyman's Access to Library Collections-a "documentary analy- sis," a definition of browsing and browsabil- ity and a "questionnaire analysis"-only the definitions are of sufficient substance to bear study. The documentary analysis merely re- hashes at intolerable length the century-old arguments of librarianship, especially clas- sification theory. Hyman's intentions were to bring together a great deal of literature on the various questions of librarianship rei- 76 I College & Research Libraries • January 1973 evant to direct access, and presumably, through the insights of past writers, to bring a focus upon our problems today. Un- fortunately, although a thorough and an- notated literature search is provided, the lack of restraint or selectivity in assembling the material serves only to smother and diffuse the issues. (There are ninety bibli- ographical footnotes for the chapter "So- ciology of Direct Access," Bliss is quoted or cited thirty-two times in the book, and a single quote from Matthews appears in three separate discussions.) Hyman percep- tively notes: . . . the problems related to direct access are peculiarly obdurate, and ... one might through any representative sampling of past studies, reconfirm their pervasive and still largely unresolved nature. It is in the definitions of browsing and browsability that we encounter Hyman's own contribution to the book: "Browsing is that activity, subsumed in the direct shelf approach, whereby materials arranged for use in a library are examined in the reason- able expectation that desired or valuable items or information might be found among those materials as arranged on the shelves," and "browsability" is "that characteristic of an open-shelf collection resulting from the arrangement of a library's materials" that permits browsing. The first problem with Hyman's defini- tions is that they are neither based on nor lead to a solid theoretical discussion of browsing. Such characteristics of browsing as the type of collection involved and the motives and habits of the user, not specified in the definitions, are incompletely dis- cussed in the text and are perfunctorily run through in the questionnaire. The failure t·o discuss what can be affirmed about the relationship between a user and an open- shelf collection, what could be supposed about such a relationship and what must be left, perhaps forever, unanswered is a fatal Haw in the book. For indeed this rela- tionship varies with each user and collec- tion; to discuss it in only the most general- ized way is to forsake the question of browsing for the problems of library man- agement. For Hyman the key to browsing is the arrangement of the collection. Although he states in the introduction that the direct shelf approach involves "every major con- cern, theoretical and practical, of librarian- ship," his emphasis is on such questions as "printed or card catalogs; broad or close classification; relative or fixed location; re- gional or union catalogs; classified or dic- tionary catalogs." Indeed, much of the book seems less an attempt to show that browsing involves all aspects of librarian- ship than to show that cataloging and clas- sification do. This leads to the second main problem with Hyman's definitions: he has failed to challenge his own basic assump- tion that order is essential to browsing . Polling other librarians (via the question- naire) on whether or not arrangement is es- sential to browsing does not provide that challenge, as most librarians operate on that same basic assumption. Since the hypothe- ses that Hyman is "testing" in the question- naire are some of the very tenents of librari- anship for most librarians, the general agreement with them does not show that these statements are accurate; it merely shows that they are generally accepted. Hyman offers no evidence to dispute an op- posing theory (e.g., that arrangement serves no purpose in browsing) , and there- fore the verdict on whether or not arrange- ment (and therefore classification) is essen- tial to browsing would have to be: Not Proven. Since the contention that arrange- ment is essential to browsing is both Hy- man's greatest concern and the book's only substantive assertion, one could not recom- mend this book as a thoughtful or thought- provoking work on browsing.-William Chase, Librarian, East Lyme High School, Connecticut. Zimmerman, Irene. Current National Bib- liographies of Latin America: A State of the Art Study. Gainesville, Center for Latin American Studies, University of Florida, 1971. 139 p. Perhaps the most striking thing about this book is that the subject of current na- tional bibliographies of the countries of the entire continent of South America, Central America, Mexico, and the islands of the Caribbean can be competently presented in 139 pages. Another very interesting feature of this work and one which is characteristic of I 1 J