College and Research Libraries


asked to agree, be neutral, or disagree as 
to their being appropriate to their function. 
The responses present a picture of confu-
sion and disagreement as to the bibliogra-

" pher' s role which is disquieting at best. 
While there was substantial agreement that 
they should keep abreast of what is being 
published in their areas, and communicate 
this information to the faculty, there was 
a strong feeling on the part of many faculty 
members that bibliographers should not be 
involved in actual book selection, evaluat-
ing the collection as it relates to the cur-
riculum, weeding the collection, coordinat-
ing book selection practices, or participat-
ing in faculty meetings. Also, library ad-
ministrators were noticeably less enthusias-
tic than the bibliographers about their at-
tending national area studies meetings or 
going on buying trips to their areas. 

No one seems to know just what bibliog-
raphers should be doing, or even who 
should decide what they should be doing, 
and the recommendations at the end can 
hardly be said to constitute new or original 
approaches to this long-standing problem. 
("The bibliographer must articulate his 
own identity . . ." "Libraries should begin 
to recognize the importance of area bibli-
ographers . . ." "The library administration 
and the area faculty . . . must make serious 
attempts to reach an understanding as to 
the role of the area bibliographer in the 
university .... ") This is one of those stud-
ies, complete with all the academic para-
phernalia of footnotes, bibliographies, and 
behavioral science jargon, which tells us al-
most nothing that is useful. It is a fuzzy 
picture of a fuzzy situation, one which bad-
ly needs some careful thought and serious 
study given to it.-N orman Dudley, As-
sistant University Librarian, University of 
California at Los Angeles. 

Rawski, Conrad, ed. Toward a Theory of 
Librarianship: Papers in Honor of 

- Jesse Hauk Shera. Metuchen, N.J.: 
Scarecrow Press, 1973. 564 p. $15.00. 

Forethought: Surely it must be at least 
slightly embarrassing to have a festschrift 
in your honor published by a press founded 
and run for so many years by your arch-
rival and severest critic! 

This festschrift in honor of the sometime 

Recent Publications I 57 

dean of Western Reserve was designed by 
its editor to ''bring together original papers 
on theoretic concerns attendant upon li-
brarianship." (p.42) Mter a refreshingly 
honest introduction by Verner Clapp, the 
standard laudatory introduction by the edi-
tor, and a bibliography by Gretchen Isard 
of Shera's 381 articles, books, columns, edi-
torials, reports, and reviews, there are some 
24 papers covering the Pertinence of His-
tory, Basic Issues, Information Retrieval, 
Catalog Topics, Contexts, Forecast, and Li-
brary Education by the usual clutch of dis-
tinguished scholars and librarians including 
Sidney Ditzion, Paul Dunkin, Robert Fair-
thorne, Douglas Foskett, Eugene Garfield, 
Neal Harlow, Patricia Knapp, John Met-
calfe, Ranganathan, Maurice Tauber, and 
Robert Taylor. 

Despite Mr. Rawski's claims and despite 
his best efforts to produce a unified vol-
ume, this book remains, like nearly all fest-
schriften, primarily a miscellaneous collec-
tion, of uneven quality and originality, of 
papers on a somewhat related topic. One 
cannot really "ponder the state of things 
documented here and the generic problems 
which, in various ways and to various ex-
tent, these papers address." (p.49) If these 
papers do share anything in common, it is 
the effort to foster the notion, nurtured and 
advocated by Shera among others, that li-
brarianship can be given the aura of science 
and the trappings of academic respectabili-
ty by the use of the signs, symbols, and 
jargon of logic, mathematics, and philoso-
phy to interpret and explain the concepts 
of librarianship. Unfortunately the net re-
sult is to make at least a quarter of these 
papers incomprehensible to me and I sus-
pect to most other librarians without ex-
tensive scientific background and training. 
This approach to librarianship is increasing-
ly common and I, for one, would like to see 
a careful evaluation of it by a competent 
nonlibrarian. Perhaps such papers are lead-
ing us forward into a new age of librarian-
ship and are expanding our scope. Surely, 
however, it might be possible to express 
this in words and concepts more intelligible 
to the average librarian than: "Documents 
exist in terms of object, content, and (in-
tended and not intended) use potentials: 
they all exhibit certain physical characteris-



58 I College & Research Libraries • January 1974 

tics ( 0) the price of admission to their con-
tent (C); and lend themselves to uses (U) 
determined by content (C) and/or physi-
cal characteristics (0 ). Maintenance of a 
library collection clearly requires control of 
these circumstances, internally ( c1 ), per-
taining to the documents available within 
the collection, and externally ( c2 ), pertain-
ing to documents available elsewhere. . . . 
The bibliothecal situation permits access to 
the documents it controls in terms of these 
documents, i.e., in terms of the 0-C-U 
syndrome symptomatic of the documents. 
Its indigenous concept of use is that gen-
erated in and by the documents." (Rawski, 
"The Interdisciplinarity of Librarianship," 
p.129) 

None of the individual articles are out-
standing and many (e.g., Tauber on book 
catalogs) are primarily restatements of 
views expressed previously, and often bet-
ter, by the same authors in other papers. 
Only Fairthorne on "The Symmetries of 
Ignorance" and Mountford on "Writing-
System: A Datum in Bibliographical De-
scription" seem to be of real merit. 

Mterthought: Select which of the fol-
lowing quotations by Shera from reviews 
of Scarecrow Press books applies to this 
book: 

(a) "assuming the hordes will buy it at 
such an exorbitant price" ( 354); 

(b) "at seven [fifteen] 'bucks' for a 
typescript format" ( 373); or 

(c) "there is the price of $10 [$15] for 
a book of some 400 [ 500] pages, repro-
duced by photocopy from unjustified type-
written texts" ( 381) .-Norman Stevens, 
University of Connecticut Library, Storrs, 
Connecticut. 

Pearson, Neville P. and Butler, Lucius A. , 
eds. Learning Resources Centers: Select-
ed Readings. Minneapolis, Minn.: Bur-
gess Publishing Company, 1973. $4.95. 

As the subtitles indicate, this paperback 
volume is an anthology. The broad topic is 
subdivided into five areas: "Concept and 
Theory," ~'Learning Resource Centers in 
the Elementary School," "Secondary-School 
Learning Resource Centers," "Higher Edu-
cation Learning Resource Centers," and 
"Applications of Learning Resource Centers 
in Special Areas." 

To quantify the evaluation of fifty-five 
of these readings, here are two tables: 

JoURNAL OF ORIGINAL PuBLICATION 

Library 
Education, General 
Education, Specialized, 

e.g. School Shop, 
junior college, etc. 

Audiovisual 

Nation,al Regional 
3 1 

14 8 

19 
10 

DATES OF ORIGINAL PUBLICATION 

1963 
1964 
1965 
1966 
1967 
1968 
1969 
1970 

1 
0 
2 
9 

13 
12 
11 
7 

At a time such as this when library bud.: 
gets are being slashed and librarians' roles 
and values seriously questioned, the review-
er harbors several reservations about this 
book. One of these the editors identify in 
their Preface when they write: "For years 
our schools have had libraries-collections 
of mostly print-type material. ... The addi-
tion of audio-visual materials has resulted 
sometimes in a happy marriage into the 
new instructional material centers. . . ~ 
There has been a widespread development 
of IMC's in concept and operation, but 
there is still less than 100 percent use of 
these collections. . . . So, the Learning R~ 
source Center, immediately adjacent to the 
Science Department, or the Math Depart-
ment, or whatever subject area, came into· 
being." Mter these professors of education· 
tell us that libraries in schools, whatever 
their current name, have failed to justify 
their existence, what is recommended as a 
remedy? Jack Tanzman, in his article in 
LRC, p.95, writes: .. Despite the fancy 
name, the resource center is nothing more 
than the old study hall, outfitted with some 
new equipment and materials." By accept-
ing learning resource centers as if they were 
a new program of education, librarians join 
the educator's game of musical chairs. In-
stead of redefining program, we librarians 
continue to concentrate on the design of li-
brary quarters and the development of ma-
terials. These tools, however, are not pur-
pose. By thus . asking only the technical 
questions, school and college librarians are