College and Research Libraries lems. Metcalfe belongs to the virile genera- tion of Teddy Roosevelt which consumed hard work with as much relish as many peo- ple now consume vitamin pills. There are sixty exercises in the back of the book (pp. 301-17), and then the answers (pp. 318-39). Copies of Cutter's Rules and Dewey's Decimal Classification are essential for many of the exercises. Finally, Metcalfe provides a "rather miscellaneous" set of rules for classifying (pp. 225-30) and a set of rules for alphabetico-specific entry (pp. 263-96). T h e significance of these rules may be missed by non-librarians as they are ex- pressed in bibliographical and grammatical terms. They represent the crystallized experi- ence of one set of catalogers, and may be called the "programming" rules for human machines.—Mrs. Lea M. Bohnert, Data Re- search Specialist, RCA Service Co., Alexan- dria, Va. Goliath and the Council Third Annual Report for the Period Ending June 30, 1959, Council on Library Re- sources, Inc. Washington, D. C.: The Council, 1959, 62p. This third annual report of the Council on Library Resources shows it at almost the halfway stage in its five-year life span, but with considerably less than one-half of its five million dollars committed. Projects ap- proved range from support of the third edi- tion of the Union List of Serials to experi- mental publication of a scientific journal in microfilm, from a photostorage and retrieval system for libraries to support of a national union catalog of manuscript materials, from deterioration of book stock to international coordination of cataloging rules. Obviously the Council is moving conservatively, but on a wide front, in carrying out its charge "of aiding in the solution of the problems of libraries generally and of research libraries particularly . . . and disseminating through any means the results thereof." When the Council was established in 1956 I commented elsewhere on this notable and exciting event, under the title "The Biblio- graphic Goliath and a New David." Every- thing that has happened and is happening in the bibliothecal world in this present cen- tury, including the three reports of the Council, emphasizes that it is indeed Goliath that the Council confronts and against which, David-like, it marshalls and directs its small arsenal of Ford dollars. It is a Goliath, moreover, which grows bigger and more formidable before its very eyes, and before the eyes of all of us who labor to confine, to organize, to make usable the graphic and auditory records of a highly articulate civi- lization. "Deluge," "inundation," "flood," "quag- mire," "avalanche," these were words the Council, in its first report, singled out as descriptive of the tremendous and rapidly growing mass of the world's literature. All of these are terms fully justified by the phe- nomenon of man's productivity as a book- writing, book-using, and book-storing crea- ture. All of them help to point up the mag- nitude of the problems of the Council and of all who work at keeping abreast of the "explosive" rate of book increase. This rate, says the report, has been doubling every forty-five years since Gutenberg, and in the United States it has, within the past 150 years, been doubling every twenty-two years. The Council, in carrying out its charge, seeks to maintain an over-all view. "A bal- ance must be struck," says President Verner Clapp in his introduction, "between present- day problems and planning the ideal 'library of the future.' " The report shows that to some extent this has been done. The weight, however, is clearly and, this reviewer be- lieves, wisely on the side of present needs and problems of libraries as they struggle against the "avalanche." So great is this ava- lanche, that the modest grants discussed and those detailed in tabular form seem little more than pebbles, with a fair sized stone or two mixed in, directed against Goliath. There must always be the hope however that some one of these, or all of them combined, plus of course non-Council-sponsored ef- forts, may find some truly vital or significant spot which, if not conquering the monster of massiveness, will at least keep it submis- sively in the service of mankind. The Council, the report shows, weighs every project and proposal placed before it from the standpoint of the part it may have in helping librarianship with its task of col- lecting recorded information and making it 324 C O L L E G E A N D R E S E A R C H L I B R A R I E S available for use. That there is a hope that some really vital spot of attack may be found seems to be indicated in the report when it says that the controlling factors in the prob- lems of libraries are not easily modified and that it is therefore difficult to identify the key log on which the log jam depends. This, says the report, is as true for the present as it is for the distant future. T h e Council, however, continuously seeks to strike at a vital log, at the basic rather than the merely apparent. While the grants made range widely (and many of them are devoted to mastery and improvement through traditional methods of control) it is clear that size, rate of in- crease, and increasing bibliographical com- plexity are uppermost, as they should be, in the minds of Council officers. Size and growth receive several interesting pages in the report, including growth charts of se- lected universities and colleges, all demon- strating both the recency of great libraries and their tendency approximately to double in size in anywhere from ten to twenty-two years. These rates of growth, and more particu- larly the exploding serial literature of our times, suggest to this reviewer that there is no single log or group of logs which are creating a jam. T h e logs at which the Coun- cil levels attack and which it hopes are basic exist in a veritable ocean. They may be plucked out or taken in tow but the ocean is still there. Since this is so then it becomes the ocean itself which must be brought under control. How else can this be done than by controlling the inflow and outflow to keep the waters manageable and to pre- vent them from drowning out their very source? T h e report says that the world's popula- tion is laid to rest each generation but the world's books have a way of lingering on. This reviewer has suggested, in other writ- ings, that sooner or later our civilization will have to come seriously to grips with biblio- graphical birth control. It will also willy- nilly have to evolve, however unpleasant and difficult this may be, mortuary processes which will lay generations of books to rest if not in the same way as people then at least in some kind of a quantitative relation- ship. T h e more sensitive, or possibly the more ardent, book-loving librarians are shocked, and sometimes also offended, this reviewer has found, when it is suggested that of the hundreds of miles of books now in our li- braries, and the thousands of miles in pros- pect, future generations will have to lay hundreds and eventually thousands of miles to permanent rest. A future Shaw list of books which can be permanently discarded, or the thought that the discarding division may rank in importance, in the libraries of the future, with the acquisition division— these are suggestions repugnant to our mid- twentieth century librarianship, and, it is believed, to mid-twentieth century culture in general. Nevertheless the facts of bibliographical increase, whether viewed from the stand- point of physical management or, granting complete success in this area, from the standpoint of utilization, are such that some kind of drastic control measures will be in- evitable. If we take the long-long-range view it seems inescapable that the acquisitive in- stincts and the generous and loving reten- tion policies which have been generally pre- dominant among librarians from the begin- ning will, under the sheer mass of writings, have to give way. Growth prospects, in the long-long view, may be emphasized in this way. T h e best estimates are that our planet Earth is five billion years old. Only during the last mil- lion of these years, a fleeting part of the whole, has man been present on the globe. Only during the last five hundred of his mil- lion years, has he been producing books in quantity and storing them in libraries. Reli- able estimates are, however, that our planet will be habitable for another five billion years. This places us then at high noon on the cosmic clocWand also in the merest in- fancy of our bookishness. Even so, books and libraries have come into being so quickly and in such profusion that increasing num- bers of men and women must struggle with their control and, more and more, scholars are heard to complain that they do not have the capacity to absorb the writings of their fields no matter how readily available. The multitude of books produced and stored by one of its creatures is a brand new phenomenon in the history of our planet; vet, granting that some madman does not blow up the whole works, the writing of J U L Y 1 9 6 0 325 books should endure. It might tax even an electronic computer to calculate how many books will be written and organized for use in the five billion years still before us and the amount of space they will occupy. Ob- viously present methods and philosophies of book production, book storage, book use, will, under the onslaught of numbers just simply have to change, and drastically. Over the eons books by the millions, including quantities of those now here and present, will surely have to be laid to rest. Who can believe that, a billion years from now, grant- ing a stable and continuing civilization, our present few hundred miles of books will all be considered essential? Or a million years from now? Or five hundred thousand years? Or a hundred thousand? Or ten, or five? Or even one thousand? This is a mere fraction of a cosmic second, but long enough, even at present growth rates of a doubling every twenty-two years, as the Council has found, to multiply the rate of book production by fifty. The fantastic long-range prospects of book increase, both quantitative and cultural, bring this reviewer to believe that of all the worthy projects presently sponsored by the Council the one retiring books from the Yale University Library to compact storage is the most important and a harbinger of things to come. The next and eventual step will be to retire books permanently. When and if this is attempted it will be the most difficult and painful task scholars and librarians have ever undertaken, requiring wisdom and judgment not now among us. And financial support too, whether from foundations or elsewhere, at levels not now approached. If such discarding can be agreed on it will remain only to strike off a list of the books nominated and we will ^khave, horrible thought, a Shaw list of books no longer needed in this world. It is quite conceivable that in the world of the far future the book as an individual entity will not retain the prime importance it now has. Knowledge may be organized only by the codification of basic ideas, phil- osophies, and facts without reference to authorship. T h e complex author-alphabetic approach which even the electronic ma- chines have so far not been able to digest could then be eliminated. It is possible that some far-off foundation, or one not so far off, will organize and support a project to produce some kind of a giant total Syntopi- con of the world's history, science, literature, philosophy, religions. Could this, perhaps, be the stone to bring Goliath into a useful submissiveness? None of us now present will know. We do know though that librarians, more than most people, are, in these matters of control and utilization of the world's knowl- edge, at grips with one of the most funda- mental cultural problems of the times. We can be thankful that a great foundation has recognized the import of these things and set able and astute men and women search- ing for solutions.—William H. Carlson, Ore- gon State College Library, Corvallis. Recruiting for Librarianship Librarians Wanted: Careers in Library Serv- ice. By Adrian A. Paradis. New York: David McKay Company, Inc. [cl959]. x, 276p. $3.50. At a time when recruiting is a crucial problem for the library profession, Adrian A. Paradis's publication of Librarians Wanted, the first book on librarianship as a career to be issued in nearly a decade, should sup- posedly be significant and thoroughly wel- come news to all librarians involved, as all should be, in recruiting. During recent years Mr. Paradis has published several well-re- ceived books for teenagers on various careers. Presently the assistant secretary for corporate work for a major airline, he was formerly a professional librarian employed in law and air transportation libraries. Librarians Wanted may indeed be a useful addition, for a year or so, to a high school library's collec- tion on careers. It is cleverly conceived, rea- sonably fast-paced, and, on the whole, inter- esting reading. Yet in several important ways it is sharply disappointing. Mr. Paradis begins his account by describ- ing the various kinds of jobs in libraries. Here he directs almost as much attention to nonprofessional as to professional positions. He then devotes the greater part of the book to a tour of more or less representative li- 326 C O L L E G E A N D R E S E A R C H L I B R A R I E S