College and Research Libraries


Review Articles 

Space for Study 
Student Reaction to Study Facilities, with 

Implications for Architects and College 
Administrators; a report to the Presidents 
of Amherst College, Alount Holyoke Col-
lege, Smith College, and the University of 
Massachusetts. . . . [Prepared under the 
auspices of the Committee for New Col-
lege.] Amherst, Mass. 1960. 60 p. 

A first reading of this report leaves me 
with some uncertainty as to whether I want 
to laugh or weep: laugh because the report 
is so well done; weep because every single 
conclusion the committee arrived at has 
been well known to those of us who have 
worked with the problem of college library 
buildings since the war. Those of us who 
live in the hinterlands have learned to expect 
a fair amount of provinciality among New 
Englanders, just as we have learned to accept 
the fact that many of our ideas aren't re-
spectable until Harvard comes along and 
rediscovers them, but, really, this report is 
just too much! 

T h e r e isn't the slightest bit of evidence in 
this report that its authors have any concep-
tion that dozens of librarians and architects 
have wrestled with these problems for fifteen 
years, that much has been written on the sub-
ject, that dozens of modular libraries have 
been built and all kinds of experiments have 
been attempted with conclusions that are al-
ready well known to most of us. For example, 
I have been saying for years that 80 per cent 
of the space for readers should be in the 
form of reading room carrels and only 20 
per cent in the form of flat tables. I could 
list library after library that has been organ-
ized along the lines of the conclusions this 
committee discovers. W h at kind of scholar-
ship is this that blandly ignores the record? 

Foundations will read this report and will 
soon be preaching the gospel to us innocents 
who haven't had access to the latest research! 
Amen. 

Having paid my respects to the committee 
for its bibliographic manners, may I now 
congratulate it for conducting a good, clean-
cut experiment and for having arrived at 

conclusions that are sound, wise, and helpful. 
T h i s is a report that every college and uni-
versity librarian should read because it will 
give each of them "scientific" evidence to 
back up what he already knows about how 
to analyze the problem of planning study 
space for a campus. 

T h e validity of the study for comparative 
purposes is limited by the lack of all kinds 
of facilities in the colleges included in the 
study. 

T h e summary of twenty-seven findings on 
pages 40-42 of the report will give the college 
librarian the ammunition he needs to com-
bat the wishful thinking of campus planners 
who have the idea that empty classrooms and 
dormitory libraries will solve the problem of 
providing study facilities on the campus. For 
this help we should all be grateful. Also, this 
report will bolster the courage of those li-
brarians in charge of modular buildings who 
haven't dared subdivide their reading room 
spaces along the lines of the committee's 
findings.—Ralph E. Ellsworth, University of 
Colorado Libraries. 

Building, Shelving, and 
Storage 
Buildings, by Ralph E. Ellsworth. Shelving, 

by Louis Kaplan. Storage Warehouses, by 
Jerrold Orne. ( T h e State of the Library 
Art, Volume 3) New Brunswick, N. J . : 
Graduate School of Library Service, Rut-
gers, the State University, 1960. 3v in 1. 
$5.50. 

T h e only thing really wrong with this 
book is that, for the most part, it simply does 
not cover the subjects named in the title. 
Everything in the book is on the subject, but 
for two out of three of the parts, the material 
covers only a portion of the much broader 
headings. T h e majority of the book (151 
pages) is supposed, by title, to cover "Build-
ings," but it is perfectly clear that the author, 
R a l p h Ellsworth, is not attempting to do 
this. As a matter of fact, he starts his intro-
duction by stating: " T h e problem of hous-

M A R C H 1 9 6 1 ' 165 



ing research library collections and of pro-
viding suitable space for readers . . . , " 
going on from there to cover, in a most 
thorough fashion, research library develop-
ment. Public libraries are mentioned only 
incidentally, and there is one extensive quo-
tation from Wheeler and Githens, but in 
very few cases are public libraries drawn 
upon for illustration or to support a point 
that occurs in the text. T h e r e are a few 
items in the bibliography which are not used 
extensively enough to justify inclusion for a 
work such as this handbuch type. T h e r e is 
very little use of college (as opposed to uni-
versity) library history and evaluation; and 
the colleges used have such large book col-
lections as to classify, as far as book-housing 
problems are concerned, with the university 
library. 

T h e r e are approximately six hundred jun-
ior colleges in this country, and they are not 
even mentioned. School libraries have been 
excluded also, but perhaps with more justi-
fication, since they usually occupy only part 
of building. This, of course, is also true for 
many, perhaps most, junior college libraries. 

It is immediately evident to the reader that 
Ellsworth thinks he is covering the subject 
assigned, and you can see that he feels he is 
on solid ground, and he most certainly is. 
Keyes Metcalf is probably the only other 
person in the country who could do this job 
with as much certainty and good results as 
Ellsworth. W i t h his selection of the most 
pertinent literature, few could quarrel. T h e 
fact that he has left out many, many items 
is to his undying credit, because most of the 
literature, of course, merely echoes—or at 
best merely expands—the few significant 
items extant. 

T h o s e who know Ralph Ellsworth will be 
greatly impressed not only with the fine j o b 
he has done, but particularly with the re-
straint he has used in approaching the prob-
lem of working toward the handbuch ideal: 
that of citing the significant literature in 
terms of the present-day state of the art 
without comment of a subjective nature. 

In the second part of his presentation he 
has attempted to evaluate the literature in 
terms of whether or not the statements are 
valid from a scientific or research point of 
view. With his evaluation this reviewer finds 
little or no fault. Toward the very end of 
this section we do get a few Ellsworthian 

flights into subjectivity, which add consider-
ably to the interest and value of the contri-
bution. An Ellsworth writing under German 
reference-editorial restraint is hardly Ells-
worth at his best, but since Mr. Metcalf is 
busy with his own book just now, who else 
could have done it? 

T h e editors are to be congratulated upon 
this wise selection for this section of the 
book. T h e editors, however, are traditionally 
and often contractually those responsible for 
titles, and this title is quite misleading. Nat-
urally, most of us in college or university 
library work would prefer to have the work 
as Ellsworth has done it, but I am sure he 
would be the last to claim that he has cov-
ered total library buildings, as the title of 
the handbook series implies. 

T h e second portion of the book (occupy-
ing 41 pages) is by Louis Kaplan and is pre-
sumably on shelving. Actually, it is not on 
shelving at all, but is on storage, and pri-
marily on compact storage as affected by 
micro-copies and storage of other non-book 
materials. All Kaplan attempts to treat is 
storage, and again the reader gets the im-
pression that this was the assignment, but 
the title, "Shelving," is much, much broader 
—so much broader, in fact, that it can be 
said that nine-tenths of the libraries of this 
country occupying separate buildings would 
have no interest whatsoever in storage (as 
treated by Kaplan) problems, because they 
do not have those problems. Shelving, on the 
other hand, is something that concerns all 
libraries. T h i s section, however, has not one 
word on shelving in the sense of free-stancl-
ing bookcases or ranges as we find them in 
practically all of the new libraries today. As 
with the Ellsworth section, the moment you 
start reading Kaplan you realize that he is 
treating carefully and expertly the subject 
he thinks is his. H e starts off with storage 
and he ends with storage, and not only has 
no words on shelving, but has no thought 
of shelving—shelving, that is, in the com-
mon use of the term. Once again the reader 
finds himself impressed with a thoroughgoing 
j o b (on one phase of the subject given in the 
title) handled in such fashion as to elicit 
admiration for the effort and few quarrels 
with the conclusions. 

Kaplan, too, has lighted upon the most 
pertinent literature and restricted his cita-
tion to only the most conclusive. When one 

166 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 



considers the mass of horesome printed ma-
terials which he must have had to comb 
through to come up with the significant 
items in this extremely important but, to 
most of us, terribly boring phase of library 
buildings, too much thanks would be im-
possible. T h e editors again have selected the 
best man for the subject, one who is patient, 
tireless, and yet enthusiastic. Again, one 
hardly knows who to criticize for the mis-
leading title, but it is inconceivable that 
Louis Kaplan thought he was writing on 
shelving and then turned out such a fine 
section on storage. 

T h e third part (52 pages) of the book on 
storage warehouses is by Jerrold Orne, and, 
for a change, it is on storage warehouses, 
which he covers both extensively and inten-
sively. T h e readers of CRL saw a large por-
tion of this study in the November 1960 issue 
of this journal under the title, "Storage and 
Deposit Libraries." 

Because of this fact, comments here will 
be more limited than on the other two parts. 
Orne's use and treatment of the literature 
in order to reveal the current state of the 

art have already been evaluated by most of 
us. Actually, this reviewer thinks he did his 
customarily fine and scholarly job, but his 
proposal as to how the problem of storage 
ought to be approached basically is much 
better substantiated and appears much more 
logical when read in its fuller form. Oddly 
enough, although Orne seems to have been 
able to adapt himself to die handbuch 
method even better than Ellsworth and Kap-
lan, he takes off further in flight in the rec-
ommendation not only for areas of needed 
research but in proposing possible solutions. 
H e does this, however, in the section of his 
part where this is permissible, for each of the 
three have a section which deals with "tar-
gets [or directions] for research." T h e Coun-
cil on Library Resources, it seems to me, 
should be quite pleased with the sections all 
three authors have under this "Targets . . . " 
heading. Kaplan's suggestions are most 
sound; Orne's are, as already stated, even 
more sweeping than we had expected; and, 
of course, in Ellsworth the profession has one 
of its truly great imaginations.—William H. 
Jesse, University of Tennessee Libraries. 

Comment 

Classification and Indexing 

W e are by now so accustomed to Mortimer 
T a u b e ' s ill-informed and splenetic outbursts 
that we usually ignore them. T h e farrago of 
misrepresentations and nonsense statements 
masquerading as a review of Vickery's Classi-
fication and Indexing in Science is such an 
extreme example, however, that it calls for 
a mild corrective. 

I will try to keep this short, but to explain 
all the points I have marked would require 
many pages. First of all, I must say that not 
only are we in Europe aware of the value of 
American intellectual contributions, but that 
the whole point of Vickery's work is to in-
crease our awareness; naturally, we also hope 
that his book will have a two-way effect. 

It is clear that Mr. T a u b e neither under-

stands nor intends to understand the "facet 
analysis" type of classification; no doubt he 
thinks he is the only one entitled to coin 
new terms. H e writes of the "general lack of 
impact of Ranganathan's work on librarian-
ship, outside of I n d i a . " Ranganathan's work 
is known and appreciated all over the world. 
He has visited the U.S.A. several times, and 
during the last two years has—in his late 
s i x t i e s — v i s i t e d the U . S . A . , U . K . , B r a z i l , 
France, Germany, Poland, Russia, and Ja-
pan; at least four of these countries by invi-
tation. Where has Mr. T a u b e been during 
this time? Mr. Ranganathan is a vice-president 
of both I F L A and F I D , and a member of the 
editorial boards of Libri and of American 
Documentation. T h e s e are only a few exam-
ples of his "lack of impact." 

T o discredit an opponent ascribe to him 
a ridiculous statement that he did not make. 
Mr. T a u b e does this very well. Mr. Vickery 

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