College and Research Libraries material, but even so one is surprised to find the chapter on "Libraries in Hospitals" deal- ing with all sorts of libraries, medical school libraries as well as medical sections of pub- lic libraries. There is little in the chapter on "Cataloguing and Classification" except out- lines of various medical classification schemes, the finding that in 1957 nine out of 109 British medical libraries were using sheaf catalogs, and the fact that author cata- logs are essential. Mr. Thornton, the medical librarian at St. Bart's in London, has provided us with some useful works, but the book under review is not one of them. It is to be feared that the hope expressed-"that all medical librarians will find material for discussion in the sum- maries of controversial topics"-is entirely vain.-Frank B. Rogers, University of Colorado Medical Center. Repertoire des Bibliotheques d':Etude et Organismes de Documentation. Publie sous l'egide de la Delegation Generale a la Recherche Scientifique et Technique. 3 vols. Paris: Bibliotheque N ationale, 1963. 1233p. 85 n.f. This guide presents information on nearly twenty-four hundred French scholarly li- braries and documentation centers. Since the present work will, for most purposes, replace the Repertoire des Bibliotheques de France (3 vols., Paris: Bibliotheque Na- tionale, 1950-51), the user's first reaction is to compare it with its predecessor. At the outset he notes the basic similarity: a direc- tory of libraries and documentation centers with information presented on a fixed num- ber of points and with an index to facilitate use. The differences between the two com- pilations fall into three groups: ( 1) scope, (2) information presented, and ( 3) arrange- ment. The later directory has a narrower scope than the earlier; it includes only scholarly libraries and documentation centers and thus contains no information on the central lending services of the departements or on certain municipal libraries (even for those which are included there is no mention of lending and children's services or of branch- es) . Beyond metropolitan France two li- braries (in French Guiana and Guadeloupe) MARCH 1964 are included as well as one in Monaco, but gone of course are listings for Algeria. Nei- ther Martinique nor Reunion (both in the earlier list) figure here. Nevertheless, total coverage has increased from 1634 to 2382 institutions, or about 45 per cent. Each entry contains the following infor- mation: name of library or documentation center; name of parent organization to which it belongs; address, telephone num- ber, cable and teletype address; hours of service and dates of annual closing; purpose and activities of parent organization; lend- ing policies; subject strengths and special collections; statistics ( 1960) of volumes, additions, periodicals currently received and of other forms of material held; classifica- tion used; catalogs available; documenta- tion (i.e., special bibliographical tools and services to facilitate the reader's work); translation services; union catalogs to which information is supplied; publications; photo- duplication services; historical data and ref- erences. Although this corresponds generally to information found in the 1950-51 guide, three items (reading rooms; administration, including the names of the director and department heads; and source of funds) have been dropped, while three ( classifica- tion, documentation, and translation ser- vices) are new. The fullness of entries var- ies, those for the larger libraries being long- er and more complete than those for the smaller. As one might expect, the longest entry (I, 60-72) deals with the Bibliotheque Nationale; divided into eleven sections, it covers general information and the library's departments (viz., Maps, Acquisitions, Prints, Printed Books, Manuscripts, Oriental Manu- scripts, Numismatics, Music, Serials, and the Annex at Versailles). The average listing seems to require between one-quarter and one-half page. In a few cases the Repertoire merely serves to indicate the existence of a collection, since little information is pro- vided other than that access is strictly lim- ited. Users of the earlier compilation will re- call that it devotes one volume to Parisian libraries, one to those in the provinces, and one to documentation centers. The new ver- sion incorporates the last category into the first two groups. The first volume, however, now comprises not only organizations in Paris but also those in the two surrounding 153 departements (Seine and Seine-et-Oise); and the arrangement of entries has also changed. The division into four parts (the Bibliothe- que Nationale, the University of Paris, gen- eral libraries, and special libraries) has giv- en way to an alphabetical arrangement by name of organization (from Abbaye Sainte Marie to Yacht Club de France) . This has resulted in a considerable number of listings under such generic entry words as associa- tion, center, institute, laboratory, library, school, and society; the user with an inac- curate memory will of course search in vain for an entry under "Association" when the organization happens to be "Societe," but fortunately the key word entries in the index will solve most difficulties of this type. One undesirable result-at least to this reviewer -is that this practice scatters the libraries of the University of Paris through the vol- ume (the· index does not bring together all collections belonging to the same organiza- tion). Those interested in this very impor- tant (but complex) group can only do what this reader did: scan the entire volume, where he will find 117 entries (the first being no. 84, the last no. 958), plus three more in the supplement. Of the university's seven libraries of first magnitude, four appear un- der Universite de Paris (nos. 953, 954, 955 and 957), and the remaining three under their own names. (While this same objec- tion applies in theory to the fifteen provin- cial universities, no city's listings begin to approach those for Paris in number or complexity, and hence a relatively easy scan- ning of entries will produce the desired result.) Volume II presents data for the re- mainder of the country, now grouped under cities rather than departements. By way of contrast with over eight hundred institutions in Paris (excluding those in Seine and Seine- et-Oise), entries for other leading cities to- tal as follows: Grenoble 43, Lille 63, Lyon 68, Marseille 42, Strasbourg 71, and Tou- louse 51. Although Volume III contains supple- mentary entries and a list of cities and towns represented in the work arranged by departement, it is devoted chiefly to an ex- tensive index ( 146 pages), which deserves comment. This section contains in a single alphabet various kinds of entries: acronyms for all organizations so designated -in the Paris region and a selection of those located elsewhere; former names of libraries, if a significant change has taken place; key words in names (especially useful for those names beginning with a generic term, as mentioned above) ; names of special col- lections; and subject entries. For the subject approach the introduction points out that some limitation in entries had to be made. Thus for libraries whose coverage is ency- clopedic, only entries for subjects covered under the rubric "specialties" are provided. For such subjects as commerce, local his- tory, and agriculture cross references lead to lists of cities with organizations like Chambers of Commerce, departmental ar- chives, and libraries of the Direction des Services Agricoles, thus avoiding double listing under both subject and generic group. Each reference is to the number of the entry rather than to the page; subject list- ings give, in addition, the names of libraries. Generous use is made of cross references (both "see" and "see also"). To check on the accuracy of the index each item in the first three pages of "L" listings was searched; only two discrepancies appeared. One reference to Lamartine gave the correct number for the library but placed it in Aix- en-Provence instead of Aix-les-Bains. The other proved to be a blind reference; the Langeron collection does not appear in the entry cited (the Bibliotheque Municipale in Brest). The earlier Repertoire, however, lists both Langeron and Sardou collections for this library (neither mentioned in the present description); apparently entries from the earlier guide's index were incorporated into the present directory without checking to see whether deletions had occurred in the listing itself. To summarize, the improvements in the present directory of French libraries are four: ( 1 ) increased coverage for scholarly collections, (2) better arrangement, especial- ly the listing under provincial cities, likely to be more familiar than names of departe- ments, (3) a single index instead of three, and ( 4) a better physical appearance, re- sulting from larger and more legible type and coated paper. The volumes are well printed; there are extremely few printer's errors. Unfortunate- ly they are paper-bound and the covers ap- pear to detach with even the slightest use; 154 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES libraries will find it imperative to bind the volumes before making them available.- William Vernon Jackson, University of Wis- consin. William Frederick Poole and the Modern Library Movement. By William Lan- dram Williamson. (Columbia University Studies in Library Service, no. 13.) New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. x, 203p., ports. $6. William Frederick Poole (1821-1894) was one of the giants of librarianship. Yet there are probably few librarians who are fa- miliar with his work, except for a vague awareness that he compiled the monumental nineteenth-century periodical index which bears his name. The library profession is fortunate indeed that William L. William- son, Butler librarian, Columbia University, has revised his doctoral dissertation and produced the definitive treatise on Poole. Possibly the highest praise that can be given is that Williamson's biography does not read like a dissertation at all; it is an absorbing account of a "librarian whose car l!er epito- mized library development in the United States during the last half of the nineteenth century." Although Williamson apologizes for the lack of a complete picture of Poole the man because almost none of his private correspondence survives, he need not have. He has gleaned the public and printed sourc- es well and there emerges a very human por- trait of a man with a paternal interest in his subordinates, generous to his opponents, and zealous for his profession. During the span of Poole's life he served as a student librarian at Yale, he was librar- ian of the oldest mercantile library (Boston) and the foremost social library (Boston Athenaeum), and he led two public librar- ies to greatness (Cincinnati and Chicago) . His last seven years were years of "stress and strain" as he acquired collections, planned a building, and set the organization for what was to become one of the nation's great research institutions, the Newberry library. Williamson has recorded all of these activities with a clear insight into Poole's qualities as an administrator, both good and bad. Certainly one of Poole's most inter- esting innovations was his decision to use a sewing machine manufacturer in Europe MARCH 1964 as a transfer agent for paying the bills of his European book dealers! Here too is the story of Poole and the ALA. One of the legends of librarianship, propagated by its high priest Melvil Dewey, has to do with Poole's initial opposition to the 1876 conference. Williamson treats the Poole-Dewey clashes with a thoroughness and fairness which leaves little question about the case. The present reviewer would like to obtain that correspondence to which Poole referred when he said that he had letters which showed the truth of the mat- ter and even called into question Dewey's own claims to having originated the confer- ' ence idea. No doubt Williamson would also have found them intriguing; but as he earli- er remarks, "A collection of books, perhaps a building, some reports, catalogs, and cor- respondence, and a set of dry statistics are the major things a librarian leaves behind him" (p. 17). It is almost inexplicable that some of the chief figures in librarianship felt so little need to preserve their private cor- respondence. Poole did become one of the major forces behind the ALA and was said "never to be so happy as when he went off by train;. on one of his regular trips to attend the ' as- sociation's conference" (p. 92). The as- sociation was also an important factor in the preparation of the third edition of the Index. By assigning the work of indexing certain journals to a number of libraries, Poole brought into being the first really sig- nificant cooperative venture among librari- ans. Yet his was the chief work, that of edi- tor, and he also indexed by far the largest number of journals himself. Poole was posi- tive that a cooperative enterprise could suc- ceed at length because the final authority and direction were in the hands of one indi- vidual. One of the unusual facets of this book is the author's willingness to make interpreta- tions in terms of today's situation. Of Poole's falling into difficulties in his later years through lax administration, Williamson com- ments "It is an unfortunate but perhaps necessary characteristic of librarianship that the head of a library can never pick out and concentrate upon one aspect of his library's operation to the neglect of the whole. . . . The history of librarianship in the United States is filled with sad stories of librarians 155