College and Research Libraries


238 / College b- Research Libraries • March 1968 

erly being "On Books and Reading," four 
essays which affirm his belief in the future 
of the book and the necessity of reading. 
A later section "on the Unity of Library 
Media" advocates a unified materials center, 
long before the term was generally used in 
schools. 

His lifelong interest in reference service 
is reflected in two sections: "On Reference 
Librarianship" and "On Reference Sources." 
In the former he predicted "that in the 
very next few years the reference librarian 
will emerge as the most strategic profes-
sional in our entire family of world occu-
pations." That was in 1957. The other 
contains the earliest essay in the volume, 
one on Noah Webster's Dictionary, written 
in 1928. His article on the ideal encyclo-
pedia, published first in 1937, accurately 
predicts the trends in publishing which 
have taken place in the past twenty years. 

The author's long involvement with li-
brary education and his visions of the fu-
ture are evident in six essays written be-
tween 1953 and 1964, under "On Library 
Education." His optimism shines through 
in "What Is Right With Library Educa-
tion," his view of its objectives is set forth 
in "The College of Library Art, 1984." 

Those aware of Dr. Shores's current 
interest in the library arts college may have 
forgotten that early in 1935, School and 
Society published "The Library Arts Col-
lege: A Possibility in 1954?" This is one of 
the ten essays in the section, "On the Li-
brary's Role in Education," which also in-
cludes the title essay, "Mark Hopkins' Log." 
It is not surprising that he identifies the Log 
as "the universe of the materials of learn-
ing," a point reiterated in "The Essence of 
Learning," in which he states his belief 
that the book, in its broadest interpretation, 
is the composite of the school curriculum, 
and that a better course of study would re-
sult if the curriculum followed the book 
instead of the other way around. 

Of necessity there is some unavoidable 
repetition in the essays, but this does not 
detract from their usefulness as a source 
of inspiration to library school students as 
well as to librarians who view their pro-
fession with a somewhat more jaundiced 
eye than Dr. Shores. For Dr. Shores, like 
Vachel Lindsay's calliope, is "tooting joy, 

tooting hope," if not in such raucous notes. 
—Frances Neel Cheney, George Feabody 
College. 
Annual Review of Information Science 

and Technology, Ed. by Carlos A. Cua-
dra. Vol. II, New York: John Wiley, 
1967. 484p. $15. (66-25096). 
This volume is the second in a series of 

annual reviews, but it is much more than 
that. With quality of exposition, compre-
hensiveness of coverage, and clarity of or-
ganization, it and its predecessor have cre-
ated a discipline where previously there 
was only an amorphous, ill-defined area of 
interesting problems. As a result, the two 
together do credit to the National Science 
Foundation and the System Development 
Corporation, which provided the resources, 
and to the American Documentation Insti-
tute which provided the professional sup-
port. Full honor is due the individual au-
thors, but more than usual is due the editor 
for the superb quality of this volume. He 
provided more than simply editorial guid-
ance. He created an entire mechanism—for 
definition of the structure and coverage, 
for accumulation of the relevant references, 
for selection of the reviewers, for critical 
evaluation and re-evaluation of their an-
alyses, for assembly and production of the 
final volume. 

For the purposes of this review, the four-
teen chapters can be divided into four 
groups: the first three, which present the 
design techniques; the next five, which pre-
sent the technical techniques; the next 
four, which present areas of application; 
and the last two, which present the social 
and professional context. 

In group 1 — 
1. Information Needs and Uses in Science 

and Technology, by Saul and Mary 
Herner; 

2. Design of Information Systems and Serv-
ices, by Harold Borko; 

3. Evaluation of Information Systems and 
Services, by Alan M. Rees. 

These are excellent summaries of the 
state of the art, "critical" in the best sense 
of the word. The evaluations can be sum-
marized by the words of the writers: "rela-
tively few techniques used," "lack of in-
novation," "failure to build on past gains 



Book Reviews / 239 

. . . (and) profit from past mistakes," "ab-
sence of rigorous experimental designs," 
"reports on the issues . . . and the problems 
to be solved rather than on specific pro-
cedures for solving them," "continued ex-
istence of nagging methodological and con-
ceptual problems." The design and evalua-
tion of information systems to serve the 
needs of users is apparently still an art 
and does not have a large kit of tools to 
draw on. Developing new tools or learning 
how to apply the old ones better is a slow 
process. 

In group 2 — 
4. Content Analysis, Specification, and Con-

trol, by John R. Sharp; 
5. File Organization and Data Manage-

ment, by Jack Minker and Jerome Sable; 
6. Automated Language Processing, by 

D. G. Bobrow, J. B. Fraser, and M. R. 
Quillian; 

7. Hardware Developments and Product 
Announcements, by Andries van Dam 
and James C. Michener; 

8. Man-Machine Communication and Prob-
lem Solving, by R. G. Mills. 

T h e growth of techniques for solution 
of specific technical problems, as summa-
rized in these five chapters, presents an in-
teresting contrast with the dearth of tech-
niques for design. Thesauri, statistics, classi-
fications, roles and links, citations, abstracts, 
etc.—all are tools for handling the descrip-
tion of document content. They may be of 
varying utility, but each can be used. The 
recent work on each is reviewed with real 
insight in Chapter 4. T h e variety of possible 
file structures, methods for linkage among 
records, and file indexing techniques is also 
great. Particularly important therefore is 
the growing number of "task-oriented" pro-
grams, reviewed in Chapter 5, which can 
handle these structures. The magnitude of 
the problems represented by "automated 
language processing" is great; it is there-
fore not remarkable that Chapter 6 con-
cludes that "no great stride forward has 
been made this year." On the other hand, 
the technology continues to progress, as 
the report in Chapter 7 amply demonstrates. 
As a result, the chapter concludes "that 
the largest problems . . . are not those of 
choosing components but continue to be 
the intellectual ones." (Parenthetically, it 

might also have been mentioned that the 
problems encountered in conversion to 
"third generation hardware" over the last 
two to three years have been predomi-
nantly due to software limitations.) Of par-
ticular interest is the evaluation that "the 
central processor, time-shared by small re-
mote computers, holds most promise." 
Chapter 8 brings this point into sharp focus, 
as it presents the status in development 
of large scale "multi-access" systems and 
concludes they "have been developed to 
only a relatively primitive level." 

In group 3 — 
9. Automation in Libraries and Informa-

tion Centers, by Barbara Evans Marku-
son; 

10. Handling Chemical Compounds in In-
formation Systems, by F . A. Tate; 

11. Applications in Medicine, by William 
C. Spring, Jr.; 

12. Techniques for Publication and Distri-
bution of Information, by the staff of 
the American Institute of Physics. 

Chapter 9 is, of course, of special interest 
to the readers of CRL. It is excellently writ-
ten and emphasizes what the author re-
gards as "the single most important facet 
. . . the vast and growing number of march-
ers." Chapter 10 reports on applications in 
chemistry, which historically has had the 
best developed means of access to scientific 
literature and still is at the forefront in 
the actual use of the computer as well as 
in its intellectual base in notation. How-
ever, the National Library of Medicine has 
perhaps accomplished more than any other 
single agency in demonstrating what com-
puters can do in support of library services 
and is leading the way in its efforts to 
establish a national medical information 
system. The final application presented— 
publication—represents one of great im-
portance, since it provides the means of 
justifying the input costs in large-scale in-
formation retrieval systems. The great varie-
ty of hardware techniques listed and the 
number of data bases being created as a 
by-product all attest to the increasing im-
portance of computer based publication. 

In group 4 — 
13. National Information Issues and Trends, 

by Donald P. Hammer; 
14. Professional Aspects of Information