College and Research Libraries Association of Research Libraries, Ellsworth set out to answer two questions: Is it eco- nomical to select little-used books from the regular book stacks and store them else- where? Is the cost factor the only one a uni- versity need consider in adopting a storage program, and how is cost related to other factors? The answers are yes, but not as much as you might guess; and no, but the relation depends on local circumstances. The total cost of storing 500,000 volumes is estimated to range from $1.44 per vol- ume (expanding an existing book stack) to $1.135 (Yale system; arranging books by size with minimal aisle space) to $1.695 ( Randtriever). Total costs include esti- mates for selecting books and changing rec- ords, transferring books to storage, land costs, and shelving. One could quarrel with Ellsworth's unit costs, but they are applied consistently. Using manufacturers' statistics, Ellsworth finds a great range in space efficiency among the twelve systems, from 15 volumes per square foot in conventional shelving to 147 in the Randtriever. The cost per vol- ume (excluding recordkeeping, selecting, moving, and land costs this time) ranges from $1.42 per volume for the Randtriever adapted to standard book stacks to $.49 for the Yale system. Lee Ash reported a cost of $.42 in Yale's Selective Book Retirement Pmgram; the discrepancy is not explained. In any event, the Yale system also comes out well in space efficiency with 64 volumes per square foot. One might conclude at this point that the merits of sliding shelves, boxes that zip to and fro, and motor-pro- pelled ranges are illusory. Here one must study the descriptions of the systems and the application to the needs of a specific university in Chapters 4 and 5 to decide how much inconvenience members of the faculty will tolerate before thev revolt. Whether librarians like it or not: this factor is more important than space or cost data. If direct access is essen- tial, the only practical solution appears to be conventional shelving with reduced aisle space, and possibly an additional shelf at the top. If limited access is acceptable, the Yale system, sliding ranges ( Compactus, Elecompack, Fullspace) or moving shelves ( Conserv-a-file, Shelco, or Ames Stor-M or) Recent Publications I 51 will do. If no direct access but rapid me- chanical retrieval is tolerable, one of the versions of Randtriever will provide a noble experiment. If Ellsworth has given us more questions than answers, this regrettably is the nature of the problem. He has,. at least, asked the questions that may discourage hasty deci- sions. In a library that installed an early version of Shelco we would be grateful had these questions been considered previously. It has become obligatory to close a re- view with a comment on the typographic crudities of Scarecrow Press books. What do you want, economical book production or good taste? Perhaps some happy day we can have both.-]oe W. Kraus, Illinois State University. Alternative Press Index. Quarterly. North- field, Minn. : The Radical Research Cen- ter, Carleton College, July/Dec. 1969 (v.1, nos. 1-2), Jan./Mar. 1970 (v.2, no. 1). $30 per year to institutions; $10 per year to individuals. Dissident and offbeat journals are poorly served by existing periodical indexes. This fact is used by some librarians to excuse their refusal to subscribe to controversial or unusual periodicals: .. If such-and-such a magazine isn't indexed, how can our pa- trons retrieve the information in it?" The Radical Research Center is making a praise- worthy effort to provide indexing for at least some of the many journals in the range from center through left. Indexing is carried out by volunteers throughout the country. Entries are sent to the Center and keypunched, and the Index is printed out by computer. The second issue contains 150 columns of enb·ies in 50 pages. Seventy-two periodicals are analyzed. Some of the types covered are: under- ground (Fifth Estate), religious pacifist/ so- cialist (Catholic Worker), old-style liberal (Prog1·essive ), antiestablishment intellectual (N.Y. Review of Books), contemplative lib- eral intellectual (Center Magazine), utopian (Modern Utopian), Marxist (International Socialist, Monthly Review), nonviolent (Peace News), New Left (Old Mole, pub- lished by an SDS chapter), educational re- 52 I College & Research Libraries • January 1971 form (This Magazine Is about Schools), and GI antiwar (Veterans' Stars & Stripes fo1' Peace). Four of the journals are Canadian, one is British. No American Indian, Chica- no, libertarian, anarchist, women's libera- tion, or gay liberation publications are rep- resented. Because 72 periodicals are but a small fraction of the English-language al- ternative press, it is probably unwise of the Index to include journals covered by other indexing tools (Ramparts, indexed in Read- ers' Guide), or even those which have their own indexes (I. F. Stone's Bi-Weekly). Each two-line entry gives such standard information as author, title, periodical, page, and date. The only approach is by subject, each entry being placed under one (or more) of some 2,000 subject headings. Because there are no author entries, arti- cles by Dave Dellinger, Jerry Rubin , Tom Hayden, Paul. Goodman, Ho Chi Minh, Staughton Lynd, and Bobby Seale can be found only by stumbling over them. There are headings for some persons as subjects (e.g., Abby and Julius Hoffman, Fidel Cas- tro, and Spiro T. Agnew). There are also some-but not enough-for organizations, such as SDS and FBI. (There is no heading for AI Fatah, although articles on it can be found-by chance-under other headings.) References to articles on the same subject are sometimes scattered under different headings, with no cross-references to tie them together. ("Infighting Within Ind. Ruling Circle" appears under INDIA, but an article entitled "India" appears under THIRD WORLD, and there are no refer- ences from one heading to the other. ) In the future, most of the indexing will be done at the Center by a trained librarian, instead of by well-meaning but unskilled volun- teers, so there should be fewer inconsisten- cies. In the first issue, the full thesaurus of about 2,000 subject headings was printed, even though more than half of the head- ings had no articles listed ( 17 percent were "see" references, and another 39 percent were simply "empty"). Many of the "see" references lead to empty headings: "DRUG- GISTS see PHARMACISTS" but there are no articles under PHARMACISTS. Many of the "see also" references were also blind alleys: "COUNTERFEITING see also FORGERY" and "FORGERY see also COUNTERFEITING," with no articles un- der either heading. Much-but not all-of this vast baggage of unused or useless head- ings was dropped in the second issue. De- spite the many (and often useless) cross- references, they are sometimes lacking when they are needed: there is one article under DETECTIVES, but no reference to or from POLICE. Occasionally the subject headings reflect modern jargon and "vogue" words, as in "MIND-BLOWING see CONSCIOUS- NESS EXPANSION" and "NEGROES see BLACK." Sometimes they are imprecise, as in "NAZISM see FASCISM." Another point about language may be mentioned here: some segments of the alternative press use four-letter words, and when these words appear in an article's title, the Index naturally reproduces them. Sensitive librari- ans may find reassurance in the all-capitals font of the computer printout: it has a cer- tain sterilizing effect, and, besides, the print is quite small. Under every heading except BOOK RE- VIEWS, the computer lists articles by date. This is usually no inconvenience, but it is a distinct nuisance under POETRY (where arrangement by poet would be preferable) and under headings devoted to reviews of Rims, plays, musical productions, and the like. (Book reviews are listed alphabetical- ly by the surname of the book's author.) Because of limitations imposed by the computer, titles of some articles are abrupt- ly truncated or severely compressed. Some- times it is easy to make a plausible recon- struction: "Bribery Uncovered in [Fort] Dix C[our ]t Marti[al]"; "Mother Says Lib[eral] Abort[ion] Laws Don[']t Wor[ry Her]." Sometimes it is hard: "What Mae- dia [sic] Didn[']t Tell About Pant[her] R[aid? Rap?]." And sometimes it is im- possible: "Rat Subterranean News Reports on [what?]." Despite its flaws, the Index is useful. As the only work in its field, it is indispensable to libraries that carry the periodicals it in- dexes. A number of improvements were made in the second issue, and more are planned: tightening up the subject head- ings, bringing greater uniformity to the in- dexing, and covering more periodicals. Librarians and library schools, who have done nothing to · meet the pressing need for indexes to . other than middle-of-the-road · periodicals, should be chagrined that one such index was finally started, on a shoe- string, by persons who knew little of com- puters or librarianship, but who saw what was needed and worked to supply it- Theodore ]urgen Spahn, University . of Michigan. Interlibrary Loan Involving Academic Li- braries. By Sarah Katherine Thomson. Chicago: American Library Association, 1970. (ACRL Monograph no. 32.) 127p. $5.00. This ACRL Monograph is a summary of the author's 1967. Columbia University doc- toral dissertation, General Interlibrary Loan Services in Major .Academic Libraries in the United States (available as University Microfilms dissertation no. 69-8558). This published work .should not be confused however with Dr. Thomson's other 1970 publication, Interlibrary Loan Procedure Manual, issued by the Interlibrary Loan Committee, Reference Services Division, American Library Association. The Inter- library Loan Committee was influenced in endorsing certain procedures in the Man- ual, as it was in its 1968 revision of the Na- tional Interlibrary Loan Code, by the find- ings and recommendations in her doctoral dissertation. But the two ALA publications are distinct ~nd different, though dealing with the same general problems ·of interli- brary loans. There have been various attempts through . nearly one hundred years of offi- cially recognized interlibrary loans in the United States to obtain a realistic picture of the quantity; pervading policies, and problems of interlibrary loans. Some overall views have emerged from survey question- naires issued separately or as part of a larg- er survey, such as the U.S. Office of Educa- tion's Library Statistics of Colleges and Universities. Studies have been attempted of the costs of interlibrary loans, especially costs to the lending library, as was James Hodgson's 1950 survey reported in the Col- Recent Publications I 53 orado A.&M. College Library Bullet·in, no. 22, 1951. There has been a great deal pub- lished in the literature about the problems of incomplete citations in interlibrary loan requests, starting from the 1890s through Constance M. Winchell's landmark book Locating Books for Interlibrary Loan (N.Y.: H. W. Wilson, 1930) and up to cur- rent articles. Dr. Thomson seems to have read all of these, including many more on related top- ics, and as a result, designed her survey to use not just statistics and questionnaires but also to study over 5,000 actual interlibrary loan requests received and answered in one year by a sample of eight major university lending libraries. These eight libraries were randomly chosen from the thirty-two uni- versity libraries reported by the U.S. Office of Education as lending the highest number of volumes in 1963/ 64. From them were procured the actual interlibrary loan re- quest forms (totalling over 60,000) re- ceived during a one-year period ( 1963/ 64 or 1964/ 65) and approximating 15 percent of the total number of interlibrary loans re- quests to academic libraries. Out of this to- tal mass of request forms a sample of 5,895 requests was drawn for intensive analysis. It represented requests from 1,123 different borrowing libraries of all types and sizes, with the majority being academic libraries. From her resulting analysis, correlations, and recommendations, Dr. Thomson has produced the first major factual study of academic interlibrary lending. She enlarged the scope from only the eight contributing libraries by incorporating answers from a detailed, specific questionnaire returned by 59 major academic lending libraries and a smaller qu estionnaire answered by 321 bor- rowing libraries, of various types and sizes, chosen from the 1,123 borrowing libraries in the 5,895 requests studied. The author has used her raw data thor- oughly, combining, realigning, and search- ing it to find tenable, useful data that are not only statistically sound but are also a true picture of the interlibrary lending in large academic libraries. This ACRL Monograph does not give all the statistical tests, tables, charts, or ap- pendices found in her doctoral dissertation. But it tells concisely and clearly her find-