College and Research Libraries 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- 54 I College & Research Libraries· January 1971 ings and conclusions, with enough tables to reveal her evidence. After an introduc- tion and general chapter on interlibrary dis- tribution, the material is arranged by spe- cific problem areas : the readers who re- quest interlibrary loans; staffing or interli- brary loan services; photocopies in lieu of loans; restrictive lending policies; language, country, and publication dates of requests; bibliographic citations, their accuracy and verification; locating of items wanted; suc- cess of interlibrary loan requests; and the increasing volume of interlibrary loans. The fifteen appendices include several tables as well as copies of the questionnaires and list- ings of the cooperating libraries. It closes with a three-page selective bibliography. Any library that borrows via interlibrary loan from academic libraries will find Chap- ter 14 extremely useful, "Increasing . the Proportion of Interlibrary Loan Requests Filled." It also has excellent recommenda- tions of procedure fo r the academic lending libraries. The other chapter of particular usefulness to the practicing interlibrary loan librarian is Chapter 5 on photocopy substi- tution. This publication in no way replaces Dr. Thomson's Interlibrary Loan Procedure Man-ual, which should be owned and an- notated by every in terlibrary loan unit in the country, but it gives forceful data for the necessity of some of the recommended procedures in that Manual. To read this ACRL Monograph takes concentration and study, but it is well worth the time spent. -~tf.,rs. Margaret D . Uridge, University of C alifomia, Berkeley . A Bibliography of Works in English on Early Russian History to 1800. Peter A. Crowther, comp. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969. 236p. $9.50. In compiling this bibliography, Peter A. Crowther has perfom1ed a valuable service for historians and for librarians wishing to build basic collections on Russian history. His work and David ~1. Shapiro's, A Select Bibliography of W arks in English on Rus- sian History, 1801-1917 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962) no w provide a survey of English-language mate rials on Russian his- tory from the beginnings to the Soviet Rev- olution. Crowther gives 2,081 entries in the body of his book along with an appendix of 83 items which appeared during the time the book was at press. The conception and execution of this work are generally excellent, but a few problems crop up. One wonders, for exam- ple, why the compiler chose a modified form of the Library of Congress system of transliteration rather than using that sys- tem without modification. Perhaps only a pedant would insist on this point, but on the other hand a bibliography should have almost pedantic accuracy. The thorough- ness with which Mr. Crowther has done his work is also commendable; this reviewer was able to find virtually no significant omissions. Two borderline cases are articles by Soviet scholars on historiography: Alek- sandr E. Presniakov, "Historical Research in Russia during the Revolutionary Crisis," American Historical R eview, for which (January 1923); and Boris D. Grekov and Evgenii V. Tarle, "Soviet Historical Re- search," Science and Society 7:217-32 ( Summer 1943). There is one less account- able omission: the regular bibliographical section, "Other Recent Publications" in the American Historical Review, for which Robert V. Allen of the Library of Congress edits the section on the Soviet Union. On the other hand, Basic Russian Publications, edited by Paul L. Horecky (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1962) is men- tioned in the introduction although not Jist- ed in the body of the book. A few entries appear unnecessarily exotic, e.g., no. 1969, John Frampton, A Discovery of the C oun- tries of Tataria, Scithia and Cataya (Lon- don: 1580) of which Crowther says, "The only known copy extant is kept in the Lam- beth Palace Library." The compilation of bibliographies is a t edious, thankless business in which per- fection is always to be sought and virtually never to be achieved. Mr. Crowther has done praiseworthy service by producing a comprehensive work which has surprisingly few omissions or typographical errors. How- ever, the next logical step would be a com- b ination of Crowther's and Shapiro's bibli- ographies, updated, and made perhaps a little more selective, covering the entire l !