College and Research Libraries 62 I College & Research Libraries • ]anoory 1972 will read and take them to heart. If this were to come about, studies and reports such as this one would never be needed. -Maryan E. Reynolds, Washington State Library, Olympia. Information, Mechanism and Meaning. Donald M. MacKay. Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1969. 196p. $2.95. Most librarians today would agree that a major, if not the major, function of li- braries is the transfer of "information" from authors to readers. To facilitate the execu- tion of this function, librarians classify their collections, provide subject, author, and ti- tle indexes, purchase bibliographies of ev- ery description, provide professional refer- ence service, etc. Yet what precisely is this "information" that librarians work so hard to help transfer? How can we recognize what information a potential reader is lack- ing? How can we be sure that we are doing the best job of representing in our catalogs the information which authors have repre- sented in their books? Without an adequate theory of information we really have no way of answering these questions in a rig- orous way. Dr. MacKay is concerned in this book with the beginnings of such a theory of information. MacKay is head of the Research De- partment of Communication at the U niver- sity of Keele. He puts his background in physics to use at several pointS' in this de- velopment of a formal model of how human beings store their information and how they add to, modify, and validate this store. His approach is nonlinguistic; that is, he views the messages that human beings send each other as unanalyzed wholes, which, as en- tities, have meaning to the sender and to the receiver of the message. He hypothe- sizes that the human mind at any given time is in a state of conditional readiness to react to stimuli in a certain way. When a message containing information is re- ceived, it results in a change in the indi- vidual's state of conditional readiness. The meaning of a message he defines as a func- tion which selects a particular state of con- ditional readiness from all the possible states of conditional readiness. He does not suggest that his hypothesis describes how the brain really handles information, only that his model is a mechanism capable of representing what the brain seems to do. None of the ideas contained in this book are new. The book is a collection of three radio broadcasts and nine papers (plus two more papers reproduced as appendices) presented by the author from 1950 to 1964. Hence, the date of publication is mislead- ing. MacKay has added an introductory chapter and has inserted a foreword and postscript to many of the papers, each a chapter in the book, in an attempt to pro- vide continuity. He has used the technique of putting passages which can be skipped by readers of earlier chapters in small type. This technique only partly alleviates the major fault of the work-redundancy. In the later chapters, there is much said that has been said before, sometimes in almost identical terms. It is unfortunate that Mac- Kay could not have taken the time to pull together all of the ideas from the various papers and present his thesis in a more or- ganized fashion. It is also unfortunate that he has added no new references to those originally included in his papers. The work does not provide a very good entry into the literature of information theory, since even the original references were not intended to be exhaustive. This book is certainly not a definitive work on the theory of information. How- ever, in many respects, it is a stimulating and highly theoretical .work. Those seeking practical advice on the design of library au- tomation projects or the construction of in- formation retrieval systems should look else- where. Those seeking insight into the basic nature of the information transfer process may find something here to stimulate their thinking.-Edward A. Eaton III, The Uni- versity of Texas at Austin. Library Lit.-The Best of 1970. Bill Katz and Joel J. Schwartz, eds. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1971. 429p. An apparently self-appointed jury of five (its origin is unclear in the introduction) took on the stultifying task of reading (scanning?) the full runs of some 200 li- brary and general periodicals of the period November 1, 1969-0ctober 31, 1970. The jury (the editors, professor and student, re- spectively, at Albany; John N. Berry, editor of Library I ournal; William R. Eshelman, editor of Wilson Library Bulletin; and Eric I "' I i Moon, president of Scarecrow) are certain- ly to be commended for their effort in at- tempting to winnow out some grain from the tremendous amount of chaff. Further- more, they propose to do this every year. In case we need to be reminded of the sorry state of library literature, we are re- minded by Eric Moon's superb "The Li- brary Press," reprinted from LJ as "Pro- logue." In all, there are thirty articles from twenty-one journals (four from LJ and WLB, three from American Libraries, and one each from the others, ranging from Horn Book and LRTS to such less frequent- ly seen things as South Today and Sound- ings. Mter the introduction and prologue, the articles are grouped into four major head- ings: Libraries and Librarians, Technical Services/ Technical Processes, Communica- tion and Education, and The Social Prerog- ative. Generally speaking, the articles are excellent, although, as the editors note, no one will be happy with all the selections, on grounds of inclusion or exclusion. At any rate, certainly pieces like Joseph L. Wheel- er's "What Good Are Library Standards?" in the first group; and "Shared Cataloging" by Herman Liebaers, "MEDLARS: A Sum- mary, Review and Evaluation of Three Re- ports" by Norman D. Stevens, "CATCALL" by Ralph R. Shaw, and "Automation Stops Here" by Roscoe Rouse in the second group, deserve as wide circulation as they can get. Equally deserving are Curtis G. Benjamin's "Book Publishing's Hidden Bo- nanza" in the third group, and Robert P. Haro's "How Mexican-Americans View Li- braries," Jesse Sher.a's "Plus c;a Change," Anita R. Schiller's "The Disadvantaged Ma- jority," and 0. James Warner's "Law Li- brary Service to Prisoners" in the fourth. The immediate question is, "Why reprint all of this?" Certainly most of us see L], WLB, CRL, AL, and a handful of other journals, but how many of us read (or even see) all of the journals? We read in our own fields of interests, with little time for more. Perhaps an anthology of this type will broaden horizons in a relatively easy way. My one quibble is in reprinting without any editorial notes articles from British journals which employ terminology unfa- miliar to most American readers. No doubt Recent Publications I 63 it is pure ignorance on my part (widely shared, I suspect) when I fail to under- stand terms like "G.C.E. pass" and "Part II papers" in Peter D. Pocklington's excel- lent "Letter to a Library School Lecturer." Couldn't there be a brief editorial note? In short, this volume is recommended for library schools and professional collections, institutional and personaL-Walter C. Al- len, University of Illinois, Urbana. Books That Changed America. Robert B. Downs. New York: The Macmillan Com- pany, 1970. 280p. $6.95. The compilation of lists of influential books is a fairly common phenomenon in the literary world. A frequently used gam- bit in the preparation of such lists is a poll of authorities in a given field which yields a list of books most frequently mentioned by the authorities polled. That few people would agree on any such list is a foregone conclusion. In a 1935· Publishers' Weekly article Edward Weeks, John Dewey, and Charles A. Beard each chose what they considered to be the twenty-five most influ- ential books of the previous fifty years ; Bellamy's Looking Backward was the only unanimous choice. The wide variation of choices for lists of influential books is due to the large number of works which have exerted some measure of influence on the public as well as to the differences in taste and background of the compilers. Armed with this warning that no one list of books will satisfy everyone (or perhaps anyone except the compiler) let us examine Robert Downs' new work, Books That Changed America. Downs has given us a list of twenty-five works in the general area of the social sciences which have exerted a telling influence on America; the list was limited to the social sciences because the author felt that the influence of works in this area is more easily demonstrated than that of works in other fields. Over eighty books were considered for inclusion at the onset of this project; as Downs notes in the introduction, "the task of reducing the list to twenty-five was by no means easy." One could compile a very creditable list of in- fluential books from those works which he considered and then omitted; among such works noted in the introduction are Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick, Dana's Two Years