College and Research Libraries asked to agree, be neutral, or disagree as to their being appropriate to their function. The responses present a picture of confu- sion and disagreement as to the bibliogra- " pher' s role which is disquieting at best. While there was substantial agreement that they should keep abreast of what is being published in their areas, and communicate this information to the faculty, there was a strong feeling on the part of many faculty members that bibliographers should not be involved in actual book selection, evaluat- ing the collection as it relates to the cur- riculum, weeding the collection, coordinat- ing book selection practices, or participat- ing in faculty meetings. Also, library ad- ministrators were noticeably less enthusias- tic than the bibliographers about their at- tending national area studies meetings or going on buying trips to their areas. No one seems to know just what bibliog- raphers should be doing, or even who should decide what they should be doing, and the recommendations at the end can hardly be said to constitute new or original approaches to this long-standing problem. ("The bibliographer must articulate his own identity . . ." "Libraries should begin to recognize the importance of area bibli- ographers . . ." "The library administration and the area faculty . . . must make serious attempts to reach an understanding as to the role of the area bibliographer in the university .... ") This is one of those stud- ies, complete with all the academic para- phernalia of footnotes, bibliographies, and behavioral science jargon, which tells us al- most nothing that is useful. It is a fuzzy picture of a fuzzy situation, one which bad- ly needs some careful thought and serious study given to it.-N orman Dudley, As- sistant University Librarian, University of California at Los Angeles. Rawski, Conrad, ed. Toward a Theory of Librarianship: Papers in Honor of - Jesse Hauk Shera. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1973. 564 p. $15.00. Forethought: Surely it must be at least slightly embarrassing to have a festschrift in your honor published by a press founded and run for so many years by your arch- rival and severest critic! This festschrift in honor of the sometime Recent Publications I 57 dean of Western Reserve was designed by its editor to ''bring together original papers on theoretic concerns attendant upon li- brarianship." (p.42) Mter a refreshingly honest introduction by Verner Clapp, the standard laudatory introduction by the edi- tor, and a bibliography by Gretchen Isard of Shera's 381 articles, books, columns, edi- torials, reports, and reviews, there are some 24 papers covering the Pertinence of His- tory, Basic Issues, Information Retrieval, Catalog Topics, Contexts, Forecast, and Li- brary Education by the usual clutch of dis- tinguished scholars and librarians including Sidney Ditzion, Paul Dunkin, Robert Fair- thorne, Douglas Foskett, Eugene Garfield, Neal Harlow, Patricia Knapp, John Met- calfe, Ranganathan, Maurice Tauber, and Robert Taylor. Despite Mr. Rawski's claims and despite his best efforts to produce a unified vol- ume, this book remains, like nearly all fest- schriften, primarily a miscellaneous collec- tion, of uneven quality and originality, of papers on a somewhat related topic. One cannot really "ponder the state of things documented here and the generic problems which, in various ways and to various ex- tent, these papers address." (p.49) If these papers do share anything in common, it is the effort to foster the notion, nurtured and advocated by Shera among others, that li- brarianship can be given the aura of science and the trappings of academic respectabili- ty by the use of the signs, symbols, and jargon of logic, mathematics, and philoso- phy to interpret and explain the concepts of librarianship. Unfortunately the net re- sult is to make at least a quarter of these papers incomprehensible to me and I sus- pect to most other librarians without ex- tensive scientific background and training. This approach to librarianship is increasing- ly common and I, for one, would like to see a careful evaluation of it by a competent nonlibrarian. Perhaps such papers are lead- ing us forward into a new age of librarian- ship and are expanding our scope. Surely, however, it might be possible to express this in words and concepts more intelligible to the average librarian than: "Documents exist in terms of object, content, and (in- tended and not intended) use potentials: they all exhibit certain physical characteris- 58 I College & Research Libraries • January 1974 tics ( 0) the price of admission to their con- tent (C); and lend themselves to uses (U) determined by content (C) and/or physi- cal characteristics (0 ). Maintenance of a library collection clearly requires control of these circumstances, internally ( c1 ), per- taining to the documents available within the collection, and externally ( c2 ), pertain- ing to documents available elsewhere. . . . The bibliothecal situation permits access to the documents it controls in terms of these documents, i.e., in terms of the 0-C-U syndrome symptomatic of the documents. Its indigenous concept of use is that gen- erated in and by the documents." (Rawski, "The Interdisciplinarity of Librarianship," p.129) None of the individual articles are out- standing and many (e.g., Tauber on book catalogs) are primarily restatements of views expressed previously, and often bet- ter, by the same authors in other papers. Only Fairthorne on "The Symmetries of Ignorance" and Mountford on "Writing- System: A Datum in Bibliographical De- scription" seem to be of real merit. Mterthought: Select which of the fol- lowing quotations by Shera from reviews of Scarecrow Press books applies to this book: (a) "assuming the hordes will buy it at such an exorbitant price" ( 354); (b) "at seven [fifteen] 'bucks' for a typescript format" ( 373); or (c) "there is the price of $10 [$15] for a book of some 400 [ 500] pages, repro- duced by photocopy from unjustified type- written texts" ( 381) .-Norman Stevens, University of Connecticut Library, Storrs, Connecticut. Pearson, Neville P. and Butler, Lucius A. , eds. Learning Resources Centers: Select- ed Readings. Minneapolis, Minn.: Bur- gess Publishing Company, 1973. $4.95. As the subtitles indicate, this paperback volume is an anthology. The broad topic is subdivided into five areas: "Concept and Theory," ~'Learning Resource Centers in the Elementary School," "Secondary-School Learning Resource Centers," "Higher Edu- cation Learning Resource Centers," and "Applications of Learning Resource Centers in Special Areas." To quantify the evaluation of fifty-five of these readings, here are two tables: JoURNAL OF ORIGINAL PuBLICATION Library Education, General Education, Specialized, e.g. School Shop, junior college, etc. Audiovisual Nation,al Regional 3 1 14 8 19 10 DATES OF ORIGINAL PUBLICATION 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1 0 2 9 13 12 11 7 At a time such as this when library bud.: gets are being slashed and librarians' roles and values seriously questioned, the review- er harbors several reservations about this book. One of these the editors identify in their Preface when they write: "For years our schools have had libraries-collections of mostly print-type material. ... The addi- tion of audio-visual materials has resulted sometimes in a happy marriage into the new instructional material centers. . . ~ There has been a widespread development of IMC's in concept and operation, but there is still less than 100 percent use of these collections. . . . So, the Learning R~ source Center, immediately adjacent to the Science Department, or the Math Depart- ment, or whatever subject area, came into· being." Mter these professors of education· tell us that libraries in schools, whatever their current name, have failed to justify their existence, what is recommended as a remedy? Jack Tanzman, in his article in LRC, p.95, writes: .. Despite the fancy name, the resource center is nothing more than the old study hall, outfitted with some new equipment and materials." By accept- ing learning resource centers as if they were a new program of education, librarians join the educator's game of musical chairs. In- stead of redefining program, we librarians continue to concentrate on the design of li- brary quarters and the development of ma- terials. These tools, however, are not pur- pose. By thus . asking only the technical questions, school and college librarians are