College and Research Libraries


428/ College & Research Libraries • September 1975 

mistic. The Bureau of Labor Statistics did 
try to cover itself. by adding a caveat at the 
end of the Bulletin stating: "If, as seems in-
creasingly likely, 1985 population and en-
rollment levels are lower than those as-
sumed at the time this analysis · was carried 
out, fewer librarians may be required." 

The organization of the material is excel-
lent, and the prose · is clear, making a 
wealth of data intelligible and interesting 
for the layman. This work is well docu-
mented · and is augmented by numerous ta-
bles and readable charts. 

Even if the projections for employment 
are too high, this book should still be on 
every librarian's, student's, and library edu-
cator's priority reading list. Many false as-
sumptions are dispelled, and many suspi-
cions are confirmed by reading this docu-
ment. There are serious implications for all 
of us based on their findings which docu-
ment current trends in librarianship. A few 
random quotations may serve as examples 
of the above: 

Nearly half of all librarians in the United 
States were employed in school libraries in 
1970. 
Probably no more than 40-50 percent of 
all librarians employed in the United States 
have a master's degree in librarianship. 
Employment of library attendants and as-
sistants is expected to grow much more 
rapidly, through 1985, than employment 
of professional librarians. 

-Janice ]. Powell, Assistant to the Uni-
versity Librarian, University of California, 
Berkeley. 

Guyton, Theodore Lewis. Unionization: 
The Viewpoint of Librarians. Chicago: 
American Library Assn. , 1975. 204p. 
$10.00. (LC 74-19164) (ISBN 0-8389-
0187-5) 

Treating southern California as a micro• 
cosm of the United States, Mr. Guyton has 
gathered and analyzed the views of 460 lo-
cal public librarians toward collective bar-· 
gaining for their profession. ·The statistical 
method employed can occasionally lend 
oracular solemnity to the obvious. Thus a 
UCLA cmnputer ·reveals to us that librari-
ans who are generally against unionism are 
unlikely to join a library· union; and that 
there is a high positive relationship be-

tween the formation , of public librarians' 
unions and the presence of legislation per-
mitting public employees to bargain collec-
tively. These exuberances of computational 
power do not, after all, · interfere much 
with the author's other points. 

His main point is, of course, what makes 
these people join or reject unions. Merely 
economic motives are overshadowed by a 
complex of interrelated events: The growth 
of a library turns it into a bureaucracy, in 
which communications between librarians 
and administrators are reduced, and a gap 
grows between their respective roles. Be-
cause the librarians perceive their profes-
sion to have fitted them to perform at all 
levels of the bureaucracy, this gap also rep-
resents a discrepancy between their desired 
professional status and what it actually is. 
Thwarted as individuals, they turn to col-
lective effort, a union. 

The author suggests that librarians con-
sider themselves holding a "status ideology,'' 
whereby workers seek to share a.dministra-
tive authority without destroying it (as op-
posed to a "class ideology" of conflict with 
authority). The questionnaire did not get 
at this point. Shared authority is such a 
pawn of rhetoric, like social justice or law 
and order, that it may not matter. · 

The author found that employment se-
curity had not been important in fostering 
library unionism. It seems likely that events 
since 1971-72, when the manuscript ap-
pears to have been submitted for publica-
tion, have given employment · security a 
greater importance; but that is merely a 
new chapter in history. Probably nobody 
is more frustrated than the author by the 
slow pace of the publisher, for in collective 
bargaining a delay of three years in publi-
cation is serious. 

Not every useful point can be cited here, 
but · the study shows that the slowness of 
public librarians to unionize is not attribut-
able to shyness or any such ·personality 
traits with which folklore has vested them. 

Mr. Guyton's statistical analyses do tell 
us important things, but he is at his best 
when he walks without the aid of the 
UCLA computer. The book includes a short 
history of public library unionism in the 
United States since its beginning in 1917. 
Inseparable from · this history are the roles 
of ALA and other professional associations, 



which the author feels might deter union-
ization if they performed some of a union's 
functions. He adds, however, "ALA is en-
couraging other organizations to assume its 
role as spokesman for the nation's librari-
ans." This pithy statement demands a chal-
lenge-if any ALA champion is awake to 
make it. 

This book deserves special recognition 
on several scores. It pioneers an approach 
to collective bargaining among librarians 
-not the only approach, but a useful one 
which will probably now be repeated from 
library school to library school. Moreover, 
it has drawn on fields of knowledge outside 
of traditional library science to a degree 
that presages future effects of collective 
bargaining on the isolation of the profes-
sion.-]ohn W. Weatherford, Central Mich-
igan University, ·Mount Pleasant. 

Thomson, Sarah · . Katharine. Interlibrary 
Loan Policies Directory. Chicago: Amer-
ican Library Assn., 1975. 486p. $7.95. 
(LC 74-32182) (ISBN 0-8389-0197-2) 
If there is any one person to whom the 

current generation of interlibrary loan li-
brarians has reason to be grateful, it is Sal-
ly Thomson. · He! Columbia dissertation 
(later published as an ACRL . monograph) 
was the first substantial study of interli-
brary loan transactions in this country. The 
Interlibrary Loan Procedure Manual, which 
she published in 1970, makes it possible for 
the least experienced librarian . to properly 
execute interlibrary loan requests. Her most 
recent contr:ibution, the Interlibrary Loan 
Policies Directory, will in the future save 
numerous individual librarians the work of 
compiling the same data. 

The Directory, arranged by NUC code, 
contains information on the lending policies 
and practices . of .276 American academic, 
public, government, and special libraries. 
The libraries selected generally lend 250 
or more volumes a year to out-of-state li-
braries. Information given for each institu-
tion includes addresses of interlibrary loan 
and photoduplication services, photocopy 
practices and charges, and lending policies 
for periodicals · and other serials, micro-
forms , government documents, . dissertations 
and theses, genealogies, and technical re-
ports. The -information was . supplied by in-
terlibrary loan librarians . following a de-

Recent Publications I 429 

tailed form provided by Dr. Thomson. 
The only similar work is the Directory 

of Reprographic Services, issued by the Re-
production of Library Materials Section of 
the Resources and Technical Services Divi-
sion of ALA, which contains information 
on lending policies for dissertations and 
periodicals as well as information on photo-
duplication services. But · the RLMS direc-
tory, because of its lack of standards for in-
clusion, its inconvenient format, and its 
lack of detail, has not been very useful to 
interlibrary loan librarians. 

As long as libraries fail to agree on lend-
ing policies and practices, a directory such 
as Dr. Thomson's will be a necessity. The 
individual interlibrary loan librarian will 
still need to collect and compile some data 
since not all libraries could be included in 
this new directory. It does provide, how-
ever, a very substantial common core to 
which each library can add its own supple-
mentary list. 

In order to make it easier to add other 
entries and also to insert changes as they 
occur, it would be helpful if the next edi-
tion were issued in a more flexible format. 
It is undoubtedly too much to hope that 
this public display of their failure to agree 
will motivate librarians to reexamine their 
policies and make the publication of future 
editions unnecessaryl-Marjorie · Karlson, 
Head, Reference Department, University of 
Massachusetts at Amherst. 

Daily, Jay E. Cataloging Phonorecordings: 
Problems and Possibilities. (Practical Li-
brary and Information Science, vol. 1) 
New York: Marcel De~ker, Inc. , 1975. 
172p. $13.75. (LC 73.-90723) (ISBN 0-
8247-6196-0) 
When the Anglo-American Cataloging 

Rules (AACR) were published in 1967, 
Jay Daily evaluated Part III, "Non-Book 
Materials" (see his "Selection, Processing, 
Storage of Non-Print Materials," Library 
Trends 16:283-99 (Oct. 1967)). He was not 
at all pleased with the. new code and sub-
sequently issued his own code for dealing 
with nonprint materials. Some of his ideas 
can quite properly be described as radical 
and controversial. On the other hand, his 
criticisms of AACR represent something 
more than a personal idiosyncrasy. If Part 
III of the code were satisfactory, it is not