College and Research Libraries 178 I College & Research Libraries • March 1976 elsewhere. Its contributors are not well served by it. Readers who may be familiar with an earlier and highly informative ABA publication, also edited by Anderson, A Manual of Bookselling (1969), can only be disappointed with this anthology. Unesco's For Books sets out to show the problem of inequitable book distribu- tion throughout the world and what the United Nations has tried to do about it. Delavenay declares: "As regards access to books, 70 per cent of the inhabitants of the globe are underdeveloped. Some thirty countries, representing 30 per cent of the world population produced 81 per cent of the book titles published in 1967," and that in 1969 "Europe, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. between them produced more than 75 per cent of the books published throughout the world." Even more alarming is the impact of the world population explosion in the 1950s and 1960s which has meant that the number of books per readers in the under- developed countries has actually decreased! For me, Delavenay's phrase ''book hunger" is a new but apt slogan. To meet that need, Unesco staff have engaged in a program for the past three decades to promote the reading habit and to accelerate the free flow of books. I was impressed with Unesco's efforts to liberalize copyright restrictions on certain texts so that they could be more readily translated into the vernaculars of emerging nations. Unesco has proceeded through a series of confer- ences held in Asia, Mrica, and Latin Ameri- ca. Its best-known effort has, of course, been the International Book Year of 1972. Steady readers of Unesco publications will not fail to find in this book that hall- mark of international organization prose: innocuous platitudes set forth in thunderous and ringing phrases. Unesco's work in this area, nevertheless, is indeed important and should be better known. Delavenay's summaries of Unesco's related publica- tion programs are useful. In sum, collection developers can skip the Anderson and ac- quire the Delavenay.-Marc Gittelsohn, Undergraduate Librarian, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla. Auger, Charles P., ed. Use of Reports Lit- erature. (Information Sources for Re- search and Development) Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1975. 226p. $12.50. (LC 7 4-28477) (ISBN 0-208- 01506-X) Hope, like providence, must be our guide for the examination of a new work on ac- quiring, handling, and using technical re- ports. Perhaps it is the much improved bib- lf.ographic control over report literature which now permits disappointment when a new survey is itself weak and disorderly. This small but ambitious book lacks real focus. The editor intended it "to act as a guide . . . simply to show the way, and to eschew any thoughts of comprehensiveness or definitiveness." His intention was to ben- efit two groups of readers: the subject specialists who seek to venture beyond the confines of conventional lit- erature sources, and the librarians and documentation specialists who constantly strive to administer and exploit reports 'literature to its fullest advantage. The book reads, however, rather like a primer somewhat casually assembled for li- brary school students. The first of the book's two sections is titled "Common Factors"; its six chapters have all been written by the editor. Al- though wide ranging-theses, translations, and meeting papers (as preprints) are in- cluded-his observations are generally ele- mentary. A chapter on the writing of tech- nical reports is included; the author recom- mends good English literary usage. The second part, "Specific Subject Areas," was written by various specialists. The chapter titles are: "Aerospace"; "Agri- culture and Food"; "Biology and Medicine"; "Business and Economics"; "Technical Re- ports in Education"; "Nuclear Energy"; "Science and Technology Applied i:n Indus- try." This should be the work's most prom- ising section, but turns out to be quite uneven; no editorial consensus seems to have informed the authors about what con- stitutes a technical report i:n terms of the project at hand. The section on agriculture, for example, considers the publications of agricultural experiment stations; the section on applications in industry (written by the editor) identifies "Reports of Investiga- tions" of the U.S. Bureau of Mines. These ancient forms are not "nonconventional lit- erature," for they have long been well orga- nized and easily approached in the tradi- tional ways of bibliography for the sciences. There is much repetition in the various papers, as the editor recognizes and com- mends-a tedious luxury in so short a treat- ment of so prodigious a set of problems. The best chapter is that on nuclear en- ergy. An analysis is given of Nuclear Sci- ence Abstracts (NSA), long a model of the mission-oriented index that developed in a thoroughly responsible way to become a great subject abstracting service. Other use- ful avenues to the literature of nuclear en- ergy are also cited, and reliable descrip- tions are given. Even it i's less than thor- ough, however, for in his detailed descrip- tion of NSA, the author has not pointed out the great usefulness of references in its cumulated reports number indexes to sub- sequent publication of many of the AEC reports in the conventional literature. The editor's summary chapter on applica- tions in industry is his best contribution; it will benefit those who have had little expo- sure to the complexities of report literature and its bibliography. At the end of each chapter there are several lists. Not all the lists for each chapter are of quite the same sort, but they may well prove to be the most useful parts of the volume. With titles such as "References," "Additional Read- ing," "Principal Organisations Mentioned in the Text," and "Principal Announcement Services Mentioned in the Text," they can be convenient guides for those who want to further their knowledge of the bibliogra- phy and the nature of technical reports.- Thomas D. Gillies, Director, Linda Hall Library, Ka.nsas City, Missouri. Vickery, B. C. Classification and Indexing in Science. 3d ed. London: Butterworths, 1975. 228p. £5. 75. (ISBN 0-408-70662- 7) It has been sixteen years since the second edition of Classification and Indexing in Science was published, and the appearance of the third edition is very welcome indeed. Classification theories controversial in the 1950s, specifically facet analysis, are now widely accepted and practiced. Vickery de- scribes current theories and methods and Recent Publications I 179 their development. The general outline for the organization of the material has re- mained essentially the same as in the pre- vious edition: (1) "The Need for Classifi- cation," (2) "The Classification of a Sub- ject Field," (3) "Classification for Arrange- ment" (4) "Notation for the Classified Cat- alogue," (5) "Classification in Indexing," and (6) "Classification in Post-Coordinate Systems." However, with some exceptions, most notably chaptel;' 4, the text has been largely rewritten, and all of the bibliogra- phies have been revised. Appendix A, "His- torical Aspects of the Classification of Sci- ence," is the same and remains the most useful brief history of classification known to this reviewer. Appendix B gives exam- ples of two faceted classifications, soil sci- ence and container manufacture. Appendix C, "Categories," remains the same except for the addition of comment on the concept of integrative levels. Appendix D, "The Classification of Chemical Substances," has not appeared in the earlier editions of this title. Classification in the somewhat pragmatic terms in which it is generally practiced in American academic libraries is limited to the arrangement of books on library shelves by means of general schemes of biblio- graphic classification, most often the Dewey Decimal Classification or that of the Li- brary of Congress. This is but one of four main areas in which classification is used in information retrieval as described by Vickery, the other ·. three being (1) the di- rect use of classification for subject bibliog- raphy ranging from the classified catalog to systematic arrangements of references to papers, reports, and other documents; (2) the implicit use of classification, casual- ly or systematically, by alphabetical indexes to subject matter; and (3) that in which classification is used "in what have been called 'manipulative' indexes, more often known as 'post-coordinate' systems." Classi- fication, then, "in one form or another, at one stage or another, is almost universal in information storage and retrieval." Vickery discusses in detail the techniques of classi- ficatory analysis which can be used to con- struct a fully developed and coded classifi- cation and also to structure an alphabetical word list or thesaurus.