College and Research Libraries books he treats are interesting and impor- tant. That's the main thing. But I would certainly make room for Mrs. Chesnut and for Margaret Mitchell in the list (and there- by, incidentally, give Fanny Kemble some female companionship). If any single Southern book reflects an era as fully and as delightfully as Mrs. Chesnut's diary, I do not know what it is. And if Mr. Downs thinks In Ole Virginia and Gone With the Wind belong directly in the same tradi- tion, I can only conclude that he has never read them. To make room for other titles in the list obviously something must come out. The reviewer would shirk half his duty to sug- gest only additions. Deletions might legiti- mately be Weems' Washington, Edward King's The Great South, Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, Page's In Ole Virginia, and C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South. One suspects that Mr. Downs was a bit too anxious for chronological coverage. This is a good book, a book that is fun to argue with. And that is one of the things books are for.-Richard Harwell, Universi- ty of Georgia, Athens. National and International Library Plan- ning. Key Papers Presented at the 40th Session of the IFLA General Council, Washington, D.C., 1974. Edited by Rob- ert Vosper and Leone I. Newkirk. IFLA Publications, 4. Miinchen: Verlag Doku- mentation, 1976. 162p. DM 38. ISBN 3- 7940-4424-X. Although it is most unfortunate that the many papers presented at the 1974 General Council of the International Federation of Library Associations have not been pub- lished, at least twelve of the papers, singled out as key papers, appear in this new vol- ume. The publication of these papers two years after the session again points out the serious time lag that exists between a con- ference and the publication of its proceed- ings. In this particular case, however, five of the contributions in this volume have also appeared in the 1975 Bowker Annual. The editors indicate that the papers se- lected for inclusion were intended to heighten awareness and to suggest the variety of national experiences in differing Recent Publications I 255 cultural situations and at different levels of library experience. This collection deals with five aspects of national and international library planning: objectives; developments in selected coun- tries; academic and research libraries and national planning; planning of national li- braries; and, finally, some aspects of library education and manpower planning. The editors acknowledge that there are many gaps in the collection. There are no papers on public libraries and national planning or on such important topics as statistics, planning methodologies, and curricular re- form. The first two papers by Robert Vosper and C. R. Zaher deal primarily with trends in interdependence, the essential tools re- quired for planning, programs for multi-na- tional cooperation such as UBS, IFLA's program for universal bibliographic control, and NATIS, Unesco's National Information Systems. Papers dealing with state-of-the-art sur- veys of national planning in selected coun- tries are presented by Frederick Burkhardt (U.S.), H. T. Hookway (Great Britain), N. M. Sikorsky (Soviet Union) , George Kaltwasser (Federal Republic of Ger- many), and Joyce I. Robinson (Jamaica). The strength and credibility of these pa- pers lie in their authorship; their weakness lies in the lack of documentation. These papers provide a striking contrast between the comprehensive and sophisticat- ed plans for the nationwide integration of libraries and documentation in the de- veloped nations and the frustrations en- countered by planners in a developing nation where librarianship is a barely recog- nized profession and the relevance of libraries is yet to be established. Of the remaining papers dealing with specific problems that require attention at the national level, those presented by F. A. Ogunsheye and Hedwig Anuar are particu- larly noteworthy. Ogunsheye provides an excellent summary on the development of library schools, the structure of the library profession, and the distribution of library manpower in African nations. Anuar dis- cusses concepts, functions, and implementa- tion of plans for national libraries in sev- eral countries in Southeast Asia and the Philippines. 256 I College & Research Libraries • May 1977 The last two papers in the collection are possibly the weakest. Esko Hakli presents a broad-brush summary of national plan- ni:p.g and research libraries in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland; and John McDonald contributes a slight essay on national planning and academic libraries in the United States. This weakness may, in fact, be the result of McDonald's obser- vation that until very recently there has been an absence of any planning that de- serves to be called "national" in scale. The papers in this collection generate re- flection, they indicate gaps in our experi- ence in national and international planning, and they should stimulate librarians to give conscious attention to this very important phase of library development.-Sylvia G. F aibisoff, Associate Professor, Graduate Li- brary School, University of Arizona. SCONUL Seminar on Practical MARC Cat- aloguing, 2d, University of Southampton, 1975. Practical MARC Cataloguing. Pro- ceedings of the Second SCONUL Semi- nar on Practical MARC Cataloguing, Or- ganized by the Universities of Southamp- ton and Birmingham and Held at the University of Southampton, 5th-7th September 1975. Edited by Ruth Irvine. London: Standing Conference of Nation- al and University Libraries, 1976. 82p. £ 3.60. ISBN 0-90021004-4 (Available from: SCONUL Secretariat, c/o The Li- brary, School of Oriental and African Studies, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HP.) MARC Users' Group. Proceedings of a Con- ference Held in Plymouth on 16 and 17 April, 1975. Edited by F. A. Clements. London: LLRS Publications, 1976. 36p. £ 1.00. $2.50 overseas. (Make check pay- able to MARC Users' Group and send or- der to LLRS Publications, Calcutta House Precinct, Old Castle Street, Lon- don, El 7NT.) It is heartening to note from the discus- sion in these two publications that our Brit- ish friends have been sedulously grappling with machine-readable cataloging and that there are others of us who have leapt into the unknown. The results of an open ex- position of these experiences are refreshing to one who has lived through similar events. The SCONUL Seminar consists of pre- sentations by two British university-level processing cooperatives-Birmingham and Southampton. It deals with the experiences growing out of their alignment with MARC and their commitment to AACR (British edition) . The purpose of the seminar was to demonstrate MARC's use from a cata- loger's viewpoint and to share the problems of functioning with MARC in real contexts. Both systems use off-line access for search, input, correction, and output. The eleven papers (illustrated with pro- cessing forms) generally progress topically in parallel to the actual processing flow, i.e., inputting, computer manipulations, out- put, etc. Southampton's contributions deal more with particulars, while Birmingham is concerned with the effects of a heterog- enous group of participants-perhaps due to the fact Southampton initially han- dled medical records, whereas the Birming- ham complex embraces libraries of five universities, four polytechnic colleges, and four public libraries. Many of the presentations are welcome nontechnical and frank delineations of de- velopmental problems, exposing pitfalls of unforeseen complications. The use of un- familiar abbreviations is disconcerting, especially when some have to be divined by induction. Two articles are worth noting: A. B. Long's "Personal Experiences with MARC and Southampton's Conversion Routines," a revealing, sympathetic, and honest appraisal of the kind of setbacks and advances encountered in such an endeavor, and P. J. D. Bramall's "The Present Na- tional and International State of MARC," a strong argument for a MARC-type inter- national system, international standards in bibliographic exchange, interchangeable data bases and software, and centralized dissemination and correction centers. It is interesting to note that there was lit- tle difficulty for experienced catalogers to apply the MARC format to normal catalog- ing, but that only confusion resulted when trainees were taught to catalog and to use MARC at the same time. In spite of an ex- tensive diagnostic process (signalling gross format errors) which produces an error list, nevertheless listings of machine-acceptable records are still visually inspected to some degree by all members of the cooperatives.