College and Research Libraries


260 I College & Research Libraries • May 1977 

Borchardt, D. H., and Horacek, J. I. Li-
brarianship in Australia, New Zealand 
and Oceania: A Brief Survey. Potts Point, 
NSW, Australia: Pergamon Press (Aus-
tralia), 1975. 80p. $6.50. ISBN 0-08-
019920-8. ISBN 0-08-019752-3 paper. 
The impetus for this slender monograph 

surveying librarianship in the South Pacific 
was provided by a commission soliciting a 
chapter for a comparative study of librari-
anship throughout the world. 

Preceding the text are simple, unclut-
tered maps of Australia and New Zealand. 
On them are marked, by a variety of dots, 
population densities of five to twenty 
thousand and twenty to one hundred thou-
sand plus. Cities with populations in excess 
of one hundred thousand are listed down 
the side of the maps. Those unfamiliar with 
these countries will need to have an atlas 
on hand in order to identify the locations 
of the cities. The end papers are maps illus-
trating the area of the Pacific Ocean under 
discussion. 

The book opens with a rudimentary ac-
count of the history and geography of this 
diverse region, which lays the foundation 
for the reader. From there it moves into an 
overview of the field. Types of libraries are 
discussed along with library education, pro-
fessional status, including salary structures, 
and the literature. Several interesting tables 
of public and university library statistics for 
Australia and New Zealand are included in 
the chapter on "Types of Libraries." In an 
epilogue the authors identify the future 
course of librarianship down under and 
enumerate ways in which this can be 
achieved. The compactness and continuity 
found elsewhere in the book are somewhat 
lacking in the final chapter on "Bibliogra-
phy and the Literature of Librarianship." 

At the outset the authors express hope 
that this brief survey will serve as a text 
for library school students who wish to gain 
insight into the function of librarianship in 
their society-a topic, by and large, ne-
glected by library schools. The book also 
will be invaluable to librarians who are in-
terested in working in this part of the 
world. Concise, factual, and interestingly 
written, it presents, in a nutshell, the 
growth and current status of librarianship 
in the South Pacific.-]udith P. Cannan, 
Dep·uty Chief Instructor, Cataloging In-

struction Office, Processing Department, 
Library of Congress, Washington, D .C. 

Chen, Ching-chih. Biomedical, Scientific & 
Technical Book Reviewing. Metuchen, 
N.J.: Scarecrow, 1976. 186p. $8.00. LC 
76-20480. ISBN 0-8108-0939-7. 
The basic premise undergirding the vari-

ous studies described in this book is about 
as controversial as apple pie and mother-
hood. Few science librarians would deny 
the repeated assertions that book reviews 
are a valuable means of keeping abreast of 
current research and of evaluating and se-
lecting new acquisitions. Nor is the identifi-
cation of those scientific journals which best 
supply reliable, timely reviews too difficult, 
although precise information on the ade-
quacy of various aspects of that coverage 
is more difficult to locate. 

The interesting data supplied in this col-
lection of quantitative surveys of scientific 
review sources are from counts made in the 
early 1970s from journals held by the 
Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard 
and the science and engineering libraries 
at M.I.T. Insight on such variables as extent 
of coverage, time lag, duplication patterns, 
length of review, subject orientation, and 
the relative emphasis on U.S. and British 
imprints is furnished in successive chapters 
for general biomedical books, books on clin-
ical medicine, general scientific books, and 
publications in the special disciplines of 
mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemis-
try, geology, and engineering. An addition-
al chapter gives supplementary data on 
major publishers in each of the areas sur-
veyed. 

There is much solid information here, al-
though most of it is fragmented by the for-
mat, which not only confines the analysis 
of each study to a separate section but fol-
lows no uniform pattern in assessing the 
recurrent variables. These difficulties stem 
partly from a constant slight shift of param-
eters for each data base. Most chapters re-
port both a pilot study and an update study 
made some two or three years later. Fre-
quently a periodical which met the criteria 
for one study proved to be insignificant for 
the companion study. Some titles too useful 
to be ignored were not held in the two base 
collections. For different reasons the spans 
of data collection varied from six months