College and Research Libraries


that librarians need to have always avail-
able. A revised edition of this work, care-
fully edited and corrected, would be the 
once-and-for-all book to have. In the mean-
time, this one will do nicely.-]udy H. 
Fair, Graduate School of Business, Stanford 
University, Stanford, California. 

Reference and Information Services: A 
Reader. Edited by Bill Katz and Andrea 
Tarr. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1978. 
456p. $12.50. LC 77-20698. ISBN 
0-8108-1091-3. 
The indefatigable and multitalented Katz 

has joined library school student Tarr to 
edit a well-balanced and far-ranging collec-
tion of articles on reference librarianship. 

In selecting articles for inclusion in this 
anthology, the editors place heavy emphasis 
on material published after 1973. So you 
will find only one or two historical pieces 
and none at all from such "old masters" as 
Ralph Shaw or Louis Shores. Katz and Tarr 
have also made a conscious effort to limit 
reprints from four basic journals of 
librarianship-American Libraries, Library 
Journal, RQ, and Wilson Library Bulletin. 
This gave them the opportunity to select for 
publication many articles from "less accessi-
ble" periodicals. There are two articles from 
C&RL, including Robert S. Taylor's seminal 
contribution, "Question-Negotiation and In-
formation Seeking in Libraries" (May 1968). 
Several of the selections are ·by British and 
Canadian librarians and bibliophiles. 

To be judged a success, an anthology 
such as this must achieve a fine balance be-
tween selections that depict the current 
state of the art of reference librarianship, 
those that take a look into the future of 
computer-assisted services, those that dis-
cuss theory, and those of a bibliographic na-
ture. Katz and Tarr succeed admirably in 
this regard. Their work also manages to 
achieve a balance in tone, as the several 
serious theoretical selections are matched 
by some direct and straightforward chapters 
(such as Art Plotnik's lively and informative 
view of "OCLC for You and Me: A 
Humanized Anatomy for Beginners"). The 
editors have added other good change-of-
pace pieces in David Draheim's humourous 
look at referencemanship ("I Never See 
Him Come Into the Library Much Any-

Recent Publications I 499 

more") and in two contributions by Nat 
Hentoff from The Village Voice. And it's re-
freshing to see an intelligent and perceptive 
layman's views present in this kind of 
reader. 

In sum, this is a volume that will interest 
and inform academic librarians wishing to 
assess the current status and future direc-
tion of reference service. For library school 
students it nicely complements Katz's In-
troduction to Reference Work (McGraw-
Hill, 3d ed., 1978).-Marshall E. Nunn, 
Glendale Community College, Glendale, 
California. 

The Many Faces of Information Science. 
Edited by Edward C. Weiss. AAAS 
Selected Symposia Series, 3. Boulder, 
Colo.: Westview Press, 1977. 128p. 
$12.50. LC 77-12103. ISBN 0-89158-
430-7. 
As librarians, we profess that the collec-

tion, control, and dissemination of informa-
tion is our domain. The nature of 
information-what it is supposed to do, how 
it is transferred (the "phenomenon of 
communication")-we generally consider 
the province of information scientists. The 
definition of information science given in 
the introduction to this book is "that set of 
principles and prescriptive rules dealing 
with the organization, maintenance and 
management of bodies of scientific, techni-
cal and business information used in deci-
sion making" (p.2). 

We should, as librarians, take a closer 
look at information science in the light of 
that definition and become aware of the 
work being done on the information transfer 
process and problems, or we may forfeit 
control of our information systems and pos-
sibly of the suppying of information al-
together. 

Information scientists are grappling with 
problems in our domain: with the change 
from resource as physical record to resource 
as knowledge and with information systems 
that permit interaction between people and 
stored knowledge rather than between 
people and stored document descriptions. 
At the very basic, theoretical end of the 
spectrum of information science, which this 
volume represents, however, most of us 
concerned with traditional information