College and Research Libraries 76 I College & Research Libraries • january 1979 sity, 125 College Place, Syracuse, NY 13210.) The need for expanded subject access to books has long been neglected in practice but not in the literature. Atherton con- cludes Books Are for Use with a quotation from Thoreau: "The book is the most treas- ured wealth of the world." This quote, she reminds us, is included in the mosaic deco- ration of the Library of Congress, and she asks: "Are we the bankers and brokers of that wealth or are we the misers?" We have been, and are, the misers. On-line· data bases have expanded the ac- cess to journal articles and similar materials. These data bases, however, rarely include expanded access to books. And books, how- ever media-minded and journal-oriented we may have become, are still the core of our collections, account for a very large part of the expenditure of our resources, and are underused due to the limited access to their contents that is provided by the traditional catalog record. The Subject Access Project added from thirty to thirty-five subject descriptors, de- rived from the contents and index terms and phrases in the book, to 1,979 MARC records, thus constructing the BOOKS data base. A number of free text-searching tests were then conducted. During these con- trolled search tests, the regular MARC data base retrieved 56 and the BOOKS data base retrieved 130 relevant items. BOOKS searches resulted in fewer non- relevant items; the average precision of MARC searches was 35 percent and of BOOKS searches 46 percent. The average MARC search took eight minutes; the aver- age BOOKS search took four minutes. And BOOKS provided access to some items that a MARC search would never have revealed. The project successfully demonstrated that suitable information to augment the traditional record is already available in a high percentage of the books we catalog. The terms and phrases selected from con- tents pages and indexes did produce a use- ful, if not the most useful, vocabulary for on-line searching. The cost of selecting and inputting these additional descriptors is not prohibitive, nor is the cost of storage and retrieval. And, finally, the augmented rec- ords did provide greater, more specific, and faster access to the books in the data base. Again the need for expanded subject ac- cess has been demonstrated and significant research toward a viable means of expanded access completed. But who is going to fol- low it through? Atherton suggests "that some effort needs to be launched by a re- . sponsible organization if we are ever going to get off the dead center of poor subject access .... Either the Library of Congress, the National Library of Canada, the Na- tional Federation of Abstracting and Index- ing Services, or the American Association of Publishers needs to review the present scene and begin to work towards improve- ments" (p.87--88). Will Books Are for Use become another lost work, through poor subject access, on the dire need for expanded subject access? Will the responsible organization please stand up?-]oan K. Marshall, Brooklyn College. Morehead, Joe. Introduction to United States Public Documents. Library Science Text Series. 2d ed. Littleton, Colo.: Li- braries Unlimited, 1978. 377p. $17.50 cloth U.S. and Canada, $21 elsewhere; $11.50 paper U.S. and Canada, $13.50 elsewhere. LC 78-16866. ISBN 0-87287- 186-X (cloth), 0-87287-190-8 (paper). Continuing his record of scholarship and writing in his inimitable style, Morehead has refined and updated the excellent first edition. The purpose of the work remains the same: "To set forth an introductory ac- count of public documents, their locus, dif- fusion, habitation and use . . . for library school students, professional librarians and the general user of government publica- tions." The new edition covers the following major categories: Government Printing Office, Superintendent of Documents, de- pository library systelll, nondepository pub- lications, selected · general guides to federal publications, legislative branch materials, publications of the presidency, department and agency publications, publications of the judiciary, documents of independent and regulatory agencies, and reports of advisory committees and commissions. In addition, two appendixes cover special problems in documents librarianship and abbreviations, acronyms, citations, and popular names used in the text. There are personal author, selected title/series, and subject indexes. An improvement in the second edition is the elimination of the chapter on clerical procedures and record keeping, the details of which appeared out of place in the first edition. A discussion of technical reports, an important part of the literature with which all librarians must grapple, has been added to the work. Other new information in- cludes GPO micropublishing, on-line re- trieval systems, and changes in the Monthly Catalog since 1976. In changing the concept for the chapter on department and agency publications in the second edition to emphasize categories of publications rather than individual publi- cations, some sense of the wide diversity of departments and agencies and their publica- tions, apparent in the first edition, has been lost. Departmental and agency publications comprise a large segment of the total output of the federal government, and some agen- cies have published significant titles over a long period of time, e.g., Occupational Out- look Handbook of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Uniform Crime Reports of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. For the latter overview, the first edition is still vaiid, but one must keep in mind that all units of government are subject to constant reorganization, and publications begin, change titles, and fade with regularity. Appendi.x A, entitled "Special Problems in Documents Librarian ship," identifies them as mapping and charting, census bureau information, computer-based biblio- graphic services, federal audiovisual infor- mation, and microforms. These may be problem areas to some librarians, but they are sources important to all librarians and might have merited chapter status. This work is of especial value to library school students who can use it as a basic in- troductory text to United States government publications. General reference librarians will find the work a useful current reference tool. It is also a readable text for users of government publications in general. Morehead's style is envied by some and criticized by others. And while those to whom the English language is not a primary language may have some difficulty with sen- Recent Publications I 11 tences like "No theme, however fey, antic, arcane or ostensibly in apposite, remains far from the omniverous curiosity of govern- ment" (p.131), his style adds a light tough to the otherwise serious business of under- standing and servicing federal government publications. As Morehead points out in his introduc- tion, the emphasis of the work is on current activities. For historical information excel- lent sources are Laurence F. Schmeckebier and Roy B. Eastin's Government Publica- tions and their Use. (2d rev. ed.; Washing- ton, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1969) and Anne Morris Boyd and Rae Elizabeth Rips' United States Government Publications (New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1949).- Yuri Nakata, University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. Downey, James A. US Federal Official Pub- lications: The International Dimension. With foreword by Leroy C. Schwartzkopf. Guides to Official Publications, v.2. Elmsford, N.Y.: Pergamon Press, 1978. 352p. $40. LC 77-30462. ISBN 0-08- 021839-3. This book is a revision of U.S. Federal Official Publications: A Foreign Viewpoint issued by the University of Sussex Library [Great Britain] in 1975. Downey's book is divided into two sections; the first describes the intricacies of bibliographic control and acquisition of federal publications and dis- cusses many government and commercially produced reference sources. The second section lists the major legislative, executive, judicial, and independent agencies, with a brief history of the unit and description of publications, especially those relevant to li- brarians and researchers outside the United States. The second section comprises three-quarters of the book. The information included in the first sec- tion is accurate and current, though much of it is gathered from numerous articles and monographs published in recent years. In some ways the first section parall~ls the early chapters of Morehead's Introduction to United States Public Documents (Librar- ies Unlimited, 1975; 2d ed., 1978), but Downey does not attempt to cover the Su- perintendent of Documents classification system, the administration of government