College and Research Libraries ers of information retrieval systems. The chapters are uneven in length and scholarly style. Nevertheless, there is an abundance of fine exposition, particularly in the several chapters that explain what happens in auto- mated information retrieval systems and how such systems can be evaluated. Both the Lancaster book and the Van Rijsbergen book contain helpful indexes. Each has a bibliography of more than 300 citations; their overlap is less than 10 per- cent, attesting to the great differences in the ·texts.-Ben-Ami Lipetz, State Universi- ty of New York at Albany. Knight, G. Norman. Indexing, The Art of: A Guide to the Indexing of Books and Periodicals. London, Boston: Allen & Un- win, 1979. 218p. $21. LC 78-70882. ISBN 0-04-029002-6. (Available from: Allen & Unwin, Inc., 9 Winchester Terr., Winchester, MA 01890.) . Although comissioned long before pub- lication of the definitive American work on indcxi~g (Indexing Concepts and Methods by Harold Borko and Charles L. Bernier, 40:284-85), this smaller volume represent- ing the British counterpart appeared one year later. The delay was due, probably, to the declining health of the author; who died in 1978 at the age of eighty-six, shortly after the text of the book had been sent to the print~r. The authors of the two volumes certainly must be considered· authorities on indexing: coauthor Charles Bernier is past president of the American Society of Index- ers, while G. Norman Knight is the late president of the Society of Indexers (Great Britain) and was one of its founders. The similarity between the two works goes further: while the American edition declares boldly on page ix "designed as a textbook," it is only on page 102 that Knight reveals his basic intent in a modest aside: "It is in a textbook (such as the pres- ent author immodestly trusts that Indexing, The Art of .may become) that numbered paragraphs are most commonly used." The author, however, does not use numbered paragraphs. While the American volume covers a broader field in more .clinical depth, the British volume concentrates on the basic fundamentals, the humanistic side of the Recent Publications I 551 ·art. In noting that an objection might be made to the elementary nature of his volume, the author states in his preface that "this has been so arranged deliberately, be- cause any indexer who observes all the elementary principles will not go far wrong, while sometimes advanced indexers are apt to make their own rules." Thus the work confines itself to the many aspects of in- dexing as accomplished by humans as an art form, and leaves others to tell of computers, citation indexes, KWIC, KWOC, PRECIS, concordances, and the many special index- es-thematic for music, ring for Chemical Abstracts, etc. In short, it is a meditatively sage old gentleman's reasoned presentation of his art. It provides a leisurely, warm, reassuring introduction to an art form which only of late has begun to receive the notice and attention it so richly deserves. The author's last chapter, "Humour in In- dexing," should appeal primarily to those few Americans who still have vestiges of a British sense of "humour." It seems, however, unfortunate that what to "this re- viewer was the most humorous textual ex- ample is not listed in the index under this heading. In describing the use of passim to indicate scattered references throughout an indicated range of pages of text, the author tells of the entry "Birds, 1-457 passim" being inserted by an indexer's young daugh- ter in the proof stage of an index for an ornithological book that consisted of 457 · pages! As Knight noted: "It then caused so much amusement that the publisher de- cided to retain it in one or two subsequent editions" (p.104). The six appendexes (the spelling based on the parallel to the correct literary plural of index as established by Shakespeare, and transmitted by Knight) provide information about the British, American, Australian, and Canadian societies of indexers, as well as the Wheatley Medal and the Carey Award. The index, which was prepared with the assistance of Anthony Raven and completed by him after the author's death, is almost perfect typographically and the contents re- flect what a model British index would be, be it somewhat more elaborately and artful- ly contrived than its American counterpart. One and one-half pages of the total fourteen 552 I College & Research Libraries • November 1980 and one-half pages of the index were care- fully checked , and only two somewhat minor omissions came to light: while the text refers with regard to honorifics to " theological" distinctions, this word does not appear in the index, not even as a cross- reference to "clergy, indexing of," the cor- rect entry. Also, "q.v. " is the only one of the five cross-references without a see also reference to "cross-references" (which , it- self, has see also references to these five ). Reading through the index takes con- siderable time, for one runs into such curiosity-piquing entries as " M uggeridge , Malcolm , regrettable lapse by, 20n ." One rushes to the note for page 20 to learn that this refers to M uggeridge , who likened a book without an index to "a railway time- table not giving the names of the stations, " allowing his own collection of random jokes to appear without an index! The book itself is a beautifully wrought example of the publisher's art , complete with a pliable , but exceptionally sturdy binding, a rich royal blue cloth cover, and very attractive layout and typeface--a book for a gentleman's library . Only four typo- graphical errors came to light in the entire volume, and none was of a serious nature. Although more elementary and le ss com- prehensive than its American counterpart, this volume merits addition to any collec- tion that is meant to be well balanced, if only because of the humanistic and reasoned introduction it provides to the art of indexing by a master indexer of the old schooL-Eldon W. Tamblyn , Portland State University , Portland, Oregon. CLIP Notes: College Library Information Packets. #1-SO: Performance Appraisal. Chicago: Continuing Education Commit- tee , College Libraries Section, Associ- ation of College and Research Libraries , American Library Assn. , 1980. 135p. $7.50 ACRL members ; $10 nonmembers. (Available from: ACRL, American Library Assn . , 50 E. Huron St. , Chicago , IL 60611.) Essentially CLIP Notes: College Library Information Packets. #1-80: Performance Appraisal is simply a selection of policy and procedure statements on performance appraisal from various academic libraries in the Midwest. It also contains a selective, annotated bibliography and two LAMA pub- lications on the subject. The policy and pro- cedure statements have been selected not as models but rather to show the range of approaches currently in use. As a result this publication is full of diverse segments that require some kind of unifying essay to make them useful. , No such unifying essay is presented. In- stead the reader is given a too-brief intro- duction (about 500 words) that raises more questions than it answers. The policy and procedure statements and measurement de- vices that make up the bulk of the docu- ment were gathered in a survey of perform- ance appraisal practices of about 300 academic libraries in seven midwestern states . Data concerning staff size, collection size, and size of population served by the responding libraries is offered. Beyond the statement that " slightly less than half of those replying answered that they had or were developing formal appraisal proce- dures ," virtually no data about performance appraisal practices in libraries surveyed are offered. The reader of this curious introduc- tion is forced to wonder if the survey device was poorly designed and netted little data or if it simply wasn't reported. Perhaps stranger still is the inclusion of the evaluation tool used by the Virginia Beach Public Library, which obviously was not part of the survey population of academic libraries in the Midwest. The in- troduction states that the Virginia Beach document was included because it provides a "unique and useful approach" to perform- ance appraisal. The performance appraisal statements and forms do indeed offer a wide range of approaches for the evaluation of librarians, support staff, and student employees. The two LAMA publications , Performance Appraisal Forms and Personnel Perform- ance Appraisal-A Guide for Libraries, will be highly useful to librarians struggling to develop and implement performance appraisal mechanisms. The annotated bib- liography will also be of use. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that this publication suffers from a lack of direc- tion and purpose. The last statement in the introduction notes that the publication is a