College and Research Libraries The Bibliographic Control of Official Publi- cations, edited by John E. Pemberton, is a collection of essays dealing with a variety of systems developed to code and file gov- ernment publications. Pemberton's preface states that this book has been produced with the object of I' stimulating progress towards the estab- lishment of a comprehensive system for the bibliographic control of official publi- cations, and identifying the principles upon which a new and definitive coding scheme could be based.'' In my opinion, this book does nothing to bring about an effective and compre- hensive system of bibliographic control for government publications, but it is ef- fective in setting out the dimensions of the problem and in describing the approaches some librarians have taken to cope with them. This is a book about coping. The prob- lems described by the eleven librarian con- tributors from Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States are familiar to anyone who has administered a sizable collection of publications from more than one government jurisdiction. Government publications are voluminous and comprise an unwieldy mix of substan- tive monographs, periodicals, serials, pamphlets, and mimeographed docu- ments-many of which are issued as sin- gle sheets .. Users require access by prove- nance and by type of document (annual report, legislative bill, treaty, etc.) as well as by personal author, title, subject, and series. Standard cataloging systems don't handle government publications well, AACR2 has made the situation worse, and many libraries have policies against pro- viding full cataloging for them. The docu- ment librarian is left to devise a scheme appropriate for his or her collection and users that is cheap, quickly and easily ap- plied by library technicians, and suffi- ciently flexible and expandable to provide for perpetual changes in government or- ganization structures, publication pat- terns, and areas of interest. This is a virtu- ally impossible task. And, Pemberton is right. What is needed is the development of a comprehensive scheme that can be ap- plied in any situation. A sound theoretical foundation is prerequisite to that, and this Recent Publications 521 book does not provide it. The librarians writing here share their problems, relate their discovery that no available scheme will work for them, and describe the system developed for their particular situation. I, in turn, have looked at the system each of them has developed and have understood both why they were developed and why each of them fails to meet my needs. Regretably, I have found nothing here to reduce my bias against lo- cally devised systems that present prob- lems in authority control and that keep government publications isolated from the bibliographic mainstream in either union card catalog or online format. This book will be of some interest to li- brary school students and to librarians struggling with the issue of bibliographic control for government publications. I am disappointed that it is so thoroughly a col- lection of tales of I 'how I do it in my li- brary'' and that it is so bereft of theory. I'm sure that many libraries have already purchased this book because it was issued as No. 11 in Pergamon's "Guide to Offi- cial Publications" series, but $25.00 is a very hefty price for a slim volume of orlly 172 pages.-Carol Turner, Stanford Univer- sity. Broadus, Robert N. Selecting Materials for Libraries. New York: Wilson, 1981. 2d ed. 479p. $18. LC 81-650. ISBN 0-8242- 0659-2. This work, which first appeared in 1973, has now been published in a second edi- tion, showing considerable rewording of the text, but without expanding on the scope or depth of coverage. It remains a basic text for introductory courses in li- brary science, rather than a thorough working manual for the practicing librar- ian, who would want more substantial de- tails. The focus remains on the small to medium-sized general library. The first one hundred thirty pages give an overview of the principles and basic means and aspects of selection in a concise manner which serves well as an introduc- tion to: the role and nature of selection in different types of libraries; the fundamen- tal principles of selection; the role of use studies and citation analysis; the structure of the publishing industry; how to judge a 522 College & ·Research Libraries book for content and physical quality; the use of guides to recommended books; and book reviews. Approximately ninety pages are then devoted to the special nature of selecting the following types of materials: free ma- terials; public documents; periodicals; ref- erence works; out-of-print, reprint, micro- form materials; and non-print materials (thirty pages). The last half (two hundred pages) presents a series of discussions of various broad subject fields consisting of a de- scription of the fields presented in such a way as to make one basically aware of their general content, the types of materi- als encountered, and problems and princi- ples of selection unique to each subject field. The author clearly states that this book is intended for use in introductory first courses on book selection in library schools, and as such it is useful. It is the purpose of an introductory text to present the basic elements of the topic and their in- terrelationships without involving the student with great amounts of detail. However, the usefulness of a text is greatly enhanced if it includes clear refer- ences to recommended supplementary readings from the literature which will carry the reader into the refinements of the subjects and answer any specific ques- tions or desire for additional general infor- mation that might arise. The footnotes do not really serve the same function and, given the brevity with which many topics are treated, such a list of recommended readings would be most useful in this book. Broadus gives a brief explanation of the various aspects of publishing and se- lection, but this serves only as an intro- duction; details and solutions to problems encountered in their application must be sought elsewhere. It is also readily apparent that the cover- age of topics is sometimes uneven: ap- proval plans are passed over in just six- teen lines; judging the content of a book is given less than one and one-half pages; but eight pages are devoted to quantita- tive measurement through use and cita- tion studies. One would like to see more about the former, but not less about the latter. November 1984 Overall, however, this book does a fine job of imparting the importance of selec- tion by librarians for the properly guided growth of a library's particular collection·.-Thomas L. Mann, Northwestern University. The Development of National Library and Information Services: Papers Given at the First Library Association Interna- tional Workshop, London, 1981. Ed. by Edward Dudley. London: The Library Assn., 1983. 214p. £15. LC 82-240549. ISBN 0-85365-784-X. The 15 papers included in this book were delivered at the First Library Associ- ation International Workshop held in Lon- don from August 24 through September 3, 1981. The workshop was structured so that there were ''three separate but inter- related seminars," to cover broadly the themes of national library and information service development, the influence of so- cial and technological change on library and information services (LIS), and edu- cation in libraries. According to the editor of the book, Edward Dudley, the workshop attracted ''some of Britain's leading practitioners and theorists in major areas of LIS devel- opment" to address "problems of some international relevance and then to seek to demonstrate British experience and re- sponse to those problems." The first part of the book (Seminar 1) is concerned primarily with the role and function of national libraries, public li- braries, academic and scientific libraries (defined very broadly to include school and special libraries), and bibliographic services in the development of national li- brary and information services. The first paper in the book takes a more general- ized view of ''the nature of planning in re- lation to the LIS environment," particu- larly as it is applied in different political and social contexts. Seminar 2 addresses the effects of social change and technological change on the provision of library and information ser- vices . Also included in this second semi- nar is a paper on using a systems approach to library planning, and one on the role of low-level technology and mechanized systems, which are more readily available