College and Research Libraries profession.-Linda E. Williamson, Univer- sity Library, University of Illinois at Chicago. Richardson, John V ., Government Informa- tion: Education and Research, 1928-1986. Bibliographies and Indexes in Library and Information Science, no. 2. New York: Greenwood, 1987. 186p. $35 (ISBN 0-313-25605-5). LC 86-27086. The generalized title of this work is per- haps a bit misleading, since it is in fact a book containing the results of two dis- tinctly different research efforts. Al- though both portions of this volume deal with graduate-level research pertaining to government publications, the two parts vary greatly in terms of utility and proba- ble audience. The major portion of the book is a thorough, comprehensive anno- tated bibliography that should have broad appeal for both those in library schools and working librarians. The rest of the work is a quantitative and sociological analysis of graduate work in government publications that will seem somewhat eso- teric to all but a miniscule few. The valuable part of this book is the bib- liography, which contains 317 entries and is a complete list of master's theses (or specialization papers) and doctoral disser- tations written on any aspect of govern- ment information at library schools in the United States and Canada from 1928 through 1986. Each entry, in addition to bibliographic information and the name of the individual's faculty adviser, contains an abstract of one or more paragraphs. Regular readers of Government Publication Review's ''Theses and Dissertations in Documents" column will find the format familiar; Richardson is the editor of that column, and this bibliography represents a cumulation of lists already published by him and a retrospective search of the pro- fessional literature. The entries are grouped into six broad divisions: local government studies, state government studies, federal government studies, for- eign government studies, United Nations government studies, and comparative government studies. As Bernard Fry says in his introduction to the work, this meticulously compiled 120-page list of theses and dissertations is Recent Publications 97 ''the first comprehensive bibliography of graduate research in the field.'' It will be of obvious use to master's and doctoral students who are interested in govern- ment publications as an area of potential research; this bibliography can serve as a starting point by identifying unexplored areas as well as useful models and meth- odological approaches. It also should prove helpful to a great many practitio- ners in libraries, since many of the entries are thorough bibliographies that could easily be adapted for in-library use. Docu- ments librarians needing research litera- ture to help them make a decision in areas -such as collection arrangement and biblio- graphic control procedures will find some useful items here to supplement a search of the periodical literature. The first one-third of the book examines what Richardson terms ''The Sociology of Research in Government Information.'' Based on the 317 authors whose works he has compiled, the author produces a sta- tistical portrait of those doing graduate work in the field. Some of the variables he looks at are the number of pages in the thesis or dissertation, quantitative orien- tation of the work, gender of the student, gender of the faculty adviser, scholarly eminence of the institution, subsequent publications of the student, and citations in Social Science Citation Index. These and several other inputs were assigned quantitative values and analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sci- ences (SPSS). A variety of tables present the accumulated data, and Richardson discusses the results as they pertain to several hypotheses with which he began the project. Most of the results are not es- pecially surprising: most would have ex- pected dissertations to be longer and more quantitative than theses, doctoral stu- dents subsequently to publish more than terminal master's students, and the few li- brary schools that emphasize the study of government publications (such as North Carolina and UCLA) to account for a very high percentage of the total work cur- rently being produced. The only mildly in- teresting finding is that at the master's level (but not as the doctoral level) those with a faculty adviser of the opposite sex 98 College & Research Libraries are less likely to have their graduate work subsequently published. Richardson dis- cusses this phenomena but does not ade- quately explain it; perhaps further re- search would indeed have yielded some significant insights and allowed his analy- ·sis to become something other than a statement of the obvious. In truth, this is not so much the sociol- ogy of research in government informa- tion as it is the sociology of library schools that either have a Ph.D. program or re- quire a paper for the M.L.S. Most real re- search is the output of working librarians who write articles and books, and they are not discussed here at all. The title of the book does not indicate that it will discuss only a very small, specialized realm of re- search regarding government publica- tions: theses and documents. It really ig- nores the education half of the subtitle, failing to talk about introductory docu- ments courses in library schools and their role as initiators of later interest in and re- search on government publications. Ex- cluding practitioners, it deals only with the publications of library school faculty, discussing them mainly in the context of their faculty adviser roles. In Chapter 3, "Influential Faculty Advisors," Richard- son devotes a page to each of several indi- viduals he calls 'I the top advisors in gov- ernment publications. 11 What can one say about a chapter like this that fails to men- tion either Peter Hernon or Charles Mc- Clure but devotes a page to the author himself? Certainly those teaching in library schools will find the analysis of student/ adviser relationships interesting (al- though they will probably not use the January 1988 data, in Richardson's words, to "better understand the sociological context of their own work with students"). No doubt a potential Ph.D. student intending to write a dissertation dealing with gov- ernment publications might wish to con- sult this book before choosing an institu- tion. But otherwise one would be hard-pressed to find a potential audience for this type of study. It is doubtful that li- brary administrators and department heads will use the quantitative data to 11 identify the strong schools and advisors who can provide them well-qualified can- didates for government information posi- tions," as Richardson envisions in his preface. This research is likely to be of in- terest only to those having a very strong interest in the history of theses and disser- tations dealing with government publica- tions. Even those who savor anything writ- ten about documents would be hard pressed not to admit that this is much ado about nothing. But we really should not fault Richard- son too much. Quantitative analyses are de rigueur these days, and there is strong pressure from within the scholarly com- munity to include some form of elabo- rately formatted data in any work. Those working librarians not planning to return to library school and obtain a doctorate can always skip past the first third of the book and make use of the bibliography. Within its narrowly defined scope this compilation of research is exhaustive; it . fills a long-standing need and is an impor- tant contribution to the professional litera- ture of government publications.-Joel Zucker, Jerome Library, Bowling Green State University, Ohio. OTHER PUBLICATIONS American Literary Critics and Scholars, 1800-1850. Ed. by John W. Rathbun and Monica M. Grecu. Detroit: Gale, 1987. 406p. $92 (ISBN 0-8103-1737-0). LC 87- 11828. American Writers for Children since 1960: Pp- ets, Illustrators, and Nonfiction Authors. Ed. by Glenn E. Estes. Detroit: Gale, 1987. 430p. $92 (ISBN 0-8103-1739-7). LC 87-14352. Annual Register: A Record of World Events, 1986. Ed. by H. V. Hodson. Detroit: Gale, 1987. 578p. $100 (ISBN 0-8103- 2053-3). LC 4-17979. Bartle, Barton K. Computer Software in Mu- sic and Music Education: A Guide. Metu-