reviews


 

 

Book Reviews 381 

the title is mistaken. A little bit of luck, 
perhaps, but it was a combination of per­
sonality, intelligence, hard work, and 
character that made him such a success­
ful teacher and permitted him to do all 
the other things he did and did so well. 
Readers of this book who have not known 
David will regret not having met him; 
those who have known him will appreci­
ate him all the more.—Evan Ira Farber, 
Earlham College (Emeritus). 

McMullen, Haynes. American Libraries 
before 1876. Foreword by Kenneth E. 
Carpenter. Westport, Conn.: Green­
wood Pr. (Beta Phi Mu Monograph, no. 
6), 2000. 179p. $62.50, alk. paper (ISBN 
031331277x). LC 99-043164. 

Here is a work of extraordinary effort. 
American Libraries before 1876 presents a 
compilation of descriptive statistics con­
cerning the history of libraries in early 
America. Presumably, this work repre­
sents Haynes McMullen’s lifetime en­
deavor. His interest began early in his 
career when he came across a thirty-page 
publication issued by the U.S. Bureau of 
Education in 1876. It was an extensive 
table identifying American libraries con­
taining at least three hundred volumes. 
By his own confession, the author tells us 
that “many years ago I fell in love with 
[that] table.”

 Over the next fifty years, McMullen 
went on to collect information anteced­
ent to that offered in the table. In Ameri­
can Libraries before 1876, he is careful to 
define his terms and explain his charts 
and graphics, giving readers access to 
detailed information about libraries in the 
colonies, and later in the young republic, 
including their numbers, characteristics, 
founders, and types of collection. Each of 
these categories is treated in a separate 
chapter. At the book’s end, there are a 
useful glossary, a selected bibliography, 
and an index that belies the detail found 
in some one hundred fifty pages of cat­
egorization.

 The statistics are interesting, but the 
book’s organization is not user-friendly; 
would that it had been arranged more 

handily. Although preliminary pages list­
ing illustrations (nineteen tables and six 
figures) and closing appendices might 
make for a quick-reference tool, the tex­
tual presentation is of less certain merit.

 McMullen asks interesting historical 
questions, for example, “Why did 
[Americans] establish so many [librar­
ies]?” His less interesting answers in­
clude: because they wanted them, because 
the colonists were “bookish,” because 
“Benjamin Franklin and his friends set an 
example,” because business was good or 
times were prosperous, but not because 
of density of population. Later, he asks, 
“Why were the new kinds of libraries 
appearing in the years before 1875 … be­
ing established in the older parts of the 
country?” Again, his response is unsatis­
fying. To the latter, he says, “The answer 
is clear: Americans in the older parts … 
continued to introduce new kinds of li­
braries … and people in the newer states 
made little or no contribution to the vari­
ety of libraries that were available.” In­
cluded in the reasons for the popularity 
of the social library is “as fiction increased 
in popularity in the early nineteenth cen­
tury, these libraries became better able to 
meet the emotional needs of their users. In 
most social libraries, novels seems [sic] 
to have made up only a small part of the 
collection; however, some records indi­
cate that fiction circulated heavily” (ital­
ics mine).

 It is this generalized speculation and 
conjecture that leaves the publication 
wanting. Had it been a collection of 
graphs and charts with the current text 
largely in explanatory footnote, the book 
could function well as a reference tool. But 
as a series of unanswered inquiries, it 
might be most useful for library school 
history courses and for doctoral students 
seeking dissertation topics.

 This book clearly involved enormous 
effort, the painstaking collection of data, 
and an undeniable joy in discovery. The 
chapter notes attest to the author’s famil­
iarity with historical scholarship in nu­
merous fields, not the least of which is 
library history. Library schools would do 



 

382 College & Research Libraries 

well to own a copy. but this reviewer, a 
great fan of libraries and their history, 
cannot recommend it for other collections 
or purposes.—Judith Segal, Western Wash­
ington University. 

Rehman, Sajjad ur. Preparing the Informa­
tion Professional: An Agenda for the Fu­
ture. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Pr. 
(Contributions in Librarianship and Infor­
mation Science, no. 93), 2000. 192p. 
$57.50, alk. paper (ISBN 0-313-30673-7). 
LC 99-462056. 

In the past two decades, there has been a 
great deal of interest in, and concern about, 
education for librarians in the United 
States. After fifteen (almost 25% of the to­
tal ) of the library and information science 
(LIS) schools closed between 1978 and 
1993, many of the remaining schools made 
changes in their curricula and their em­
phases, often resulting in the ALA-accred­
ited master’s degree becoming just one of 
several programs being offered. This re­
structuring of LIS education has been met 
with misgivings by many in the profes­
sion, resulting in a sharply defined differ­
ence of opinion between some practitio­
ners and educators about what LIS schools 
should be doing to prepare librarians of 
the future.

 Many practitioners think that LIS edu­
cators are not interested in what practic­
ing librarians want and expect from the 
schools, especially in terms of requiring 
courses in core competencies such as cata­
loging and in producing new librarians 
who will work in areas where there are 
national shortages. The dropping of the 
word library from the names of some of 
the schools also is seen by many practi­
tioners as a signal that the schools are dis­
associating themselves from the library 
profession. On the other hand, many edu­
cators feel that practitioners are unaware 
of the competitive reality of contemporary 
higher education and unrealistic about 
what they expect from graduates emerg­
ing from what are still primarily one-year 
master’s programs.

 So over the past few years, there has 
been a great deal of discussion about LIS 

July 2001 

education. The ALA-sponsored Congress 
on Professional Education in the spring 
of 1999 and a large number of periodical 
articles have addressed different aspects 
of this topic, but the focus has almost al­
ways been internal, looking only at LIS 
education in the United States and 
Canada. In Preparing the Information Pro­
fessional: An Agenda for the Future, Sajjad 
ur Rehman, professor of Information Sci­
ence at Kuwait University, provides a 
more comprehensive global view of LIS 
education. The major purpose of his book 
is to provide a rationale and a methodol­
ogy for taking the demands of individual 
LIS markets (determined primarily by the 
surveying of library managers) and us­
ing them to shape LIS curricula, both in 
graduate and undergraduate programs. 
Rehman discusses three groups of LIS 
schools: those in North America; those in 
the United Kingdom and Australia; and 
those in three groups of developing na­
tions, South Asia (including Bangladesh, 
India, and Pakistan), Arabian Gulf nations 
(Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi 
Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates), 
and East Asia (Malaysia and Singapore).

 The book falls naturally into three sec­
tions. The longest, the first seven chap­
ters, is devoted to a description of the 
concept of competency-based education, 
a review of the literature of its use in the 
LIS field, and a description of a study 
done in Malaysia in the mid-1990s. This 
study asked Malaysian middle- and top-
level library managers to identify the 
knowledge and skill competencies they 
wanted to see in entry-level librarians in 
academic, public, and special library set­
tings. The competencies desired in each 
of these settings are described in separate 
chapters that compare the findings of the 
Malaysian study with the results of stud­
ies from other places.

 The second section of the book de­
scribes a study that looked at the percep­
tions of senior library managers in dif­
ferent types of libraries in the Arabian 
Gulf region. The managers were asked to 
differentiate between the competencies 
and educational preparation of parapro­