reviews.indd


460 College & Research Libraries 

In the meantime, “the history of the book” 
remained the province of antiquarians, 
book collectors, curators, and sundry 
printers—a dedicated band of amateurs 
who, nonetheless, did much of the basic 
spade work for later academics. 

By contemporary standards, Moran’s 
review of de Worde’s career seems almost 
quaint, circumscribed as it is by the narrow 
horizons of Moran’s own interests and his 
understanding of his task. It relies heavily 
on a book I can recommend, H. S. Bennett’s 
English Books and Readers 1475 to 1557 (Cam-
bridge 1989). For Moran, de Worde was the 
first printer in London to truly take advan-
tage of the new technology as a medium of 
popular communication. Over the course 
of his career, he churned out hundreds of 
titles aimed at a more popular market and 
so became, for his biographer, the “precur-
sor” of the Fleet Street baron. 

As William Caxton’s “journeyman,” 
de Worde enjoys his own cult follow-
ing today. There is a Wynkyn de Worde 
Society in the UK, and it seems to have 
underwritten some of the costs of the 
reissue of the present work. Perhaps its 
members are the driving force behind the 
volume. However welcome the bibliog-
raphy by Lotte Hellinga and Mary Erler, 
though, I cannot really urge anyone to 
rush out and buy this slim monograph. 
Librarians and scholars coming to it from 
the perspective of current work in the his-
tory of the book will probably be neither 
impressed nor enlightened. In its day, it 
was a welcome addition to the literature. 
It is good to have it in our libraries. But 
I find it difficult to make the case for its 
enduring presence today.—Michael Ryan, 
University of Pennsylvania. 

Sauperl, Alenka. Subject Determination 
during the Cataloging Process. Lanham, 
Md.: London: Scarecrow, 2002. 173p. 
alk. paper, $47.50 (ISBN 0810842890). 
LC 2001-57698. 

September 2004 

This reviewer, who finds it diffi  cult to dis-
like any book, was disappointed by this 
one. Based on the author’s doctoral dis-
sertation (University of North Carolina, 
1999), the work reports on a study made 
to identify and examine the cognitive 
processes involved in the assignment of 
subject headings through a case study of 
catalogers. The thought processes that 
go into subject cataloging have received 
sparse attention and the topic is deserv-
ing of scholarly exploration. This study 
makes a definite contribution to the 
quite limited body of literature. Sauperl’s 
failure to explain certain aspects of her 
research methodology frequently causes 
the reader to become puzzled, however, 
if not frustrated. The printed text itself 
could have been improved by careful 
editing and some rewriting. 

The work is organized into seven 
chapters. An introduction discusses the 
purpose of the study and very briefl y de-
scribes the research strategy. The second 
chapter reviews the treatment of subject 
determination as presented in cataloging 
and indexing textbooks and discusses 
the previous research concerned with 
subject analysis and indexing. The inclu-
sion of indexing research strengthens the 
study and is to be applauded. The third 
chapter describes the research methodol-
ogy. Chapter four, “Twelve Personal Ap-
proaches to Subject Cataloging,” presents 
the case studies. Being ninety-fi ve pages 
in length, it forms the core of the book. 
Chapter five summarizes what was 
learned from the case studies. Chapter 
six presents a model for subject analysis. 
Chapter seven discusses the author ’s 
findings in relation to earlier studies 
and the implication of those findings 
for cataloging education and cataloging 
in libraries. The section concerned with 
previous research has a fair amount of 
redundancy with chapter three. Although 
repetition of this nature is not uncommon 



in dissertations, less detail in one chapter 
or the other would have been preferable 
in the book. A bibliography and an index 
conclude the volume. 

Sauperl’s case study participants were 
twelve experienced original catalogers 
from three academic libraries in the 
Southeastern United States. Each institu-
tion had “more than a million volumes... 
several branch libraries and large central 
cataloging departments with several 
catalogers performing original catalog-
ing. All the libraries used OCLC.” Each 
participant performed original cataloging 
for three books of his or her own selection. 
However, except for the fi rst case study, 
participants only “describe cataloging of 
one of the three items.” The reason for 
imposing this limitation in a study, that 
by its very nature is already quite limited, 
is not stated. 

Six catalogers were observed by Sau-
perl, who used the “think-aloud method 
...to capture the cognitive process of 
the catalogers during their work.” The 
other six were interviewed. The respec-
tive methodologies are discussed, but the 
rationale for their dual employment is no-
where stated. Sauperl does comment that 
the different methods had a substantial 
impact on the reports of the case studies. 
“While the observed catalogers actually 
cataloged books during the observation 
session, the interviewed catalogers only 
talked about their cataloging approach. 
This means the stories of the observed 
catalogers are much more detailed and 
based on evidence from the observation, 
whereas the stories of the interviewed 
catalogers are quite brief and skeletal.” 

Interviewed participants were asked 
to describe some recent work that they 
had cataloged, given the opportunity to 
explain their philosophy of cataloging, 
and so on. The interviews were structured 
inasmuch as individuals were asked to 
respond to and discuss, as they deemed 

Book Reviews 461 

appropriate, the relation of a number of 
factors to subject cataloging. 

Each participant was presented with 
several factors that “were selected from 
the observation session of one or two 
catalogers in another library in the study.” 
Participants were therefore not respond-
ing to a uniform set of factors, a circum-
stance that Sauperl leaves unexplained. 
The responses given to the variables were 
interesting and informative. This reviewer 
believes the study would have been stron-
ger had a comprehensive set of variables 
been developed and each participant in 
the three groups presented with the same 
identical factors to prompt discussion.

 There are several problems with the 
handling of the variables. Given their im-
portance to the interviews, Sauperl’s fail-
ure to discuss them in a separately labeled 
section of the text must be faulted. She 
also must be faulted for explicitly stating 
the complete set of variables for just one 
interviewee group. No comparable sets 
are provided for interviewees in the other 
two groups. One learns the factors used to 
prompt discussion with these interview-
ees only in the text. Variables or concepts 
presented to the first group included such 
expected elements as authority fi le, local 
catalog, title page, record for a previous 
edition, tentative heading and subject 
heading, as well as such factors as time 
and cost. Participants in this group were 
not asked to comment on the importance 
of the author’s intention, skimming the 
work, and thinking of the library user as a 
part of the process when choosing subject 
headings, variables included as prompts 
to another group of interviewees. Coop-
eration with colleagues and “saturation 
point...that feeling when you had to stop” 
working with a given book, were among 
the other variables. 

Despite its shortcomings, this is not 
an unimportant work. Scholars of subject 
cataloging will obviously be its primary 



462 College & Research Libraries September 2004 

audience. The study provides a base for 
future research and, given its moderate 
price, should be owned by any library 
and information science collection that 
supports serious scholarship. The book 
is worth consideration as supplementary 
reading for cataloging courses. Catalogers 
should at least skim the work, especially 
those at entry level and midcareer. 

By way of conclusion, it seemed only 
appropriate to check WorldCat to look 
at the subject headings assigned to this 
work. A title search (done on August 
9, 2002) retrieved five records, two for 
the book and three for the preceding 
dissertation. The record for the book in 
hand (OCLC: 48588266) had two subjects: 
“Subject cataloging” and “Subject cata-
loging—United States—Case studies.” A 
second record (OCLC: 50100464), which 
had an identical bibliographic description 

except for pagination being noted 192 
(versus 173 for the copy in hand), gave 
the single subject: “Subject cataloging.” 
The record for the printed version of the 
dissertation (OCLC: 42810541) had three 
subjects: “Subject cataloging,” “Subject 
headings,” and “Catalogers—United 
States—Att itudes.” The final records were 
for microform versions of the disserta-
tion. The records for both the microfilm 
(OCLC: 44492710) and microfi che (OCLC: 
44161585) gave the two identical head-
ings “Subject cataloging” and “Subject 
headings.” The subjects given all seem 
appropriate, even if they are not entirely 
consistent. This reviewer would suggest 
adding another subject heading to bring 
out the cognitive aspects of the study. 
But that’s just a thought.—James W. 
Williams, University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign. 

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