Lewis A.

Mostaghim S.

Scriven I.

College and Research Libraries

Marc Gittelsohn

Crossref

College & Research Libraries

The Undergraduate Library (Book Review)

Gittelsohn, Marc

Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship Repository

Summing up, this is a stolid, workman-like presentation, lacking any innovative ap-proaches to library education, but with some definite implications for a changed fu-ture which are worthy of consideration by the government's Library Advisory Council which the report proposes should be estab-lished.-Norman Horrocks, University of Pittsburgh. The Undergraduate Library. By Irene A. Braden. Chicago: A.L.A., 1970. 158p. (ACRL Monograph no. 31). $7.50. The appearance of Miss Braden's book, the first full-length study of its subject, will be greeted with delight by a large number of academic librarians. By now, over 40 large U.S. and Canadian universities have separately housed undergraduate libraries in actual operation, under construction or in some stage of planning. Still other li-braries-teetering on the brink of present-ing their campus administrations with temptingly convenient undergraduate li-brary packages of their own-are closely following developments of this recent trend. In some quarters, doubts about the univer-sal efficacy of this panacea at today's multi-versity are beginning to surface. Obviously a time for stocktaking is at hand: this year, undergraduate libraries were the top-ic of a major meeting at ALA in Detroit and even a separate summer institute in San Diego. While the need for this work clearly exists, its execution hardly rises to the level of excellence its timely subject matter warrants. Accepted in 1967 as her doctoral disser-tation at the University of Michigan, The Undergraduate L~brary contains an intro-ductory statement of the problem, followed by six essays devoted to the undergraduate libraries at Harvard (opened in 1949), Michigan (1958), South Carolina (1959), Indiana (1961), Cornell (1962) and Tex-as ( 1963) . In uniform format for each are given the 'historical and financial back-ground, the description of the building and its furnishings, the development and char-acter of the collection (the general collec-tion, reference, reserve), the services (ref-erence, circulation, reserve, special and Recent Publications I 417 technical services) , and the staffing and li-brary use. A concluding chapter brings to-gether the data and makes comparisons and evaluations. Her findings: The undergraduate library has provided a more efficient and satisfactory service to the under-graduate-and has at the same time improved the service of the central library to graduate students and faculty by relieving the central collection of undergraduate service. This method of providing expanded and improved library service has blazed a new path on the frontier of library service-one which many more li-braries will eventually follow. ( p. 150) The wealth of useful narrative detail, es-pecially the historical antecedents, will in-trigue those (like myself) engaged in pre-paratory work on a forthcoming undergrad-uate library. The book is well illustrated and the figures are helpful. Its peculiar topical arrangement, however, can be tedi-ous and leads to unnecessary repetition: in-formation on course reserves, for example, crops up under collections, services, library use and so on. Rich though the book may be in the ac-cumulation of certain categories of fact, these are incompletely assimilated-seem-ingly frozen in the semidigested state es-tablished by her original questionnaire/in-teryiew approach. Much is lost by her sin-gle-minded focus on the undergraduate li-brary building and its contents. I feel that insufficient attention is paid to the unique academic and physical context within which each of the six facilities is located. I submit that the nature of the curriculum and prevailing patterns of instructional technique are crucial. Similarly significant is the overall configuration and the domi-nant mission of total campus library service. To speak of Cornell's Uris Library with vir-tually no mention of its great Mann Library is to neglect a salient dimension. The role of residence hall libraries is ignored; yet, trivial as these are at one campus, they are vital at another. Little mention is made of enrollments until the concluding chapter. Yet are we not comparing an institution that ostensibly serves Harvard's few and Michigan's many? Miss Braden bases her data and conclu-sions on site visits and on interviews con-ducted only with undergraduate librarians 418 I College & Research Libraries • November 1970 and their superiors. To be sure, these are key witnesses, but they are certainly "vest-ed interests." There should also have been queries made of other librarians in parallel but independent positions (e.g., central loan librarians) . An effort ought to have been made to fathom user response by way of independent surveys of student and fac-ulty opinion. How else can one adequately test standards and make evaluations? The 1970 imprint promises new material, but the text itself was written in 1966 and is based upon figures for 1965 and before. Neither her introduction, which appeared earlier in CRL (July 1968, p. 281-84), nor the text of her dissertation has been substantially changed. It is unfortunate that the work was not updated. Changes in the field in the last five years have been great. Impressive new undergraduate libraries-among them U.C.L.A., Stanford, North Carolina, and Illinois-have since opened and are already exercising great influence. Significant alterations are occurring in the basic concepts underlying the undergradu-ate library movement, particularly its meth-odology of collection development and ref-erence service. Recent survey articles by Warren B. Kuhn in Library Trends (Oct. 1969) and Robert H. Muller in Advances in Librarianship I ( 1970) are among the significant new literature documenting these fundamental changes. While a pioneer effort-and thus a com-mendable one-it must be concluded that this study by no means preempts or ex-hausts the subject. It is to be hoped that its existence will not deter future scholars from undertaking further investigations.-Marc Gittelsohn, University of California, Berke-ley. Southeastern Europe: A Guide to Basic Publications. Paul L. Horecky, ed. Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. 755p. Professor Horecky has attempted a most difficult task of compressing into one vol-ume all pertinent bibliographical data con-cerning Southeastern Europe. A companion to the similar volume on Central Europe, this volume is the most exhaustive guide to basic publications on the subject. There are 3,018 entries, divided into two parts. In the first part, an overview of the Southeast Eu-ropean area is presented and books on vari-ous aspects of life, past and present, are listed in the following categories: general reference aids and bibliographies, general and descriptive works, land, people, his-tory, state, economy, society, and intellec-tual and cultural life. The five chapters of the second part are devoted to Southeast European countries, Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia, follow-ing the same categories as in the introduc-tory chapter. These categories are further broken down into more specific subhead-ings. The volume opens with a useful list of participants and concludes with a thor-ough index of names of authors, compilers, editors, translators, and titles of publica-tions. References are consecutively numbered throughout the volume. They are in many languages, although the emphasis is on the language of the respective country and on English. Transliteration charts are provided and should prove indispensable to the gen-eral librarian. Most of the references are from the period since 1930, with those of the 1960's predominating. Thus the latest accomplishments in research are well repre-sented. The quality of the references them-selves varies from excellent to mediocre. Since it would be impossible to list all de-serving references in one volume, this guide had to be selective. The selection of items was entrusted to specialists in their fields and was done expertly in the main. One could, of course, argue for or against inclu-sion of certain entries or regret the lack of complete consistency in the arrangements, but omissions of this kind are inevitable in a guide of such large scope. The greatest merit of the references is contained in the annotations, most of which are concise yet quite informative. When these merits are coupled with the excellent technical make-up of the book, it becomes clear that this is by far the best bibliographical guide in its field, an indispensable tool for every li-brary and librarian dealing with Southeast-ein Europe. It is also an invaluable basic work to which future references can be 

University of Queensland eSpace

Dynamic search initialisation strategies for multi-objective optimisation in peer-to-peer networks

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/38462/crl_31_06_417_opt.pdf?sequence=2

The Undergraduate Library (Book Review)

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Crossref

Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship Repository

University of Queensland eSpace