Broadus, Robert N.

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Book Selection: Principles
and Procedures (Book Review)

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) >'t is not clear what criteria guided the author to include such unimportant places as Plock, with its historical society, and omit other more important places like Oswiecim, where archives pertaining to the concentra-tion camps during the German occupation are preserved. Omitted, too, are libraries in Bytom, Drohyczyn, Miedzyrzec, Racibor, Oswie-cim, Tarnow, Zamosc, and some other cities where one may find archives on sub-jects related to the countries bordering Po-land. Since churches and monasteries in Poland played a great political and cultural role and collected and preserved much ar-chival material, it is also hard to explain why the compiler chose the Academy of Physical Education Library in Warsaw but failed to mention Chrzescjanska Akademia Teologiczna (Christian Theological Acade-my), also in Warsaw and which preserves the archives on all other religious denomi-nations besides Catholicism. The library in Czestochowa is also less important than the library in J asna Gora which is not men-tioned at all. In spite of such failures and omissions, this is the only tool available to foreign scholars and may serve its purpose well. One should not be distracted by the title but should consult this directory for infor-mation on bordering countries as well.-Peter Kudrik, Slavic Bibliographer, Univer-sity of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor. Lunati, Rinaldo. Book Selection: Principles and Procedures. Translated by Luciana Marulli, with a foreword by Guy A. Mar-co. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1975. 167p. $7.00. (LC 75-23498) (ISBN 0-8108-0846-3) "What appears to be the first English rendering of a modem Italian writing on librarianship" (Marco's foreword) is a translation of chapters II, III, and IV of the author's longer work published in Florence, 1972. The book in hand is concerned with libraries in general, giving some attention to particular types, such as academic. In the main, it is a review of the literature on book selection published in Western Eu-rope and the United States, with the addi-tion of Ranganathan. · Recent Publications I 379 The author here and there adds his own evaluations, together with his constructive judgments and theory. There is difficulty in knowing exactly where Lunati is sum-marizing a work and where he begins to in-sert his own ideas. Furthermore, since he has cast the thought of writers of English and other languages into Italian, then had the material translated (back) into English, the final results are not always accurate. For instance, he apparently has Danton saying in his Book Selection and Collec-tions: "The fact is that professors are of all persons the least qualified to take part in the process of selection" (p.85). I wonder whether the translator has not missed some of the fine distinctions which may have been in the original. Lunati's overall view is that most trea-tises on book selection require far too much knowledge and concentration on the part of the selector, while his own theory, "cul-tural selection," is not only superior but within the capabilities of human librarians. This "cultural selection" -hinted at over and over, never made clear, but arousing great interest-is dealt with in the untrans-lated part of the original. However, Marco, reviewing the full Italian text (Library Quarterly 43:267-68 [July 1973]), was not satisfied with the development of the the-ory. Apparently it assumes a society less pluralistic than ours, and perhaps one changing at a slower rate. The book is worthwhile, though; there is no question of that. Its main value is for widening horizons, historically and geo-graphically. To know that for more than three centuries librarians have wrestled with the problems of selection is consoling. It is humbling to hear some of our widely accepted views, e.g., on the value of lists of "best books," dismissed as Anglo-Ameri-can peculiarities. We may well ask whether he is wiser than we in asserting that we have emphasized demand too much at the expense of value. In the part which applies more specifical-ly to academic libraries, the author deals at some length with Danton, usually agree-ing with his conclusions. For some odd rea-sons, though, Danton's tame and sensible remarks on building collections for the fu-ture as well as the present are called "ex-380 I College & Research Libraries • July 1976 cessive and irrelevant" (p.94). Anglo-American librarianship needs more ideas brought in from the outside, and in spite of the problems connected with this work, it is a worthy attempt-the kind of publication which ought to be encouraged. -Robert Broadus, Department of Library Science, Northern Illinois University, De-Kalb. Lowell, Mildred Hawksworth. Library Management Cases. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1975. 260p. $8.50. (LC 75-23077) (ISBN 0-8108-0845-5) This volume is composed of seventy-six fictionalized problem cases exemplifying various aspects of library management. It is uncertain, however, whether this book is to be considered a revised edition of the a~thor' s Management of Libraries and In-formation Centers (4 vols., 1968-71) or only as a revised edition of one of the four volumes. The author died while the volume was in preparation, and this point remains unclear. Some of the cases are new. Most, how-ever, are revisions in one form or another of cases which appeared earlier in one of the volumes of Management of Libraries and Information Centers. Each case is an episode in the life of a librarian. The cases cover all types of libraries. There are cases to be role-played. There are my favorites, the in-basket cases. The general structure follows the au-thor's conception of the first three phases of management: organizing, planning, and controlling. The fourth phase, leading and motivating, was to have been a part of a projected volume, Library Personnel Cases. Slight introductory material, of a few paragraphs, precede the cases in each chap-ter. These introductions summarize the managerial precepts that the cases in the chapters exemplify. Following each case, except for those of role playing, one or more questions or suggestions are append-ed. The questions occasionally do not refer to the more important points of the cases; and readers may have a tendency to focus on answers to the appended matter rather than on what they perceive to be the rami-fications of the cases themselves. Since the book is to be used in management courses in library schools or in seminars, workshops, institutes, and continuing education pro-grams, these suggestions or questions may inhibit the imagination of the reader as well as inhibit the initiative of the instruc-tor or program leader. There are indexes by title and by subject, but each entry refers to a case number in-stead of a page number. The time required to locate a reference is thus needlessly lengthened. This edition is certainly better than the author's Management of Libraries and In-formation Centers, because the author has eliminated some of the objectionable as-pects of those four volumes, for example, the lecture outlines, suggested readings, or bibliographies in volume 2. Yet this is a volume which I judge should never have been published, because there are potential-ly few persons who should, or would care to, read it. Its sole justification might be in its becoming a library school textbook. Even that possibility is diminished greatly because management courses in library schools have changed so dramatically in the past few years.-G. A. Rudolph, Dean of Libraries, University of Nebraska, Lincoln. OTHER PUBLICATIONS OF INTEREST TO ACADEMIC LIBRARIANS Allworth, Edward. Soviet Asia: Bibliogra-phies. New York: Published in Coopera-tion with the Program on Soviet Nation-ality Problems, Columbia Univ., by Prae-ger, 1975. 686p. $35.00. (LC 73-9061) (ISBN 0-275-28740-8) American Humanities Index for 1975. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1976. Vol. 1- . $89.50, amiual cumulation; $125.00, quarterly index. (ISBN 0-87875-089-4) American Theological Library Association. Summary of Proceedings of the Twenty-ninth Annual Conference. Philadelphia: American Theological Library Assn., 1976. 204p. $4.00. Ass_ociation of College and Research Li-braries. Community and Junior College Libraries Section. Bibliography Commit-l 

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Book Selection: Principles and Procedures (Book Review)

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