lib-s-mocs-kmc364-20141005045744 BOOK REVIEWS Key Papers in Informatwn Science. Edited by Arthur W. Elias. Washington, D.C.: American Society for Information Science, 1971. 223 p. $6.00. When I re-read the articles making up this volume for the purpose of writing this review, a strong feeling of nostalgia welled up. As a reader who has lived t?rough the years of speculation, explora- tion, experiment, development, and de- bate that they embody, I couldn't help but feel again the spirit of excitement that I and others felt at the time. These are in- deed "key papers," and it's valuable to have them together. Oh, of course some names are missing and are missed- Mooers, Taube, Fairthorne, Perry and Kent, Bar-Hillel, Bush, Shaw-but enough of them are here to give a full flavor of the times. The question is whether, as a collection, this set of papers has value be- yond nostalgia. Before turning to that question, however, let's see what they consist of. The volume groups nineteen papers into four categories: (1) Background and Philosophy, (2) Information Needs and Systems, ( 3) Organization and Dissemi- nation of Information, and ( 4) Other Areas of Interest. The first includes pa- pers by Borko, by Shera, and by Otten and Debons that attempt to define infor- mation science, its relationship to librari- anship, and its potential as an indepen- dent discipline. The second includes pa- pers by Weinberg, by Murdock and Lis- ton, by Taylor, by Parker and Paisley, and by Kertesz that outline the purposes and functions of information transfer, especial- ly for the sciences. The third includes pa- pers by Doyle, by Fischer, by Conner, and by Rees that present some of the techniques which have been developed for handling, organizing, and presenting information-especially mechanized ones such as KWIC indexes, automatic index- ing and abstracting, and SDI. The final section presents a potpourri of topics: a paper by Lipetz on information storage Book Reviews 269 and retrieval, one by De Gennaro on li- brary automation, one by Garvin on na- tural language, one by Borko on systems analysis, and one by Heilprin on technol- ogy and copyright. The defined purpose of this collection is to serve students and instructors in in- troductory courses in information science, by making these key papers readily avail- able as assigned readings. They indeed are useful readings, and the organization imposed on them by the editor, Elias, adds greatly to their usefulness, making them far more than a simple chronological listing. Despite this, however, I must confess that, as the instructor in an introductory course in which we used the Key Papers for the purpose for which it was intend- ed, it fell short of meeting the needs. Since then, I've tried to evaluate why. Recognizing that the difficulties may have been due to the style of the instruc- tor and the form of the course the fact is that any collection of readings: valuable though they individually may be, has many deficiencies. I suppose they can all be summed up as follows: a collection of papers has the appearance of a book with- out being a book. It lacks congruity; it lacks balance; it lacks inherent structure in contrast to that which is imposed; it lacks a theme or point to be made; it lacks a consistent style. As a sometime publisher, as an editor of a -series of books as a reviewer of prospective manuscrip~ I have felt that these things are as impor- tant in evaluation as substance and con- tent. Beyond this, a more important fact is that these papers, "key" though they are, represent the past, not the present. An in- troduction to information science requires reading assignments in the work of today, not just those of historical importance. On the other hand, the fact remains that these are important papers, ones with which students should be come familiar- and not simply for historical purposes, and that most instructors and classes should Bnd this a useful volume. Robert M. Hayes Becker & Hayes, Inc.