College and Research Libraries for LaFayette, the French were unenthusi- astically described. Ita~ans, although artis- tic, were degenerate, and reproached for housing the seat of the Roman Catholic Church. South European peoples were de- scribed as indolent; Asians generally as de- clining; and Chinese as cunning and deceit- ful. There was a smugness toward Latin Americans that complimented them for their good sense in revolting against cruel Spain, but warned them there was no salvation ex- cept under United States leadership. These national misconceptions were only a part of the nineteenth-century schoolbook teachings. The rest included a hero worship register that put Washington at the top, fol- lowed by Franklin, Lincoln, Columbus, and Penn; and for contrast, Benedict Arnold per- sonified villainy. Other instruction in eco- nomics, social, political, reform, and culture concepts appeared equally naive and con- trasted sharply with contemporary sophisti- cated liberalism and realism as communi- cated by today' s mass media. It is a tribute to Dr. Elson's provocative writing that a reader is stimulated to ask: Is our century better because we relish a fare of virtue punished, vice rewarded? Does our passion for realism and pragma- tism make us a greater nation now than when we naively welcomed fantasy, and "they lived happily ever after"? Librarians of school, public, and college libraries have to select this book. For its list of nineteenth-century textbooks alone, it is bibliographically indispensable. For its con- tribution to our number one professional problem of censorship it merits an intellec- tual freedom award. For good writing and stimulating reading Guardians of Tradition deserves inclusion on all kinds of library reading lists.-Louis Shores, Florida State University. Classification and Indexing in the Social Sciences. By D. J. Foskett. Washington, D.C.: Butterworth, Inc., 1963. 190p. $6.95. No one has ever devised a completely satisfactory classification scheme, and it seems unlikely that anyone ever will. This failing has always been apparent, but in recent years it has taken on increasingly ur- gent importance as scholarly literature has grown more complex and information re- Book Reviews I 253 trieval more sophisticated. The library pro- fession has long been aware of the diffi- culties created by the schemes available, but Foskett, librarian at the University of London's Institute of Education, has now examined the matter thoroughly in specific · relation to the social sciences. He has writ- ten an immensely stimulating book, provid- ing a perceptive critique of each of the existing classifications as well as new in- sight into possible solutions to the problems of classifying social science materials. He is very much in the Ranganathan camp and believes that the "facet analysis" which Ranganathan devised can conceiv- ably supply the key to a much improved classification. He is especially taken with the more refined versions of this approach found in the work of the British Classifica- tion Research Group, ,and particularly in the work of Barbara Kyle. A schedule fashioned along these lines, he believes, would reveal subject. subdivisions and the relationships between subjects much more satisfactorily than any schedule used today. He would have a classification of such flexibility that any two concepts in the area of the social sciences could be related and this relation indicated in the notation of the material. To reach this goal, Foskett, like Rangana- than and virtually all the librarians working in new classifications, proposes a change in the concepts by which an item should be classified. Thus, a book would be classified by whether it deals, say, with a personality or an activity and then subclassified by equally untraditional concepts, like Rangan- athan's Matter, Space, Time, and Energy. The final result should present, he believes, a classification network which would show the interrelations of all categories of knowl- edge, general or specific, where they im- pinge on each other. If the reader finds himself quarreling with any of these ideas, it is probably due more to the nature of the enterprise than it is to Foskett's analysis of it. There are, however, several obstacles standing in the author's way, as he readily admits. It seems fairly reasonable to suppose that no classification system is going to provide for precise rela- tion of every concept to every other one. Foskett faces this limitation squarely, de- bating at some length whether "Cell" should be related to "Child," for example, and fi- 254 I College & Research Libraries • May, 1965 nally admitting that the line has to be drawn somewhere. And this problem is plainly all the more aggravating when the terms and concepts themselves are not precise, as they often are not in the social sciences. Human activities and relationships are not always clearly definable, thank heavens, and it will take some doing to reduce them to any such classification scheme as Foskett has in mind. The terms Personality and Ac- tivity, especially as used here, are far from precise-are indeed rather subjective judg- ments which would inevitably vary from person to person. The age-old problem of classifying a piece of material which covers more than one subject and consequently has a complex web of relationships to other subjects lies at the heart of this matter. It is a dilemma which librarians need to work on, and Fos- kett and his colleagues in this endeavor deserve the best wishes and gratitude of all of us. His book certainly is an excellent exposition of that work, its difficulties, and its goals. On the other hand, they might well temper their enthusiasm-and their earnestness-with the thought that it will never be perfectly solved. And after all, it does no serious damage to a social scientist to wander up a few blind alleys. He can pick up a lot of useful information that way; in fact, he may even find that he is working on the wrong problem.-]ames F. Govan, Trinity University. The Universal Decimal Classification. By Jack Mills. (Rutgers Series on Systems for the Intellectual Organization of Infor- mation, Vol. 1, edited by Susan Artandi) New Brunswick, N.J.: Graduate School of Library Service. Rutgers, The State University, 1964. v, 132p. Paper, $3.50. Jack Mills, lecturer (North-Western Polytechnic, London) , and practitioner ( ASLIB-Cran£eld Project) , one of the British avantgarde in the art and science of classification, was eminently qualified as guest leader of the first seminar, Octo her 31, and November 1, 1963, in the Rutgers Series on Systems for the Intellectual Or- ganization of Information, supported by a grant from the National Science Founda- tion. The Universal Decimal Classification, with its origins rooted in Dewey's Decimal Classification-including its merits and some of its limitations-already lucidly described by Mills in a chapter of his text, A Modern Outline of Library Classification ( 1960), is further delineated in this compact volume of six chapters and a four-part appendix. The introductory chapter includes a bib- liography and surveys the background and development of the UDC. Its basic concepts and significance for manual and/ or mecha- nized indexing are emphasized, and an eval- uation is given of its utility. Its truly inter- national character is evidenced by the list of its editions by language, with provision for its "Extensions and Corrections" which, unlike "Decimal Classification Additions, Notes, and Decisions," are kept up to date primarily by volunteer participants. Mr. Mills, in the core of the volume, his second and third chapters, demonstrates with clarity, by description and by exam- ples, the applications of the system. For an understanding of his description, however, a knowledge of the UDC notation (a mix- ture of hierarchical and "analytico-syn- thetic" characteristics which permits mul- tiple entry and p ermutation) , and of the construction of its indexes (classified and AI Z) , is necessary to follow his demonstra- tion of input, searching methods, and out- put of the system for organization of infor- mation (books, journal articles, reports, ab- stracts, etc.) . As the author translates sub- jects from their natural to their UDC nota- tional language he deftly inserts concise identification of classification concepts. In addition, he has compiled in the second appendix a glossary of definitions of twenty- two terms used in the text. Two brief chapters are devoted to further applications and to methods for evaluation of the system. The concluding chapter, the "Seminar Panel Discussion," for some read- ers may prove the most provocative. The panelists included Benjamin Custer (Dewey Decimal Classification), Phyllis Richmond (University of Rochester), Malcolm Rigby (Meteorological and Geoastrophysical Ab- stracts), Maurice Tauber (Columbia U ni- versity), and Harold Wooster (Air Force Office of Scientific Research) . Susan Artandi (Rutgers, the State University), was mod- erator. In contrast to the use of the UDC by some five thousand organizations in the world, only a few libraries in the United States use this system, and this fact prompt- ,.