College and Research Libraries Costs of Technical Processes lays substan- tial groundwork toward fulfilling the com- pilers' prediction that "the seventy-year cost information drought will end."-Flor- ence E. DeHart, Kansas State Teachers College, Emporia. The Southern Historical Collection: A Guide to Manuscripts. By Susan B. Blos- ser and Clyde N. Wilson, Jr. Chapel Hill, The Southern Historical Collection, Uni- versity of North Carolina Library, 1970. 252, 48p. $7.00. The Southern Historical Collection of the University of North Carolina does not col- lect books, pamphlets, or newspapers; its sole concern is manuscripts. Since its foun- dation in 1930, with Professor J. G. de Roulac Hamilton as director, the Collection has concentrated on the preservation of southern materials, primarily private pa- pers, and upon the organization and de- scription of these resources to make them readily available for research. Dr. Hamil- ton, manuscripts collector non pareil, crossed and recrossed the South many times in his faithful Ford searching for manu- scripts in private hands and persuading owners that their treasures belonged in the Southern Historical Collection. If necessary, Dr. Hamilton pursued descendants of prominent Southerners beyond southern boundaries to achieve his purpose. His suc- cessor, Dr. James W. Patton, under whose direction the Collection more than doubled in size between 1948 and 1967, and the present director, Dr. J. Isaac Copeland, have continued the policy of concentrating upon southern materials of interest to his- torians and other students of the South. Since publication in 1941 of the first guide to the Southern Historical Collection, the size of the Collection's holdings has more than quadrupled. This handsome, well-designed, and well-edited, new, paper- bound Guide supplants the earlier one, of- fering succinct but adequate descriptions of some five million pieces organized into nearly 4,000 groups of papers. Is there a need for guides to manuscript collections now that the National Union Catalog of Manuscripts has undertaken to Recent Publications I 149 make known the resources of every manu- script repository in the United States? The answer of any serious scholar would be ''yes." Of necessity, the NUC-M sets stan- dards which exclude single items (and even small groups unless they are lumped to- gether), groups of microforms, and typed copies. Therefore a number of important manuscripts in the Southern Historical Col- lection are not listed in NUC-M. Also, the shape and scope, the personality, if you please, of a special collection can scarcely by discerned from perusal of the NUC-M. Such items as Group 672, a record of slave births kept in the margins of a Georgia planter's medical manual, or Group 1825, records of the Matrimony Creek Primitive Baptist Church (1776-1814), or Group 1093, consisting of a letter from Isaac L. Baker in 1807 giving family news from Philadelphia and describing the recent stu- dent rebellion at Princeton are not impor- tant in themselves, but seeing them juxta- posed with larger, more substantial groups of family correspondence, diaries, and legal and business papers gives one a sense of the range and depth of this particular Collec- tion devoted to a region endlessly fascinat- ing to historians. In format, the Guide is straightforward and self-explanatory. Standard abbrevia- tions are used, including the U.S. Post Of- fice's two-letter zip code designations for states. The abbreviations are made plain in a table immediately preceding the body of the text. Groups are arranged numerically by accession number through 3901. Includ- ed are the formal name (in bold face) , in- clusive dates, approximate number of items or linear feet of shelf space, description of chief persons, places, and topics, and a ci- tation to related groups. In the left margin, under group number, notation is made of the state or states most prominent in that group. Frequently two or three states ap- pear, often more, e.g., beside the papers of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, 1934- 1967, one finds: AR, MO, TX, LA, FL, CA, DC. An appendix immediately follow- ing the main group descriptions lists a doz- en groups of manuscripts (including 18~ feet of Thomas Wolfe papers) in the North Carolina Collection of the University Li- brary. 150 I College & Research Libraries • March 1971 The Index of the Guide consists of 48 pages containing entries of four types: Names of manuscript groups (in bold type); persons; places; and subjects. The editor notes that the drudgery was "im- mensely alleviated by the university com- puter which cheerfully ingested over 20,000 IBM cards and organized our index." Read- ers should bear in mind that the index is a guide to the group descriptions in the Guide and therefore makes no pretense of offering deep access to the Collection. Con- cluding the volume is a list of the names of close to 3,000 benefactors of the Southern Historical Collection. Although, as Mrs. Blosser warns in her preface, use of the Guide is no substitute for a personal visit to Chapel Hill to exam- ine detailed descriptions and indexes (not to mention the papers themselves), librari- ans and historians will welcome this addi- tion to the bibliography of special coiiec- tions.-Florence Blakely, Duke University Library. Reader in the Academic Library. Michael M. Reynolds, ed. Washington, D.C.: NCR Microcards Editions [1970] (Read- er Series in Library and Information Sci- ence). 378p. $10.95. First we had the case book series from Simmons as the basis for a new approach to the teaching of librarianship, now we have the reader series from Maryland de- signed to serve the same purpose (as Paul Wasserman, sometime dean at the Universi- ty of Maryland and general editor of this series, says) by bringing together a wide variety of material from a number of sources, including many from outside the traditional literature of librarianship, in a synthesizing approach. Although perhaps intended in some way to appeal to a wider audience, such works are presumably most effective when used in a classroom situation by the person who designed or selected the material, and they are really only useful in a teaching situation. A casebook or reader of this kind is of very limited value to the intelligent practicing librarian. One cannot, however, evaluate how ef- fective the teaching of librarianship at a particular school may be by reviewing one, or even all, of the works in a particular se- ries used in the teaching program. In the same way it is extremely difficult to review one of these works without having seen how it is used in a teaching context. Evalu- ation of particular teaching approaches and their related textbooks is badly needed. In a review of one textbook in a series, viewed by itself and outside its natural habitat, the only meaningful evaluation a reviewer can perhaps make is whether or not he would find the book useful, either as a textbook or a collateral work, in a course on the same subject that he might teach. To fault the compiler for his selection, or for not having put together the ideal work for another course, is in many ways unreasonable. Be that as it may, I would not use this reader as the main textbook in a course on academic library administration, and would find it of limited value-with only approxi- mately half of the 39 articles being worth using-as a supplemental reader. Some of the selections are outstanding and would be extremely useful. These include an ar- ticle on how the new site for a college was selected (Banfield) and a selection from the Swarthmore report on the teaching li- brary and the development of independent study. On the other hand, while articles like those by Bishop, Munthe, and Works, which date from the 1920s and 1930s, may serve to establish a historical perspective, they are very much out of date and with so much current material to be covered, are even of doubtful value. Even some of the articles from the 1950s, including Millett's famous comments on the financing of li- braries, may be interesting but they hardly reflect the many changes, such as formula budgeting, that have taken place in recent years. The only article on libraries by a col- lege president (from a school whose own library is far from adequate) is outrageous- ly naive; one can understand why it may have been induded but it only ser\res to convey the impression that academic ad- ministrations don't comprehend the com- plexities and purposes of libraries. The main weakness of this collection, however, is that the coverage is weak or nonexistent in several of today's most important areas. There is nothing, for example, on formula