College and Research Libraries wick's book an excellent source of informa- tion for comparative purposes, for there are many similarities in the British and Amer- ican experience. In · both countries Asian and African collections developed from rather modest beginnings. A period of very rapid growth came in the 1950s and the 1960s as a result of substantial financial support from government and private sources. The number of Asian and African library collections multiplied, extending the scope of their coverage far beyond their original concern with materials in the hu- manities. With this expansion came also a number of organizational, technical, and management problems, many of which still await satisfactory solutions. For example, the question of whether area collections should be maintained separately or inte- gra ted with the main library collection re- mains a source of disagreement between users and library administrators. The prob- lem of bibliographical control is another challenge which has been only partially met. Dealing with countries with no de- veloped book trade where many desired items can be had only by personal visits and through diligent cultivation of personal contacts is still a problem that defies the solutions of an efficiency expert. (Ms. Bene- wick offers an excellent account of such difficulties which can be read with profit by those who are accustomed to dealing with American and Western European dealers with computerized operations.) Probably the most important question facing Asian and African libraries in our two countries today, when financial sup- port for higher education can no longer be taken for granted, is how to consolidate the gains of the past two decades in better ser- vice to scholarship. Ms. Benewick pleads for more coordination and planning on the national level for Great Britain. The same plea can and should be entered for the United States. Lately in the United States, there has been much discussion of coopera- tive schemes in library development in area studies. Both the positive and the negative aspects of the British experience can serve as a useful guide to our deliberations. Finally, this reviewer would recommend the inclusion of a few statistical tables giv- ing more quantitative information on British Asian and African collections, when and if Recent Publications / 243 Ms. Benewick updates her study.-Eugene W u, Librarian, H arvar~Y enching Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachu- setts. Woodburn, Henry M. Using the Chemwal Literature: A Practical Guide. (Books in Library and Information Science, v. 11) New York: Marcel Dekker, 1974. 302p. $14.50. (74-21883). (ISBN 0- 824 7-6260-6) . The literature of scientific bibliography has now become so immense with so many different information sources and data ser- vices offered to . technician and librarian alike that new guides to such literature should prove very welcome indeed. If the guide, as this one does, attempts to be con- cise, accurate, and fairly well up to date, professional reference attention will focus upon it. Woodburn, professor emeritus of chem- istry at SUNY Buffalo, has summarized in a very modestly sized book his experience of more than fifty years in the use of chem- ical literature. The editorial effort has been to discuss a limited number of periodicals and reference works but to include in those works the major ones found in well- equipped American libraries today. This is not a vast listing or bibliography of all sources available in the field. Instead the very readable text leads you into broad areas of discussion such as "col- lections of physical data," "abstracting ser- vices," "retrospective searching," and "mi- croform publication." There are, of course, sections on the basic works such as Chem- ical Abstracts, Beilstein, and Gmelin. It is quite obvious that here is an author with a feel for library methodology: classifica- tion systems are outlined and compared and government publications and their unique problems summarized. The double-spaced format of the entire text done in a typewriter face actually in- vites reading. It is an easy guide to use and manages to make several rather complicat- ed chemical literature systems interesting and clear. This is no mean achievement. Literature developments have been cov- ered through 1973. There are references appended to each chapter which permit the reader to consult the original sources if he chooses. 244 j College & Research Libraries • May 1975 Woodburn will inevitably be compared with Evan J. Crane's Guide to the Litera- ture of Chemistry · ( 1957) ; M. G. Mellon's Chemical Publications: Their Nature and Use (1965); and C. R. Burman's How to Find Out in Chemistry ( 1966). In several fields-collections of spectra, microform material, and computer-readable material -Woodburn is clearly more up to date, and the entire work is a valuable and most useful addition to the science reference shelf.-David Kuhner, Librarian, Sprague Library, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, California. Computers and Early Books: Report of the LOC Project Investigating Means of Compiling a Machine-Readable Union Catalogue of pre-1801 Books in Oxford, Cambridge and the British Museum. London: Mansell, 1974. 131p. $12.00. (74-76872). (ISBN 0-7201-0444-0). The LOC Project represents search for a practical method to produce a union list of the contents of all libraries of Oxford and Cambridge universities and to relate their resources to those of the British Museum. The calculations based on the results of the project indicate that about a half million unique titles of pre-1801 books alone are held in these libraries. Until now, the suc- cess in making the entire spectrum of this wealth systematically available to research- ers has eluded the efforts of bibliographers. However, the emerging computer technol- ogy recently has opened up possibilities to attack this mammoth task without armies of skilled manpower. The LOC Project has aimed to devise, test, and evaluate tech- niques for the massive task of compiling a union catalog by exploiting the potential of the new emerging technology. The LOC Project, which was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 1968 and was brought to completion in 1973, represents thoroughly planned and meticu- lously performed research in the funda- mentals of creating machine-readable bib- liographic records from books on shelves. It has assumed no available systematized bibliographic data in the sense of customary catalogs. It has researched the feasibility of creating adequately precise machine- readable records on the basis of rudimen- tary, easily recorded data from the books themselves. Bearing in mind that the object union catalog had been restricted to books published before 1801, the task assumes an additional dimension of challenge if one re- members the character of the title pages of early books, ranging from the elusively de- scriptive to the poetic. The method chosen for the project speci- fied the compilation of the bibliographic records from the title pages of a sample consisting of all pre-1801 books in all Cam- bridge and Oxford libraries cataloged un- der the letter "0," except for three college libraries which were recorded in their en- tirety. To serve as a system of normalized base for comparison, a reference file was es- tablished also against which the records from all college, departmental, and faculty libraries could be matched. This file con- sisted of the "0" letter catalog records from the British Museum, the Bodleian, the Cambridge University Library, and the li- brary of the Taylor Institution, Oxford; added were also .. 0" entries from Pollard and Redgrave's Short Title Catalogue (re- vised), from Wing's Short Title Catalogue, and from H. M. Adam's Catalogue of Books ... in Cambridge Libraries. The records produced by the project were matched by computer against each other and against the reference file, using three matching techniques: a computer generated search code, the ''keyed title," and the "finger- print'' identification technique. The matched records from the entire sample were assimilated, and a specimen union list was produced. Aside from its principal objective the project produced a wealth of statistical data about the distribution of materials by date, language, and numbers of copies of works in the various libraries; about the relative merits and costs of various methods in cap- turing bibliographic data for machine-read- able transcription; about the problems in- volved in several methods and devices used in the transcription; and about the prob- lems which arose in computer matching and printing of bibliographic records, rang- ing from identification of data structures to representation of characters in a large array of languages. A particularly noteworthy achievement of the LOC Project is the successful ex-