College and Research Libraries Diaz, Albert James, ed. Microforms in Li- braries: A Reader • . Weston, Conn .. : Mi- croform Review, Inc., 1975. 428p. $17.50 (LC 75-6666) (ISBN 0-913672- 03-3) This book brings together and reprints some of the best basic recent microform literature selected from professional library journals and other sources. Both students and practicing librarians . would benefit from reading the most significant articles. No one would want to read it from beginning to end, because a work consisting of reprints of forty-two articles on various aspects of microforms without any cutting is bound to suffer from repetitiousness and other weaknesses. These readings cover most basic micro- forms knowledge and tell the experiences of academic librarians and some other au- thors concerning the organization, bibli'o- graphic control, selection, and use problems of microforms. It will be especially prac- tical and useful to new microforms man- agers in libraries with collections of more than 15,000 microform units. The editor's introductory essays at the Recent Publications I 81 beginning of the six subject sections · are good. The many bibliographies are excel- lent. It would be preferable had the editor written an encyclopedic-type essay on each of the six major topics covered: introduc- tion to microforms, organizing the micro- form collection, bibliographic control, appli- cations, standards, and user reactions. Thus redundancies could have been removed, many passages synthesized, and the docu- mentary sources put in an appendix. These shortcomings are mentioned: (1) the same information appears in several ar- ticles; (2) lack of an index is a serious fault; (3) authors are not identified; ( 4) despite the compiler's statement to the con- trary some articles are excessively technical; (5) the text is "processed," the .print is small, and there are typographical errors; ( 6) an occasional article is too old; and (7) varying styles of writing hurt read- ability. Despite shortcomings this book would be helpful to managers of large microforms collecti'ons for the general and technical in- formation on microforms conveniently as- TEAM WORK! A new team of regional representatives extends Faxon's personalized library magazine sub- scription service across the nation. Midwest: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Wisconsin David R. Fritsch P.O. Box 338 Saline, Michigan 48176 Tel: 313-995-0108 Northeast: Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island , Vermont Roy J. Reinalda 15 Southwest Park Westwood, Massachusetts 02090 Tel : 617-329-3350 South: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas. Virginia, Washington D.C.. West Virginia James L. Smith P.O. Box 1 000 Marietta, Georgia 30060 Tel : 404-971-1323 West : Alaska, Arizona, California , Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah , Washington, Wyoming John C. Van Dyke 1351 Rhoda Drive · La Jolla, California 92037 Tel: 714-454-4946 Contact the representative in your area to find out about Faxon's fast, personalized s~rvice and how it can apply to your library. · lf5¥j F. w. FAxon comPAnY, me. Library Magazine Subscription Agency 15 Southwest Park. Westwood, Massachusetts 02090 Tel : 800-225-7894 (toll-free) 617-329-3350 (collect in Mass. and Canada only) 82 t ·College & Research Libraries • January 1976 sembled here in one volume. It is not an es- sential reference work-Louis A.· ·Kenney; Director of Library Services, San Diego State University. Sherrod, John, ed. Information Systems and Networks. Eleventh Annual Symposium, March 27-29, 1974. Produced by lnfor- . matics, Inc., Westport, Conn.: Green- . wood, 1975. 200p. $11.00. (LC 74- ·11941) (ISBN 0-8371-7717-0) If you like Irish stew this book is for you. Hidden behind a vague title is a symposium on on-line intera.ctive data base services. The Data: Base · Industry, or rriore accurately. the Data Base Complex, embraces activities ranging from creating data bases to provid- ing data base ·services to end-users. It faces is~ues of design, economics, organization, and us~r requirements, and hardware-soft- ware-telecommunication arrangements. The actors in the data base drama are: organizations that create and often publish data bases; · organizations that produce machine-readable versions of data bases; organizations that provide software access to data baseS; organizations that supply te;lecommunication connections; organiza- ti<;>ns that offer services directly to us~rs or to intermediaries such as librarians, re- s~arch organizations, and their funders; the· acJ,ministrators .and staffs of these organiza- · tions; and the end-users themselves. Most of the actors . are represented iri the sym- posium. : · . · . . The is~ues facing these actors include the OP,timal ·design of data bases, of hardware, of: software, and of service interfaces. They inc1ude issues of financing development and operation, of subsidizing and recovering costs, and . of marketing and pricing ser- vices. Issues relating to ·users include the characteristics of various 'user groups, their work requirements, and the system and service functions that best meet these re- quirements. Most .of these issues are covered in vary- ing depth in the symposium. Some of the m·ore substantive presentations are Roy Kid- man's statement of the harsh constraints on aqademic libraries in offering on-line ser- vices; Thomas Martin's review of alterna- tives in designing interactive retrieval soft- ware; ·Donald King and :Raymond ·Brown's eronomic model for deeiSions · on · using interactive services; Bennet· Lientz' s quanti- fication of factors in deciding to :secure computer services through a network; Ken- neth Siler's ;description of criteria for evalu- ating data base management systems; and Paul Zurkowski's discussion of the role of the marketplace in providi.pg access to in- formation. In addition, there. are lucid dis-:- cussio.ns of .. data bases and services in areas such as toxicology, medi~ine, .aerospace, bi- ology> .and chemistry. Historical and sum- . mary papers offer background information for the nontechnical reader . . · The virtue of this symposium is -that the main actors and issues in the Data Base Complex are represented. ·Its .defect is a lack of..a unifying plot that highlights the parties at issue and the. -alterna.tives each face. · The papers appear 01,1e · after the oth- er; .· covering an astonishingly wide range, more like. a drama festival ' than .an evening with Ibsen. The symposium ·advances our ability to reach an integrated understand- ing of what commercial, · academic, . profes- sional, and governmental groups must do to make interactive services better and sup- portable. Librarians, systems personnel, ad- ministrators, and business people will each find several valuable papers in this sym- posium. The . organizers deserve credit for making the proceedings available rapidly. -Douglas Ferguson, · Stanford University Libr{lnes, Stanford, California. · OTHER. PUBLICATIONS OF INTEREST TO ACADEMIC LIBRARIANS Alloman, Katherine A. A . Reference Guide to Postsecondary Education · Data Sour- ces; A Dire(Jtory to Data Sources Corre- sponding to Items in the NCHEMS StateWide Measilres Inventory. Boulder, Colo.:. National Center for Higher Edu- cation Management Systems at Western Interstate Commission for Higher Educa- tion, 1975. 1v. unpaged. $12.00. American Library Association. Office for Library , Service to the Disadvantaged. Multi-Ethic Media; Selected Bibliogra-