College and Research Libraries book are, alas, nearly unreadable. The decade was indeed an exciting one, which saw very dramatic developments and changes in the fields of information and li- brary science, but that drama is largely lost in the volume, perhaps because of the un- evenness of the writing. The most readable and downright sensi- ble section is Markuson's on library net- works; I found Orne on standards and Jackson and Wyllys on professional educa- tion useful and succinct. The most irritat- ing reading is Kraft and McDonald on library operations research, which I am not entirely convinced even belongs in the book. The other sections are workmanlike and mostly cover the ground adequately, if not with flair. The single most valuable section may well be Stephen Salmon's contribution, an intelligent summary of problems and fail- ures which are generally not available in a form which puts them into perspective. Salmon does this very well, and he makes a sober and dignified case for reporting on Recent Publications I 343 negative results in an honest and timely fashion as part of professional responsibili- ty. I was prepared to like The Information Age better than I did. No doubt some of the dullness I find in the books is caused in part by the standard Scarecrow format, but essentially the book is disappointing be- cause it is uneven and diffuse and fails to capture the real feeling of the decade.- Fay Zipkowitz, University Library, Univer- sity of Massachusetts, Amherst. Designing a National Scientific and Tech- nological Communication System: The SCATT Report. By Rus.sell L. Ackoff, Thomas A. Cowan, Peter Davis, Martin C. J. Elton, James C. Emery, Marybeth L. Meditz, and Wladimer M. Sachs. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Pr., 1976. 173p. $12.00. LC 76-20150. ISBN 0-8122-7716-3. This idealized design of a national system for scientific and technical communication transfer is intended, in the words of its au- Cost accounting for nonfinancial executives. A superb book for managers not trained as accountants. In non- technical language covers: cost and data reports ... inventory valuation ... overhead allocation ... cost-volume-profit ... stan- dard costs ... direct vs. absorp- tion costing ... plus much more. COST ACCOUNTING CONCEPTS FOR NONFINANCIAL EXECUTIVES by Joseph Peter Simini $12.95 A DIVISION OF AMERICAN MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATIONS 135 West 50 Street, New York, N.Y. 10020 344 I College & Research Libraries • July 1977 thors, "to mobilize the large number of rela- tively autonomous subsystems of the current system into a collaborative effort directed at redesigning their system and · implementing their design." Supported by a grant from the Office of Science Informa- tion of the National Science Foundation, Russell Ackoff and his associates at the Wharton School of the University of Penn- sylvania have developed a comprehensive system that combines existing technology with a substantial number of innovative programs. Among the major features of the SCA TT (National Scientific Communication and Technology Transfer) System proposed are the provision for prepublication entry of documents; a mechanism for redundancy checking of all manuscripts; a structured fee system wherein invited papers would have no charges, uninvited but refereed and accepted papers would get partial re- covery of processing costs, and uninvited, unrefereed, or rejected papers would be charged the total processing cost; establish- ment of national, regional, and local centers with separate but interlocking functions; user feedback on document relevancy and quality; and the potentiality for internation- al extension of the system. In addition to describing the idealized system in great detail, the authors have in- cluded an excellent summary of the existing system for the dissemination of scientific and technical information. This volume raises a number of monumental issues that affect the publishing community, academic and public libraries, the role of the federal government in information transfer, the nature and extent of user subsidies, and the whole question of quality control in scien- tific and technical communication. Although the group producing this vol- ume has received NSF support to proceed to a second phase that aims at moving from idealized design to practical planning, it is clear that possible implementation of such a system is dependent in large part upon a substantial number of cooperative agreements among various parts of the sys- tem, including publishers, scientists, scien- tific and technical societies, libraries, governmental agencies, and research lab- oratories. In a foreword, Lee Burchinal, head of the Office of Science Information Service at NSF, invites "researchers and users ... [and] information processors" to contribute to the design of the system and to critique the proposed system. Academic librarians, especially those involved in sci- entific and technical information, ought to xead this volume-and respond.-Jay K. Lucker, Director of Libraries, M assachu- setts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. Pollard, Alfred William. Alfred William Pollard: A Selection of His Essays. Com- piled by Fred W. Roper. The Great Bib- liographers Series, no. 2. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1976. 244p. $10.00. LC 76-25547. ISBN 0-8108-0958-3. A stammer made Alfred William Polla£d a librarian, then a bibliographer and a scholar of international reputation; other- wise, we may never have benefited so greatly from his talents. Keeper of printed books at the British Museum, he planned its catalog of fifteenth-century books and the Bibliographic Society's short title cata- log, which mark an epoch in the history of bibliography. He was the outstanding in- cunabulist of the day, and many of his in- sights have been built upon. Roper has chosen items which represent Pollard's theory and philosophy in bibliog- raphy and librarianship: (1) personal impress, (2) work historically important but largely superseded, and (3) work that remains both useful and relevant today. Nine of his essays are included. Those on regulation of the English book trade and history of copyright are especially interest- ing, but others are dull and unreadable. It appears that Pollard was more for getting things done, however, than in general the- ories about the nature and purpose of bib- liography. Three arrangements for bibliographies are put forth, and he evidently favors the chronological one, under subject, but never gets around to saying so, failing to discuss, for me, the scope, length, or planned use of a bibliography. He replies to criticism that English bibli- ographers should give more than physical description of the book with this statement: "Brown has sinned against one of the sound- est of maxims, never to try to pull another man off his hobby." This seems a shallow