College and Research Libraries There are undoubtedly many ways to support arguments on either side of this controversy. The most disturbing aspect of this book, however, is its primary assump- tion that there is currently no problem that time and the good motives of employers won't solve. Such a condescending, even paternalisitic, view of a situation in which women's salaries on the whole remain at 57 percent of men's salaries, and in which the largest proportion of both women and men will always remain in the service, clerical, or maintenance categories of employment, is appalling. The implications of this view for librarians are clear. Despite what librarians perceive as a profession in which individual jobs are complex and demanding in terms of re- quired skills and levels of responsibility, the typical characterization of librarianship as a woman's profession continues to have a negative effect on the salaries that librarians can expect to earn over the course of their careers. The debate over comparable worth is just beginning, and it will be important for librarians interested in fair and equitable compensation practices in their own profes- sion as well as in the labor market as a whole to be aware of both sides of the issue. Comparable Worth presents only one side.-Tina Kass, Research Libraries Group, Stanford, California. Personnel Policies in Libraries. Edited by Nancy Patton Van Zant. New York: Neal- Schuman, 1980. 334p. $19.95. LC 80- 11734. ISBN 0-918212-26-X. This publication of sample personnel poli- cies is intended, according to the author, to provide assistance to those who are faced with the "formidable task of writing a per- sonnel policy in the absence of good exam- ples." Unfortunately, the approach and the content of this book are unlikely to encour- age either "good" policies or even the de- velopment of written policies. It fails to do an adequate job of explaining why written personnel policies are necessary to effective library administration, nor does it include · any evaluation of the sample policies. The book has two major focuses: the first, a summary of survey results from a ques- tionnaire on personnel policies, and the second, the reprinting of sample personnel Recent Publications I 251 policies. The survey questionnaire was de- veloped to query public and academic li- braries on the extent of their written poli- cies and to identifY the specific areas of per- sonnel in which policies existed. Question- naires were mailed to over 1,300 pu,blic and 1,000 academic libraries with 510 usable questionnaires returned from the former and 416 from the latter. The section of the book entitled "Survey" is an analysis of the in- formation obtained from these question- naires. An immediate problem in under- standing the survey results is with the broad question: "Does the library have a written personnel policy which defines li- brarians' rights and their conditions of employment? ... " The implication, then, is that the survey is directed toward policies for only one group of employees-librar- ians-even though following survey ques- tions are addressed to policies affecting "li- brary employees." For instance, the ques- tion on performance evaluation is: "Are li- brary employees given performance evalua- tions?" Does this question refer to all li- brary employees or only to the librarians re- ferred to in the broad survey question? This is not simply nit-picking since most libraries have different policies for professional and support staff. Therefore it is important to know when reading the survey results and later the sample policies whether the in- formation applies to all staff or only to li- brarians. The bulk of the book, though, is devoted not to the survey results or general informa- tion on personnel policies, but to the sam- ple personnel policies reprinted from public and academic libraries. The policies are pre- sented in two formats. The first set of poli- cies consists of the complete personnel poli- cies of four libraries-one academic and three public. The second group of poli- cies-organized by personnel topics such as selection of staff, working conditions, em- ployee benefits, and so forth-includes selections from numerous libraries. The au- . thor justifies the inclusion of the four com- prehensive policies by commenting that they "provide reasonably thorough coverage · of issues associated with the particular type and size of library" though none of this rel- evant information is provided to the reader. Indeed, no information on the libraries that 258 I College & Research Libraries • May 1981 contributed policies-such as size and type of library, number of professional and sup- port staff, union status, governance, or faculty status-is included. Since a clear understanding of personnel policies requires an understanding of the context within which _they are developed and applied, this lack of information minimizes the usefulness of the sample policies. In addition, the author provides no ex- planation of the criteria used to select the sample policies of 26 public and 20 academic libraries from among the 325 li- braries that forwarded policies. In the acknowledgments section of the book, the author does indicate that she tried to achieve representation from geographic locations and size and type of library in pre- senting the policies but, other than this general statement, she provides no criteria for selecting the sample policies. Again it would be helpful to the reader to know what qualitative judgments the author made when reviewing so many personnel policies from such a wide range of libraries . A major fault of this book is that the au- thor provides no critical evaluation of the sample policies ' content, writing style, or clarity. Nor has she identified those person- nel issues, such as sexual harassment, privacy, and personal freedom, that are not covered in the policy information and survey results. What is also absent from this book is any information on the process of developing policies : who has the responsi- bility for identifying needed policies and writing pqlicies, what opportunities should be provided for staff to review and contrib- ute to policies, what are mechanisms for re- view and updating of policies, and how is policy information disseminated. Certainly major considerations in implementing per- sonnel policies are staff attitudes, the ac- quisition of complete information on which to base policy decisions , and effective means for communicating policies to staff. These issues are ignored even though they are far more difficult for administrators than the actual writing of policies. This book . does not provide constructive assistance to someone faced with developing personnel policies. It fails to raise questions or issues related to policy development, nor does it provide helpful guidelines in the actual development, implementation, and updating of personnel policies. It simply provides in one volume a wide range of ex- isting personnel policies-good, bad, and in- different. One would hope that personnel administration-and specifically personnel policies-would deserve a more serious treatment than this volume provides.- Sheila Greth, University of Connecticut, Storrs. Justin Winsor: Scholar-Librarian. Edited by Wayne Cutler and Michael H. Harris. Heritage of Librarianship Series, no . 5. Littleton , Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 1980. 196p. $25 U.S.; $30 elsewhere. LC 80-19310. ISBN 0-87287-200-9. Justin Winsor, the first president of ALA, was an important and interesting man, and many of his writings on librarianship and historiography are well worth reading. Most of this volume (p.5~174) is devoted to re- prints of twenty-one of 'his addresses, arti- cles, and reports, including his report as chairman of the Boston Public Library Ex- amining Committee (1867), his tenth report as superintendent of the Boston Public Li- brary (1877) , and the first of his twenty re- ports as librarian of Harvard University (1878). Twelve of the documents are re- printed from early volumes of Library jour- nal and one is from Atlantic Monthly , and although such texts may be readily accessi- ble, it is convenient to have them brought together here. Each is reprinted in full , which is clearly desirable in most cases, but the three reports inevitably contain details, statistics, and tabulations that will be skipped by most readers . Deletions here might have made room for illuminating paragraphs from .some of Winsor's many other reports. The reprints are preceded by forty-four pages in which the editors outline Winsor's career and consider his ideas. This contribu- tion is brief yet somewhat repetitious, in- formative but undistinguished. Suspicions regarding the proofreading are aroused by the first line of the foreword, which states that Winsor died "unexpectant- ly" in 1897. Some of the subsequent slips- e. g., "B.oyleston" (twice) for Boylston, "enert" for inert, and "credible" for credit- able--might be passed over as venial; but a verdict of guilty is justified when (p.41)