College and Research Libraries ~--------- - -------------------------------------------------------------~ 4U College & Research Libraries consistency in substantive content is lack- ing to the point that it weakens the edi- tors' intent. In many cases data are con- densed to the point that little current or historical information is obtained by the reader in a consistent fashion, resulting in unbalanced overviews. For example, cap- tions to the illustrations (p.117) of two Af- rican libraries reflect out-of-date terminol- ogy. Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1980, and Haile Selassie University has not offi- cially been known by that name since 1974. Brief and concise area studies are a re- quirement for this work since one inten- tion is to use them to develop and test the editors' analytical framework. Therefore, lengthy areas studies, for example, such as one finds in the International Handbook of Contemporary Developments in Librarianship (1981), would not be appropriate. What is needed in World Librarianship is more con- sistent, balanced, and substantive area studies edited to be less discursive in con- tent. What is also needed in World Librari- anship are up-to-date bibliographic cita- tions. The weaknesses of the area studies are reflected in the notes to the text. There are just over 180 notes, a substantial num- ber of which come from the same source, the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, which itself contains out-of-date material. References to current in-depth studies in the bibliography of the book it- self are lacking as well. Of the approxi- mately 160 entries, only about five date from 1978 to the present. Furthermore, current editions are not cited. For exam- ple, the 1976 edition of the International Guide to Library, Archival, and Information Science Associations is cited instead of the 1980 edition, and the 1970 edition of A Handbook of Comparative Librarianship is cited instead of the 1975 or 1983 editions. Intended as a text, the methodological framework for analysis the editors have developed in World Librarianship will, in spite of the work's weaknesses, be of in- terest to students and teachers of compar- ative librarianship.-David L. Easterbrook, University of Illinois at Chicago. Serials Management in an Automated Age. Proceedings of the First Annual September 1984 Serials Conference, October 30-31, 1981, Arlington, Va. Ed. by Nancy Jean Melin. Westport, Conn.: Meckler, 1982. 101p. $35. LC 82-2302. ISBN 0-930466- 48-9. Although many of the papers in this slim volume are already becoming dated, it does contain a wealth of information for the serials manager attempting to deal with serials in a time of great change. Many of the articles contain excellent bibli- ographies and serve well, both as an intro- duction to the topic and as a starting point for further research. The papers are well chosen, and cover a diversity of topics: ''The Journal of the Year 2000'' (Thomas B. Hickey); "Playing by the Rules- AACR2 and Serials" (Ruth C. Carter), "Going Online with Serials" (Minna C. Saxe); "Order from Chaos? Standardizing Serials" (Gary Ink); Indexes and Abstracts-What Lies Ahead" (Robert E. Stobaugh, David W. Weisgerber, and Ronald L. Wigington); "Resource Sharing of Serials-Past, Present and Prospective: Old Wine in New Bottles or Substantial Change?" (C. James Schmidt); and "Au- tomating the Serials Manager: New Direc- tions, New Opportunities" (Nancy Jean Melin). The book also includes an intro- duction by Melin and a summary by Milo Nelson. The papers contain excellent anal- yses of the present state of the field and fu- ture predictions. Many of the presenters bring forth problems for consideration along with some suggested solutions. Even though it is overpriced ($35 for 101 pages), I recommend this book for pur- chase by anyone dealing with the collec- tion or management of serials and for all libraries with a large library science collection.-]ames Mouw, University of Illi- nois at Chicago. Scientific Information Systems in Japan. Ed. by Hiroshi Inose. Amsterdam: North- Holland, 1981. 257p. $56. LC 81-1658. ISBN 0-444-86151-3. This collection of thirty-four technical papers is intended for the serious scholar/ student of database management systems in scientific research. The final report of a three-year project supported by Japan's Ministry of Education, Science, and Cui- • ture and conducted between 1976 and 1979, this volume deals with the formation process of information systems and the or- ganization of scientific information. More than five hundred researchers in the aca- demic and scientific community partici- pated in studying the information sys- tem's implications and organizational approaches to a broad range of scientific disciplines. Their study focused on five re- search groups: input processing, struc- ture recognition, storage and retrieval, systems approach,, and research trend analysis. Developmental activities were carried out on database management sys- tems, computer networks, and input- output system organization. The results are here published in English as a whole for the first time. Led by the internation- ally known cybernetics scholar, Toshio Ki- tagawa, professor emeritus at K yushu University, twenty-nine research units tackled the five research categories as well as the developmental activities. This is a welcome publication, although best suited for the technical collection of a large research library or special library. Not a general treatise, it reveals little of Ja- pan's efforts to organize its isolated com- petitive efforts to link the scientific infor- mation community. Despite the promise of this title, the ma- jor study in English on information sys- tems in Japan today is contained in the in- troductory matter in Gibson and Kunkel, Japanese Scientific and Technical Literature; a Subject Guide (Greenwood, 1981). Data and commentary on national and interna- tional cooperation through the proposed Japan Center for Promoting Scientific In- formation will be of particular interest to academic librarians. The papers dealing with this topic include the group study on the planning of scientific information sys- tems in Japan (Shimanouchi), the Report of the 0-Committee on the development of scientific information systems in Japan (Tanaka), and the paper on the develop- ment of interuniversity computer net- works in Japan (Inose). Typical of the sub- ject coverage, the paper, "An Under- standing System of Natural Language and Pictorial Pattern in the World of Weather Report,'' devotes four pages to the lin- Recent Publications 413 guistic and pictorial world of the isobar. One treatise details the use of handwriting action in construction of models for use in two-dimensional expressions of informa- tion, such as those used in figures, graphs, charts, and other handwritten characters, and is punctuated with illus- trations (Hosaka and Kimura). In the pa- per on "Methodologies of Japanese Lan- guage Treatment by Computer for Information and Documentation Sci- ences," authors Nagao, Tsujii, and Mat- suyama explore machine translation of document titles from English into J apa- nese, a Japanese text-editor capability, and a model for a natural language question-answer system. One revealing conclusion: "Interna- tional exchange of documentation infor- mation requires the [sic] language transla- tion, and it is to be by machine because the information amount to be translated is too huge to be done by human translators." Written in technical, often halting, En- glish, this book provides ample evidence that the need is indeed urgent for high- quality natural translations from one lan- guage to another. References to articles cited are not always clear as to the lan- guage of the full text. The work has no in- dex, and suffers further from a photo- reduced, single-spaced typewritten manuscript for most of its contents.- Theodore F. Welch, Northern Illinois Univer- sity, DeKalb, Illinois. Conservation in the Library: A Handbook of Use and Care of Traditional and Non- traditional Materials. Ed. by Susan Garretson Swartzburg. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1983. 245p. $35. LC 82-15582. ISBN 0-313-23267-9. When William Blades' The Enemies of Books (London: Triibner) appeared in 1880, the enemies were identified as dirt, climate, air pollution, fungi, and people. Librarians are all too aware that these ene- mies not only continue to threaten the printed collections described by Blades but also pose serious problems for the non print components of this decade's li- brary collections, including photographs, microforms, slides, films, sound record- ings, videotapes, videodiscs, and com-