reviews 382 College & Research Libraries well to own a copy. but this reviewer, a great fan of libraries and their history, cannot recommend it for other collections or purposes.—Judith Segal, Western Wash­ ington University. Rehman, Sajjad ur. Preparing the Informa­ tion Professional: An Agenda for the Fu­ ture. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Pr. (Contributions in Librarianship and Infor­ mation Science, no. 93), 2000. 192p. $57.50, alk. paper (ISBN 0-313-30673-7). LC 99-462056. In the past two decades, there has been a great deal of interest in, and concern about, education for librarians in the United States. After fifteen (almost 25% of the to­ tal ) of the library and information science (LIS) schools closed between 1978 and 1993, many of the remaining schools made changes in their curricula and their em­ phases, often resulting in the ALA-accred­ ited master’s degree becoming just one of several programs being offered. This re­ structuring of LIS education has been met with misgivings by many in the profes­ sion, resulting in a sharply defined differ­ ence of opinion between some practitio­ ners and educators about what LIS schools should be doing to prepare librarians of the future. Many practitioners think that LIS edu­ cators are not interested in what practic­ ing librarians want and expect from the schools, especially in terms of requiring courses in core competencies such as cata­ loging and in producing new librarians who will work in areas where there are national shortages. The dropping of the word library from the names of some of the schools also is seen by many practi­ tioners as a signal that the schools are dis­ associating themselves from the library profession. On the other hand, many edu­ cators feel that practitioners are unaware of the competitive reality of contemporary higher education and unrealistic about what they expect from graduates emerg­ ing from what are still primarily one-year master’s programs. So over the past few years, there has been a great deal of discussion about LIS July 2001 education. The ALA-sponsored Congress on Professional Education in the spring of 1999 and a large number of periodical articles have addressed different aspects of this topic, but the focus has almost al­ ways been internal, looking only at LIS education in the United States and Canada. In Preparing the Information Pro­ fessional: An Agenda for the Future, Sajjad ur Rehman, professor of Information Sci­ ence at Kuwait University, provides a more comprehensive global view of LIS education. The major purpose of his book is to provide a rationale and a methodol­ ogy for taking the demands of individual LIS markets (determined primarily by the surveying of library managers) and us­ ing them to shape LIS curricula, both in graduate and undergraduate programs. Rehman discusses three groups of LIS schools: those in North America; those in the United Kingdom and Australia; and those in three groups of developing na­ tions, South Asia (including Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan), Arabian Gulf nations (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates), and East Asia (Malaysia and Singapore). The book falls naturally into three sec­ tions. The longest, the first seven chap­ ters, is devoted to a description of the concept of competency-based education, a review of the literature of its use in the LIS field, and a description of a study done in Malaysia in the mid-1990s. This study asked Malaysian middle- and top- level library managers to identify the knowledge and skill competencies they wanted to see in entry-level librarians in academic, public, and special library set­ tings. The competencies desired in each of these settings are described in separate chapters that compare the findings of the Malaysian study with the results of stud­ ies from other places. The second section of the book de­ scribes a study that looked at the percep­ tions of senior library managers in dif­ ferent types of libraries in the Arabian Gulf region. The managers were asked to differentiate between the competencies and educational preparation of parapro­ Book Reviews 383 fessional and professional library work­ ers. The size of the sample in both of the studies was small, but the results are in­ teresting and surprisingly similar to a number of studies that have been done on these same topics in the United States. Perhaps the competencies desired in in­ formation professionals do not reflect cultural differences as much as one might expect. The final chapter of the book takes these two studies and builds on them a discussion of the differences in LIS edu­ cation as found in North America, the U.K., and various developing nations. This section of the book provides a good description of LIS education in various parts of the world but falls short in pro­ viding strategies for improving education for the future. Rehman argues that the profession needs to use employer percep­ tions and demands for competencies to provide direction for shaping the prepa­ ration of professionals in the future. He realizes that there is no one “right” way to reshape LIS education and that each institution has to respond to local condi­ tions. As he points out, there are vast dif­ ferences between LIS education found in North America and that found in other parts of the world. The last section attempts to do too much in too few pages; the agenda set­ ting for the future has been made second­ ary to the description of existing pro­ grams. It also would have been helpful for Rehman to discuss how the frame­ work of using employer perceptions and competency data can be used to shape a model curriculum in a specific setting, perhaps in Malaysia or the Arab Gulf be­ cause the two studies that are key to de­ veloping the framework were done in those locations. The book is useful because the stud­ ies described provide a methodology for gathering employer perceptions; perhaps there would be greater consensus in the views of LIS educators and practitioners in the United States if more of the LIS schools had attempted to survey library managers to find what type of competen­ cies and skills they wanted in new gradu­ ates. Although ALA-accredited schools typically gather such data as part of the accreditation process (if not more fre­ quently), too few of them follow up and tell the employers how the data are be­ ing used. Surveys such as those described by Rehman could be useful in improving communication between the schools and the practitioner community. Preparing the Information Professional provides an interesting overview of the similarities and differences in LIS educa­ tion across the world. In the future, as we move into a global society, we all need to look for opportunities to learn from other societies, and cross-cultural studies such as this one will become more useful and pertinent.—Barbara B. Moran, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Saving the Time of the Library User through Subject Access Innovation: Papers in Honor of Pauline Atherton Cochrane. Ed. William J. Wheeler. Champaign, Ill.: Graduate School of Library and Infor­ mation Science, Univ. of Illinois, 2000. 217p. $30 (ISBN 0878451080). In this living Festschrift, nine apprecia­ tive and admiring students and peers laud the achievements and explore the influence of Pauline Atherton Cochrane, for nearly fifty years a leading teacher and theorist in cataloging, indexing, and in­ formation access. Potentially significant observations about free-text searching hazards, access-limiting AACR2 strictures, SAP (Subject Access Project)-inspired record augmentation, controlled versus “natural” vocabularies, paralyzing adherence to “petit point” cataloging rules, user involve­ ment in information system design, rel­ evance feedback, and the necessity for human indexing as examples, are made by Robert Fugmann, Eric H. Johnson, Vinh-The Lamm, and Donald J. W. King, among others. Unhappily, some contribu­ tions seem excessively long and much of the prose (with the joyful exceptions of Bjorn Tell’s “On MARC and the Nature of Text Searching” and Raya Fidel’s “User 384 College & Research Libraries Centered Approach”) is virtually unread­ able, written in impenetrable infoscispeak (e.g., “The problems in processing the in­ finitely large multitude of nonlexical ex­ pressions are insurmountable for any mechanism, when the satisfactory autono­ mous processing of them is the goal”). Of all the selections, Karen Drabenstott’s lucid, logical, and practical “Web Search Strategies” may be most valuable to information desk librarians and other Internet users. Curiously and unfortunately absent are ideas and actual examples of how to simplify and improve information access in typical public, school, and academic libraries. Also missing is the recognition that most such institutions are wholly and traditionally dependent on “outside copy” from the Library of Congress and vendors (including library networks), that this copy is frequently flawed and dysfunctional, and that the library and information science profession appears totally immobilized about actually im­ proving the situation (for example, devot­ ing more staff and resources to critical copy revision and enhancement, as well as dynamic subject heading reform, cross-referencing, and innovation at lo­ cal and network levels, in tandem with efforts to correct and reinvigorate the cata­ loging operation at LC and make govern­ ing codes, such as AACR2, more Index to advertisers Academic Press 333 ACRL 378 AIAA 306, 368 American Psychological 347 Annual Reviews 386 CHOICE 377 EBSCO cover 2 Faxon/Rowecom cover 3 Greenwood Publishing 299 Haworth Press 354 Liberty Fund 316 Library Technologies 303 Marcive 300 OCLC cover 4 Ovid Technologies 368 July 2001 user-friendly and less mystifying). Con­ tributors further neglect the fact that some obviously needed and recommended changes in cataloging and indexing have been undertaken on a serious, consistent basis—not merely as one-shot experi­ ments—at systems such as Hennepin County in Minnesota and in book indexes such as those for the biennial Alternative Library Literature (McFarland). Indeed, a whole chapter deals with the benefits of including more searchable and content-clarifying notes in bibliographic records, which HCL has rigorously and successfully done for almost two decades. And those notes have not been mindlessly and completely “scanned in” but, rather, fashioned by individual catalogers who exercise their intellect and judgment in deciding what may or may not be of genuine utility. Given that indexing and retrieval are major book themes, the index itself should have been outstanding. Although better than most, it lamentably lacks many whole entries and contains incom­ plete citations for others. Finally, and inexplicably, for a work dealing in part with cataloging and ema­ nating from an eminent library school, there is no cataloging-in-publication (CIP) entry or LC control number.—Sanford Berman (formerly employed by Hennepin County Library). White, Herbert S. Librarianship: Quo Vadis?: Opportunities and Dangers as We Face the New Millennium. Englewood, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 2000. 399p. $65 (ISBN 1-56308-807-X). LC 00-041219. Herbert White is an intellectual bruiser, an agent provocateur, a deep thinker, and a man who cares about librarians and li­ braries right down to his boots. Were he ever up for confirmation before a congres­ sional committee, his voluminous writ­ ings probably would lead to his being “borked” because there is enough in those writings to convict him of every conceiv­ able offense against the common wisdom and the party line.