College and Research Libraries


classification. On one question, however, 
Trager's work is bound to exert a consider-
able and beneficial influence: it will enable the 
classifier to place a little known or even an 

unknown language in its proper relation 
others with much more certainty and d 
patch than has been possible up to this time. 
Arthur B. Berthold. 

Guide to Business Materials 
Guides to the Harvard Libraries. No. I.' 

Economics and Business. By Arthur H. 
Cole. Cambridge, Harvard University Li-
brary, 1947. x, 64p. 
The size and complexity of the modern 

university library, with its resources scat-
tered in many branch libraries and special 
collections, often embracing overlapping sub-
ject fields, has created the well-recognized 
problem of how to impart to the research 
worker knowledge essential to the location 
and use of his materials. The issuance by 
various libraries of handbooks, general de-
scriptions of their collections, lists of biblio-
graphical tools in subject fields, and instruc-
tions in methods of research have been at-
tempts to meet this problem. 

Arthur H. Cole, librarian of the Harvard 
Graduate School of Business Administra-
tion, in Guides to the Harvard Libraries, No. 
I: Economics and Business, has combined 
these four approaches to produce what should 
prove to be a most effective and useful manual 
for the graduate student in business or econ-
omics at Harvard. 

The manual has four sections: I. Library 
Facilities; II. Library Tools; III. Practical 
Applications; IV. Special Fields of Economics 
and Business. 

In Section I Cole describes briefly the 
Harvard library system and lists other li-
braries in the Cambridge and Boston area .of 
interest to students of economics and business, 
together with pertinent information concern-
ing their holdings and availability. There 
follows a description of the collections in Har-
vard libraries which contain mate~ials in 
economics, business, and related fields , with 
particular reference to the Widener Library 
and the Library of the Graduate School of 
Business Administration. The purposes of 
these libraries, their fields, the special types 
of material they contain, and their distinc-
tive characteristics are set down with enough 
detail to give the reader a good working 
knowledge of the resources of each one. The 

second portion of the section, on "The Effe 
tive Use of the Basic Libraries," takes u 
in order of use, what the author calls t 
"several depths" or "strata" which must 
penetrated to reach all the material that c 
be secured on a given subject-the card cat 
logs, the bibliographical collection, t 
stacks, the reference department, interlibra 
loan, microfilm, and book purchase. A not 
worthy feature of the descriptions of t 
public and union catalogs is the care wit 
which their limitations are pointed out, by t 
detailing of the types of material not include 
at all. Too often instruction in the use of t 
catalog leaves the impression that everythin 
is there if the student only knows how to fin 
it. 

In Section II Dr. Cole lists and character 
izes basic bibliographical tools. Include 
are guides to government documents ( th 
Library of Congress Monthly Checklist o 
State Publications is omitted), guides t 
theses, printed catalogs of large libraries 
trade bibliography and periodical indexes 
The works cited here, as well as all othe 
titles mentioned in the guide, are listed, wit 
full bibliographic.al information, at the en 
of the manual. 

Section III, on "Locating a Particula 
Work" and "Preparation of a Bibliography,' 
contains much sound, practical advice. On 
hopes, however, that the graduate studen 
will not be discouraged by the example o 
the hard-to-find item that the author take 
through all possible tools, in order to illus 
trate the use and extent of each. The re-
viewer was slightly troubled by the fact that, 
although at the beginning "the work sought 
is assumed to be a printed item of substantia] 
size, not a pamphlet or broadside or map, and 
not a part of a series, a magazine article, Oli 
a government document," we later find the 
student, having exhausted all possible tools 
for monographic literature, exploring the 
possibility that the item is a magazine article, 
a serial, or a government document. We 

470 COLLEGE A!vD RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



.. 

couldn't keep from wondering, too, whether 
he ever found it. 

Ten specific areas in which students in 
economics and business will be working such 
as economic theory, statistics, money, and 
banking, etc., are listed in Section IV. For 
each of the areas~ information concerning the 
housing of special materials relating to 1t IS 
given and important bibliographies are pro-
vided. 

On the whole, this manual should fulfil 
its purpose admirably. Dr. Cole, while skirt-
ing the pitfall of too much detail in his de-
lineation of an extremely complex situation, 
has included the essential. He has not as-
sumed too much knowledge on the part of 
the guide's intended users, has avoided the 
terminology of library science, and yet the 
manual is far from elementary. An impor-

tant value the student will derive, aside from 
the primary one of the minimization of trial 
and error, is the conception he will gain of 
the wealth of library materials available to 
him and the painstaking care he must use to 
uncover them. . 

In his preface Keyes D. Metcalf states 
that if the manual accomplishes its purposes, 
similar . ones will ·be prepared for graduate 
students in other broad subject fields. It 
occurs to one that much of the material in 
the present manual is basic to research in any 
field and will have to be repeated in subse-
quent ones. For example, .of the ninety-four 
titles cited, more than half cover all fields of 
knowledge. However, this may prove to be 
no disadvantage. And Harvard has set an ex-
ample. that other large university libraries may 
well consider following.-Ruth Walling. 

Faculty Personnel 
Problems of Faculty Personnel. John Dale 

Russell, editor. (Proceedings of the In-
stitute for Administrative Offices of High-
er Institutions, 1946, v. 18.) Chicago, 
University of Chicago Press, 1946. 
The eighteenth volume in the Proceedings 

of the Institute for Administrative Offices of 
Higher Institutions constitutes a course in 
the proper treatment of professors, from con-
tract to retirement. The course has thirteen 
lessons, composed of the papers of the insti-
tute, and was planned by a veteran instituter, 
John Dale Russell, who is now director of 
the Division of Higher Education in the U.S. 
Office of Education. 

The papers deal in logical sequence with 
the major aspects of faculty management, 
beginning with a well-marshaled discussion of 
determining needs for instructional staff 
members by Vice President Brumbaugh, of 
the American Council on Education, and 
ending with a reasoned treatment of the 
difficult problem of evaluating faculty serv-
ices by Ralph Tyler, of the University of 
Chicago. Between are papers on the prepara-
tion, selection, appointment, induction, in-
service training, and housing of faculty per-
sonnel. 

All the authors are professors and adminis-
trators of education. They look at faculty 
personnel problems from the "inside," as 

OCTOBER~ 1947 

members and directors of faculties. From 
this viewpoint accrues the strength and weak-
ness of the volume as a whole. It is filled 
with practical wisdom based on experience. 
The wise comments and the examples of 
forward-looking personnel practices suggest 
many promising adaptations to the reader. 
But it treats faculties in splendid isolation 
from personnel in other walks of life and 
profits in no way from advances in knowledge 
of human relations and group direction which 
is being carried forward by the very faculties 
discussed. 

Like most proceedings, the present collec-
tion remains a group of more-or-less related 
papers and lacks a unifying body of principle. 
The student and practitioner will tend quite 
properly to pick one or another article related 
to an immediate problem or interest and not 
many will be tempted to read the collection 
as a whole. The volume presents a series of 
contributions to the practice of personnel 
management in education but it is not a not-
able addition to the theory of personnel ad-
ministration. 

Several of the authors were evidently 
selected because they possessed personal 
knowledge of specific programs of effective 
faculty management and were encouraged to 
describe these programs. Thus, Frank Lank-
ard recounts the cooperative plan for select-

471 

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