College and Research Libraries the presses of the Western Country, includ- ing Samuel Vail and Matthew Lyon, also born in Ireland. Listed as well are book- binders, engravers, papermakers, and book- sellers. This is a valuable addition to the several directories of the early book trades of particular locales, most of which have been published by the New York Public library. The biographical sketches, inciden- tally, make interesting reading. Also given as appendices are a list of Vermont printers arranged by town, and a table correlating years and item numbers. As would be expected of a book of this kind, it is well indexed. As should be expected of a book of this kind, it is quite handsomely designed and manufactured by the Stinehour Press of Lunenburg, Vermont. We may hope that the publication of this important work will inspire similar studies of other geo- graphical areas.-D. K. Centralization and Documentation. Ar- thur D. Little, Inc. Cambridge, Mass.: The Author, 1963. 74p. This is the final report of a study sup- ported by the National Science Foundation. It considers the feasibility of centralizing fa- cilities for the storage and retrieval of scien- tific documents and makes the following recommendations to the National Science Foundation: 1. Do not support large-scale centralization of document searching facilities at this time. A large centralized facility drawing upon the current state of the art of document retrieval techniques could probably not achieve the main objective for which it was designed-provision of an effective, exhaustive, literature-searching capability to supplement efforts to prevent duplicated research or development invest- ments. Responsibility for showing that a pro- posed centralized facility would be feasible and would satisfy this objective must be borne by the proponents of centralization, employing quantitative evaluation techniques such as those we have developed. 2. Support the undertaking of a compre- hensive program to yield additional information and insight as to what the real informational needs of scientists and engineers are. Such a survey is a necessary prerequisite to the possi- ble support of centralized document searching facilities in the future, to insure that such fa- cilities will serve real functions, and that they will in fact be used. To be meaningful, the survey must be conducted with considerable imagination and insight. 3. Before undertaking extensive efforts to de- velop aids such as elaborate word thesauri for existing, partially centralized information re- trieval systems, investigate further the use of statistical techniques both for the automatic generation of thesaurus lists and for the auto- mation of some of the functions currently per- formed by human intermediaries. 4. To support such a program, test operate one of the medium-sized operating coordinate retrieval systems on a statistical associative basis. We feel that the state of the art of these associative techniques will permit such an un- dertaking, that a great deal could be learned from it, and that substantial benefits to the users of the system could quite possibly be realized. 5. For activities which are not concerned with exhaustive literature search operations, support centralization on an individual project basis, after cost effectiveness analyses have dem- onstrated-quantitatively-that adequate ser- vice levels and over-all benefits will accrue. It is heartening to see a study by an or- ganization that has been deeply involved in the past in installation of mechanized search- ing systems, as Arthur D. Little has been, that shows that they are willing to go where the facts lead. As they point out, the only "automatic" document searching system that has been applied on any substantial scale is the coordinate searching procedure and, "despite the use of high-speed digital com- puters, the searching logic employed in these most advanced systems is basically un- changed from that used in the earliest ap- plications . . . the systems are based on a purely mechanical attempt to match terms." The data analyzed indicate that in such sys- tems the indexing of all scientific literature by this approach would require using sub- stantially all meaningful scientific words as indexing terms, and even a file of half a million or so documents would require at least ten thousand index terms. A model is developed for study and evalu- ation of coordinate retrieval systems and applied to several collections. This shows that it will be difficult to obtain high preci- sion together with high recall ratios, and that even with an IBM 7090 (a very large-scale computer) the data processing cost for a large collection could become very great. These conclusions point up the need for (a) demonstration that cost and effectiveness 68 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES analyses should precede any further support in this field, and (b) that there is great need to develop the science upon which a sound technology may be based.-Ralph R. Shaw, Rutgers University. Serials in Australian Libraries; Social Sciences and Humanities; A Union List. 2 vols. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1963. Price to be deter- mined. The publication of these two volumes marks another step forward in the efforts of Australian libraries to compile informa- tion on their resources. This "interim edi- tion" is designed to be a companion to Sci- entific Serials in Australian Libraries, as it might well be after it is used and continued as a list of holdings of several hundred li- braries in the country. The list includes peri- odicals an~ other serials, as well as mono- Americans in Africa: A Preliminary Guide to American Missionary Archives and Li- brary Manuscript Collections on Africa. By Robert Collins and Peter Duignan. (Hoover Institution Bibliographical Se- ries, no. 12.) Stanford, Calif.: The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, 1963. 96p. $2. Catalogo Colective de Publicaciones Periodi- cas Existentes en Bibliotecas Cientificas y Tecnicas Argentinas. By Ernesto Gustavo Gietz. Buenos Aires: Scientific and Tech- nical Libraries of Argentina, 1962. 1,726p. The Catholic Church in America: An His- torical Bibliography. By Edward R. Voll- mar. New York: Scarecrow Press. 339p. $8.50. A Checklist of Serials for African Studies. By Peter Duignan and Kenneth M. Glaz- ier. (Hoover Institution Bibliographical Series, no. 13.) Stanford, Calif.: The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, 1963. 104p. $3. The Chinese Communist Movement, 1937- 1949: An Annotated Bibliography. By Chun-tu Hsueh. (Hoover Institute Biblio- graphical Series, no. 11.) Stanford, Calif.: JANUARY 1964 graphic and some publishers' series, but it does not contain newspapers, company re- ports, house organs, and certain ephemeral titles. Almost twenty thousand titles are included. Australian librarians, through AACOBS (the Australian Advisory Council on Biblio- graphical Services), the National Library of Australia, and the work of personnel in indi- vidual libraries, have been pooling their ef- forts to gain an insight into present holdings. The objective is to develop, so far as is fea- sible, within programs of individual institu- tions a program of collecting that will be beneficial to the country as a whole. Aus- tralian libraries, because of their distance from one another, have an opportunity that is both unique and challenging, particularly in a country in which the social sciences and humanities, as well as science and technol- ogy, are regarded as important.-Maurice F. Tauber, Columbia University. • • Books Briefly Noted The Hoover Institution on War, Revolu- tion, and Peace, 1962. 312p. $5. Correlation Index to Current Department of Defense Research Reports. Cambridge, Mass.: M. I. T. Libraries, 1963. $10. Educational Media in Libraries. Edited by Carl H. Melinat. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syra- cuse University School of Library Sci- ence, 1963. 39p. $1.50. General Encyclopedias in Print: A Compar- ative Analysis 1963, Second revised ed. Compiled by Padraig S. Walsh. Akron, Ohio: Reference Books Research Service, 1963. 66p. $1.50. Guide to Research Facilities in History in The Universities of Great Britain and Ire- land. By G. Kitson Clark and G. R. Elton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1963. 44p. $1. A History of Graphic Art. By James Cleav- er. New York: Philosophical Library, 1963. 282p. illus. $12. Library Careers. By Richard H. and K. Irene Logsdon. New York: Henry Z. Walck, Inc., 1963. lllp. $3.50. 69