College and Research Libraries


62 I College & Research Libraries • ]anoory 1972 

will read and take them to heart. If this 
were to come about, studies and reports 
such as this one would never be needed. 
-Maryan E. Reynolds, Washington State 
Library, Olympia. 

Information, Mechanism and Meaning. 
Donald M. MacKay. Cambridge, Mass.: 
The M.I.T. Press, 1969. 196p. $2.95. 
Most librarians today would agree that 

a major, if not the major, function of li-
braries is the transfer of "information" from 
authors to readers. To facilitate the execu-
tion of this function, librarians classify their 
collections, provide subject, author, and ti-
tle indexes, purchase bibliographies of ev-
ery description, provide professional refer-
ence service, etc. Yet what precisely is this 
"information" that librarians work so hard 
to help transfer? How can we recognize 
what information a potential reader is lack-
ing? How can we be sure that we are doing 
the best job of representing in our catalogs 
the information which authors have repre-
sented in their books? Without an adequate 
theory of information we really have no 
way of answering these questions in a rig-
orous way. Dr. MacKay is concerned in this 
book with the beginnings of such a theory 
of information. 

MacKay is head of the Research De-
partment of Communication at the U niver-
sity of Keele. He puts his background in 
physics to use at several pointS' in this de-
velopment of a formal model of how human 
beings store their information and how they 
add to, modify, and validate this store. His 
approach is nonlinguistic; that is, he views 
the messages that human beings send each 
other as unanalyzed wholes, which, as en-
tities, have meaning to the sender and to 
the receiver of the message. He hypothe-
sizes that the human mind at any given 
time is in a state of conditional readiness 
to react to stimuli in a certain way. When 
a message containing information is re-
ceived, it results in a change in the indi-
vidual's state of conditional readiness. The 
meaning of a message he defines as a func-
tion which selects a particular state of con-
ditional readiness from all the possible 
states of conditional readiness. He does not 
suggest that his hypothesis describes how 
the brain really handles information, only 
that his model is a mechanism capable of 

representing what the brain seems to do. 
None of the ideas contained in this book 

are new. The book is a collection of three 
radio broadcasts and nine papers (plus two 
more papers reproduced as appendices) 
presented by the author from 1950 to 1964. 
Hence, the date of publication is mislead-
ing. MacKay has added an introductory 
chapter and has inserted a foreword and 
postscript to many of the papers, each a 
chapter in the book, in an attempt to pro-
vide continuity. He has used the technique 
of putting passages which can be skipped 
by readers of earlier chapters in small type. 
This technique only partly alleviates the 
major fault of the work-redundancy. In 
the later chapters, there is much said that 
has been said before, sometimes in almost 
identical terms. It is unfortunate that Mac-
Kay could not have taken the time to pull 
together all of the ideas from the various 
papers and present his thesis in a more or-
ganized fashion. It is also unfortunate that 
he has added no new references to those 
originally included in his papers. The work 
does not provide a very good entry into the 
literature of information theory, since even 
the original references were not intended 
to be exhaustive. 

This book is certainly not a definitive 
work on the theory of information. How-
ever, in many respects, it is a stimulating 
and highly theoretical .work. Those seeking 
practical advice on the design of library au-
tomation projects or the construction of in-
formation retrieval systems should look else-
where. Those seeking insight into the basic 
nature of the information transfer process 
may find something here to stimulate their 
thinking.-Edward A. Eaton III, The Uni-
versity of Texas at Austin. 

Library Lit.-The Best of 1970. Bill Katz 
and Joel J. Schwartz, eds. Metuchen, 
N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1971. 429p. 
An apparently self-appointed jury of five 

(its origin is unclear in the introduction) 
took on the stultifying task of reading 
(scanning?) the full runs of some 200 li-
brary and general periodicals of the period 
November 1, 1969-0ctober 31, 1970. The 
jury (the editors, professor and student, re-
spectively, at Albany; John N. Berry, editor 
of Library I ournal; William R. Eshelman, 
editor of Wilson Library Bulletin; and Eric 

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