College and Research Libraries


BOOK REVIEWS 

Introduction to Information Science. 
Comp. and ed. by Tefko Saracevic. New 
York: R. R. Bowker Co., 1970. 751p. 
This book is a collection of sixty-six pa-

pers by various authors. Most of the papers 
have previously been published elsewhere, 
and all are quite recent. (Only three pre-
date 1960.) Most of the papers are impor-
tant: Maron and Kuhns on probabilistic in-
dexing, Swets on system performance, 
Leimkuhler on library systems analysis, 
Barko and Bernick on automatic classifica-
tion, etc. Because these papers have ap-
peared in journals as disparate as ETC, 
College & Research Libraries, the Journal 
and Communications of the Association for 
Computing Machinery, American Docu-
mentation, Nature, etc., their collection into 
a single volume is a signal service for which 
we owe Professor Saracevic and The Bow-
ker Company a debt of gratitude. Because 
most of these papers have not previously 
been collected, and because their general 
quality is so high, this book should be pur-
chased by every library that has even a 
minimal collection in the area of librarian-
ship or information science. 

A very regrettable feature of the volume 
is that in his general introduction, the edi-
tor does not help to clarify what this disci-
pline that he calls "information science" is, 
but rather perpetuates and further com-
pounds the confusion that is rampant in the 
promotional literature of ASIS, the bulletins 
of schools of "information science," and oth-
er publications. True, "information science" 
is, as Professor Saracevic states, a "nascent 
science," and we should therefore not ex-
pect a totally unambiguous definition of the 
field-especially since practitioners of even 
long-established disciplines often cannot do 
so for their own fields. Nevertheless, we do 
have a right to expect Professor Saracevic 
to explain whatever obvious lacunae and 

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Recent Publications 

gross disparities occur in his own definition. 
The evidence presented in this volume 

suggests that the discipline it represents-
whether one calls it "information science" 
or something else-is substantial and shows 
vigorous signs of approaching maturity. 
This makes it all the more regrettable that 
the editor has so misled the reader-par-
ticularly the reader who is new to the field 
and has not yet learned to discount the 
grandiose claims information science usual-
ly makes for itself-about the nature of the 
discipline to which the volume is an intro-
duction. It should be stressed again that 
Professor Saracevic is not alone in defining 
information science more broadly than he 
conceives it in practice. Even the constitu-
tion of ASIS delineates the Society's area of 
interest as "information and its transfer" 
which is clearly not the Society's interest in 
practice. For example, the ASIS Journal 
would almost certainly not accept an article, 
even of very high quality, on the sb·ucture 
of Swahili, or the imagery of Keats, or prob-
lems in teaching arithmetic to ghetto chil-
dren; yet all three articles could quite rea-
sonably be subsumed under the rubric of 
"information and its transfer." (But then 
the Journal of ASIS has not kept up with 
what is going on in its parent society: it 
calls itself, in its "instructions to authors," 
a ". . . journal in the various fields in docu-
mentation." However, this states better than 
the constitution of ASIS what the real in-
terests of the majority of the Society's mem-
bers are.) 

A final minor complaint: This book will 
probably be used primarily as a sourcebook. 
It is therefore regrettable that it does not 
contain an author index. This might have 
been more useful than the rather poor sub-
ject index that is provided.-Kelley L. 
Cartwright, School of Library Service, Uni-
versity of California, Los Angeles. 

Planning the Academic Library: Metcalf 
and EUsworth at York. Harry Faulkner 

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