College and Research Libraries


230 I College & Research Libraries • May 1973 

the volume succeeds admirably. The publi-
cation would have been of greater value, 
however, if the institute had also been con-
vened to produce some sort of unified blue-
print for action. The problems confronting 
users of nonbook materials and the need for 
an effective solution to these problems have 
been effectively documented; what is need-
ed now is a directive on what steps must 
be taken to bring order out of bibliographic 
confusion. If there was any hope that the 
institute would produce such a directive, 
this hope does not appear to have been 
met.-Cathleen Flanagan, Graduate School 
of Library Science, University of Illinois. 

Kent, Allen and Lancour, Harold, ed. 
Copyright: Current Viewpoints on His-
tory, Laws, Legislation. New York: R. R. 
Bowker, 1972. $11.95. 
The Copyright Act of 1909, though fre-

quently amended, was constructed for an 
archaic era of communications. Attempts 
to write a comprehensive revision of do-
mestic copyright legislation since 1956 have 
been constantly interrupted by one innova-
tion after another in information handling 
and word processing. Although copyright 
legislation is based on a Constitutional pol-
icy, the efforts at revision have had to fo-
cus on difficult practical issues of the rights 
of various parties in the chain of diffusion 
of knowledge and the vested interests and 
practices of many segments of the infor-
mation industry, including, of course, li-
braries. 

The issues in copyright application and 
revision are complex and the literature con-
cerning them vast, starting in recent times 
with thirty-five studies commissioned by the 
Copyright Office in the late 1950s. It is 
helpful, therefore, to have at least the key 
facts of copyright_ and of issues in revision 
affecting libraries brought together in one 
place. This was done recently in a series of 
short essays in the Encyclopedia of Li-
brary and Information Science. The book 
here reviewed is a reprint of that material. 
The presentation is sound, but constrained 
by the limitations of space and the purpose 
of the Encyclopedia. 

Unfortunately, the essays are unevenly 
developed. Some are scholarly, some are 
rhetorical, some are dense, and some are 

light and inflated. Throughout there is a 
considerable redundancy, and lack of bal-
ance. Nearly one-third of the book's 125 
pages are devoted to a highly detailed dis-
cussion of the viewpoint of a computer sci-
entist, including a ten-page uncritical bib-
liography of writings long and short on this 
aspect of the copyright issue-everything 
you wanted to know about the literature of 
computers and copyright and wished you 
had never asked! Add to that the pages that 
give the text of the two international copy-
right agreements (good for reference but 
out of place in the midst of a series of short 
essays) and nearly one-half of the text is 
used up. 

The short piece on the publisher's point 
of view by Curtis Benjamin is merely a re-
statement of the major provisions of the 
Copyright Act (given in another part of 
the volume in the text of the law), and of 
the problem area of its applications. There 
is no point of view at all. Charles Gosnell 
and Dan Lacy, long active in trying to 
bring order into the tangle, make their 
usual well-styled and cogent presentations 
on the librarian's point of view and the his-
tory of revision. The sections on legal im-
plications by Abe Goldman and on copy-
right and the public interest by Lyman 
Patterson are superb and meaty, and right 
on the mark, particularly in the analysis of 
the irrelevance of the historical roots of 
copyright to today's social and technologi-
cal environment. 

In short, the information in this book is 
basic and good, and in some places bril-
liant. But the facts are too often repeated, 
the details of the key issues are lost in un-
even style of presentation of the various 
views. Overall, the book is not worth the 
$11.95 price.-Russell Shank, Director of 
Libraries, Smithsonian Institution, Wash-
ington, D.C. 

Coughlin, Robert E.; Taieb, Francoise; and 
Stevens, Benjamin H. Urban Analysis 
for Branch Library System Planning. 
Greenwood, 1972, 167p. 
Public library planners for over three 

decades have functioned with several basic 
assumptions regarding library facility loca-
tion as it relates to maximum effective 
usage. These planning assumptions include 

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