College and Research Libraries


Examples of the unique materials in the 
special collections and nonbook units of the 
library are highlighted to make the sketches 
of those units particularly interesting. (John 
Y. Cole's A List for Further Reading, p.285-
88, provides access to more information 
about specific departments.) 

Librarians will not view this work as the 
definitive study of LC; the author himself 
notes this on p.175: 

. . . our hurried, obviously superficial 
glance at a few of the many libraries that 
make up the Library of Congress. Not 
only could whole books be written about 
a single room--or drawer or item of the 
Library-but whole books have been so 
written. 

The description of the six card catalogs cov-
ers but one and a half pages. The explana-
tions of the theories and practices of techni-
cal processing are, of necessity, oversimpli-
fied. There are no footnotes for the quotes 
used so effectively throughout the text. Al-
though numbers of positions, job descrip-
tions, and statistics of work accomplished 
are given, the book seems somehow unpeo-
pled except for the superstars. 

Librarians will find the last five chapters 
particularly interesting. Here Mr. Goodrum 
asks how well is the library doing its job 
( p.177) . He uses this question to structure 
his presentation of the needs and satisfac-
tion level of the library's three principal 
user groups: Congress, the library profes-
sion, and the scholarly research world. How 
the library goes about meeting these needs, 
the relationships between the library and 
each group, and some of the political reali-
ties of those relationships are concisely re-
ported. Mr. Goodrum objectively sets forth 
the demands on· the library's resources by 
each of the three and the conflicts which 
would be involved in meeting any particu-
lar group's requirements completely. The 
chapters do not appear to be merely a per-
sonal view or to favor one group. Rather, 
they do give a sharp outline of those con-
flicts about the purpose of the Library of 
Congress and how that purpose may be de-
termined and what the choice will mean to 
all those interested in the outcome. Mr. 
Goodrum's perceptio~s of the issues of con-
cern have additional significance as the li-
brary world awaits : the selection of a new 
Librarian of Congress. That person will 

Recent Publications I 459 

have to have what Mr. Goodrum offers as 
the answer to the library's questions about 
the future, " ... more wisdom" (p.280). 

Mr. Goodrum's work does extremely well 
that which it sets out to do. As an added 
recommendation, it provides a clear state-
ment of the library's directional conflicts. 
The· price of $10.00 unfortunately may pre-
vent individual librarians from buying their 
own copies.-]udy H. Fair, DirectOr 'of the 
Library, The Urban Institute, Washington, 
D.C. 

National Library of Canada. Resources Sur-
vey Section. Research Collections in Ca-
nadian Libraries. Ottawa: Information 
Canada, 1972- . Part I, Universities. 
Volume 6, Canada (1974). lOOp. 
Volume six is a summary and a 'critique 

of the first five volumes in a continuing se-
ries, which is entitled Research Collections 
in Canadian Libraries. The earlier volumes, 
each of which dealt with a geographic area 
of Canada, were all issued in 1972. They 
report statistically by subject forty-five col-
lections in as many universities, or parts of 
universities, that offer graduate. studies in 
the humanities or the social sciences. It is 
planned that "the information will be kept 
up to date in the future and will be aug-
·mented by further surveys of federal gov-
.ernment libraries, special libraries, and 
large public libraries, and by the extension 
of these surveys to include science and oth-
er collections." 

On the whole Canada has been well 
served in the past by many and varying li-
brary surveys-well served in part because 
the principal finding has always been so 
simple and so apparent. Canadians needed 
books. The satisfaction of this lack is still 
the main and most difficult task for the li-
braries of this vast land. 

Volume six of this the latest, but not the 
best, survey is in two parts. 

The first part presents a list of recom-
mendations which are addressed to libraries 
in general. There follows a historical sketch 
of Canadian universities a,nd two ftirther 
essays. One essay relates academic pro-
grams to library resources, and the other 
deals with national information and library 
networks in the Canadian context . . A final 
piece, called "Surveying the Survey; A Self-



460 I College & Research Libraries • November 1974 

Critique," contains the following revela-
tion : 'This survey has been in a very real 
sense a long on-the-job learning process for 
the National Library's Resources Division." 
I personally doubt the wisdom of publish-
ing such an experiment as a definitive 
piece of work. I believe that this survey 
must be used with great caution, for its 
definitions of such terms as volume and se-
rial and the consequent assignation of sta-
tistics are arbitrary and unconventional and 
differ from volume to volume. Any com-
parative value that the survey could have 
had, even among the constituent volumes 
of the series, is thus negated. Any future 
work that seeks to build on it without its 
extensive revision should be doubted. Any 
judgments that are based on the statistics 
of the individual library holdings delineated 
in this survey must be made with care. 

The second part of volume six is a sub-
jective, arbitrary, and unsuccessful attempt 
at an assessment of the relative quality of 
the individual surveyed libraries. This part 
also contains the six-volume index and a 
bibliography that manages to omit two 
seminal Canadian surveys. One of these 
was done by Edwin Williams in 1962 and 
the other by a Commission of Enquiry 
chaired by John Ridington in 1933. 

It was Stephen Leacock who had one of 
his characters ". . . fling himself into his 
saddle and gallop madly off in all direc-
tions."-Thomas F. O'Connell, Director of 
Libraries, York University, Downsview, On-
tario . 

Dosa, Marta L. Libraries in the Political 
Scene. (Contributions in Librarianship 
and Information Science, No. 7) West-
port, Conn.: Greenwood, 1974. 226p. 
The only fault of consequence in this 

book is its title. It is not, as the title states, 
a study of libraries in the political scene. 
It is rather an account of the professional 
life and milieu of Georg Leyh. The fact 
that Dr. Leyh was Germany's leading li-
brarian during the critical three-score years 
following the turn of the century, however, 
does mean that the work is replete with 
food for the thought of those who would 
ponder the politicization of libraries. 

Dr. Leyh appears to have conceptualized 
his philosophy of librarianship quite fully 

during his student days at Munich, Stras-
bourg, and Tiibingen between 1896 and 
1901; in essence it was that libraries have 
a high humanistic and scholarly purpose 
that can and must keep aloof of ideological 
and political issues. For the most part the 
present volume describes the testing of that 
philosophy through the several fateful eras 
of German history spanned by Dr. Leyh's 
long life. 

And a sore testing it was, too, reminis-
cent in a way of the journey of Bunyan's 
Christian in his search for the Celestial 
City. Raised and educated in the period of 
empire, Dr. Leyh seems to have been most 
at ease with the social role which libraries 
were expected to fill during that time. The 
First World War, however, created new 
pressures which caught him "in a web of 
uncertainty and adversity." The Weimar 
Republic saw the first questioning of "the 
integrity of scientific research, free of po-
litical and military considerations." Most 
pernicious obviously was the period of the 
Third Reich, during which libraries were 
frankly used as implements of propaganda, 
a use which Dr. Leyh at his personal peril 
opposed actively. The wholesale destruction 
of libraries during World War II, despite 
the profession's frenetic efforts to protect 
them, weighed heavily upon his spirit. In 
the postwar era, with massive library prob-
lems borne of occupation and reconstruc-
tion, he was most troubled by the ineffec-
tiveness of his efforts to revitalize a single 
German library community in the face of 
national partition. 

Perhaps Dr. Leyh's greatest disappoint-
ment was the widespread criticism from his 
colleagues in the West which followed his 
acceptance in 1954 of a National Prize 
from the East German government "for his 
prominent, internationally acknowledged 
works in the field of library science and for 
his outstanding services in the interest of 
the unity of German librarianship." The 
picture which the author gives us of Dr. 
Leyh at the time of his death in his ninety-
first year is of a battle-scarred warrior, 
largely abandoned by his less stalwart com-
rades-in-arms, but still struggling manfully 
to defend the faith. He died in 1968, dis-
appointed but not disillusioned. 

This is a great story, even containing 
some of the qualities of epic, and Dr. Dosa