College and Research Libraries


The workability of the instructions and 
the effectiveness of the examples will have 
to be judged by teachers, students , and 
other users. There seems to be adequate in-
formation to give the reader a general idea 
of foundations and procedures, but students 
will certainly need a helping hand, and 
practicing catalogers should not find much 
they don't already know or have access to in 
standard tools. Continued revisions of this 
book attest to a certain demand , but it is 
hard to visualize the audience for this par-
ticular mix of introductory and advanced 
material. Covering the contents in one 
course would not be easy. 

It should be noted that the text is fully 
documented and a ~bliography of several 
pages on cataloging and classification aids is 
included. There is an excellent index and a 
glossary of terms and acronyms. The only 
mistake meriting mention is in the AACR2 
section, in which .-is used to separate the 
items in a contents note , rather than -
without the full stop . Only a former catalog-
er would quibble over a punctuation 
mark-Suzanne Massonneau, University of 
Vermont , Burlington, Vermont. 

Benge, Ronald Charles. Cultural Crisis and 
Libraries in the Third World. London: 
Clive Bingley; Hamden , Conn.: Linnet 
Books, 1979. 255p. $17.50. LC 79-12.929. 
ISBN 0-85157-281-2 Bingley; 0-208-
01668-6 Linnet. 
In Nigeria, as in other Third World coun-

tries, "When social action is taken to create 
a new environment, then libraries will be a 
necessary part of it" (Cultural Crisis and Li-
braries in the Third World, p .242). At that 
time , it will be verified that Third World li-
brarians can be strong forces for the welfare 
of their country. To do this , they must 
understand the meaning of development in 
their country, they must perceive how tech-
nology can be transferred appropriately to 
it, and they must avoid the pitfalls of educa-
tion and mass communication imposed from 
without, in disregard of their country ' s 
native genius. 

In developing this thesis through an 
essay-style approach , Ronald C . Benge de-
votes ten chapters to the general premises 
of development, education, and communica-

Recent Publications I 171 

tion ; then he turns, in the last five chapters, 
to the particulars concerning libraries and 
librarians. Such a procedure gives students 
of cultural crisis in the Third World food for 
thought , without , however, providing a 
thorough treatment of that crisis; and it gives 
students of libraries in the Third World 
some guiding principles, but only a mini-
mum of facts about the library milieu there. 

This essay also poises itself on the edge 
between · the general and the particular by 
drawing extensively from a vast literature 
concerning Third World affairs in general 
and by reporting on the author's years of 
personal experience, especially in Nigeria. 
The strong affective tone of the work surely 
derives from the latter source , and the 
reader has the feeling that as long as the au-
thor had the praiseworthy intention of 
avoiding a dry monograph on his topic, he 
could have presented his insights and feel-
ings with more power by giving greater 
emphasis to his Nigerian experience against 
a lower profile of general background 
knowledge.-Paul Tutwiler , School of Li-
brary Science , University of Wisconsin-Mil-
waukee. 

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