College and Research Libraries


ties and in the development of its fund-
ing priorities. Towner's championship 
of the NEH enabled libraries such as the 
Newberry to have access to public fund-
ing for the first time. 

Towner may have been a very good 
scholar but he also turned out to be an 
exceptional administrator. Perhaps the 
most interesting article in this collection 
is a 1971 planning report internal to the 
Newberry entitled "A Plan for the 
Newberry Library," in which he de-
scribed his vision of theN ewberry' s role. 
Towner viewed the library as one of 
"several varieties of educational institu-
tions-museums, colleges, universities, 
academies, institutes, and independent 
libraries-all sharing a common objec-
tive. That objective is the enlargement of 
mankind's knowledge and the sharing 
of that knowledge with as large an 
audience as is practical for the kind of 
institution it is." For Towner, the library 
was an educational institution among 
others, not a mass of materials passively 
awaiting the attention of scholars. He 
promoted the planned use of the 
Newberry by introducing the Newberry 
Library Seminar in the Humanities. Ulti-
mately, by making the library the site of 
the Northwestern-Newberry editions of 
the writings of Herman Melville and the 
Atlas of American History, and by creating 
the Center for the History of Cartogra-
phy, he insured that the "uncommon col-
lection of collections" at the Newberry 
would be utilized by specialists, and he 
brought to the library a community of 
scholars, some for short residences, 
others for permanent stays. 

His plans as outlined in 1971 were 
grand-no less than creating an Institute 
for Advanced Study in History and the 
Humanities. Though the institute did 
not come to be, the Newberry added 
other "centers," such as the Center for 
the History of the American Indian, the 
Center for Family and Community His-
tory Center, and the Center for Renais-
sance Studies. He developed an active 
publication program, found grants to 
bring in scholars, and broadened access 
to the collection. The Newberry insti-
tuted one of the first in-house preserva-

Book Reviews 553 

tion laboratories, in which many librari-
ans received their training. The library's 
collection also grew through judicious 
sales and purchases, a complex process 
described in a fascinating essay, "Every 
Silver Lining Has a Cloud: The Recent 
Shaping of the Newberry Library's Col-
lections." 

How did Towner manage to pay for all 
this? The editors diplomatically re-

• moved from the 1971 planning docu-
ment Towner's list of potential funding 
sources, so we are left to guess about 
where the money came from. In the early 
days, it seems to have come from 
wealthy donors. Foundations also sup-
ported the Newberry's projects. Where 
sources of funding did not exist, Towner 
helped create them. He was instrumen-
tal in the creation of the NEH, which 
later was a source of funding for many 
of the Newberry's projects. Perhaps to 
his own surprise, Bill Towner turned out 
to be as much of an entrepreneur as a 
historian. 

The most recent essay in the collection 
dates from 1983, and, in a way, the library 
world Towner describes seems old -fash-
ioned and remote. Though preservation 
and security problems preoccupied 
Towner, he never mentions automation 
and its attendant benefits and problems. 
His essays on the Newberry, however, 
are well worth reading, not so much for 
solutions to concrete problems as for the 
alternative vision of the library which 
they offer and for the verve and initiative 
below the surface of the controlled prose 
and the formulaic structure of some of 
the pieces.-Eva Sartori, University of Ne-
braska-Lincoln, Lincoln. 

Teaching Bibliographic Skills in His-
tory: A Sourcebook for Historians and 
Librarians. Ed. by Charles A. D' Aniello. 
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993. 
385p. $65 (ISBN 0-313-25266-1). 
The animating principle behind this 

work is to gather together material for 
the building of a bibliographic instruc-
tion course in history, but it is pitched to 
too many audiences and is written on too 
many different levels to be effective. It is 
also intended to bring together in one 



554 College & Research Libraries 

book archivists, librarians, and histori-
ans in order to share their views and 
expertise on the art and science of doing 
historical research in libraries and ar-
chives. One wonders why this kind of 
book is necessary: librarians putting to-
gether such a course have at their finger-
tips more detailed sources that include 
all of the bibliographical material re-
capitulated here, and historians would 
not need the two introductory essays nor 
most of the library apparatus, such as the 
illustrations of catalog cards that adorn 
the volume. 

The work begins with an essay by 
Georg Iggers that seems to be intended 
for beginning undergraduates, and is 
followed by Harry Ritter's essay on in-
terdisciplinary history, much more 
detailed and demanding, which looks 
like something for advanced under-
graduates or a first year graduate semi-
nar. Jane A. Rosenberg's part of the essay 
on "Finding and Using Historical Mate-
rials" is an excellent summary of the in-
adequate (fruitless?) nature of research 
on the ways that historians use libraries, 
and concludes that "the historian's pre-
dilection for working alone and doing 
intermittent bibliographical or reference 
work has much to recommend it." The 
second half of the same essay seems un-
connected to the first part: historian 
Robert P. Swierenga muses about how he 
would design a bibliographic instruc-
tion course. This section of the work 
ends with a long chapter by the editor 
which looks more or less like a syl-

. labus/lesson plan for his own biblio-
graphic instruction course. If this sounds 
a bit like a hodgepodge, it is. Instead of 
this scattershot approach, the field of 
bibliographic instruction might have 
been better served by a real exchange of 
ideas. What we have here are people 
from two professions talking past one 
another. 

The second third of the volume is 
devoted to an uneven treatment of 
various reference and research topics, 
not all of which are particularly relevant 
to historical research. For example, there 
is a long detour into most of the fields of 
the social sciences by Raymond G. Mcln-

November 1993 

nis, which, useful in itself, is not devoted 
to either research in the history of these 
fields or the use of these fields when 
doing historical research. It is just there, 
with a curious disclaimer, printed as an 
orphan footnote, that one should read 
the chapter, "keep[ing] Harry Ritter's 
discussion of interdisciplinary historical 
research in mind." Bur Ritter's essay 
near the front of the work speaks directly 
to interdisciplinary history, not to the 
general existence of the social sciences. 

The sections on using indexes and cat-
alogs seem to suffer from the problems 
alluded to at the beginning of this re-
view: the information included is much 
too elementary to be of use to librarians 
teaching the course, and written at the 
wrong level to interest historians. Per-
haps this portion of the work is intended 
to be given to students to read, although 
that is not clear, like much about this 
diffuse sourcebook. 

The final section of this sourcebook is 
devoted to a long annotated bibliogra-
phy that brings together some of the mate-
rials cited in the rest of the work. Some of 
the entries in the bibliography are re-
printed from a 1984 article in The History 
Teacher written by the editor, who has 
also reprinted here other materials that 
he had previously published. Although 
reprinting old material is not necessarily 
a p~oblem in itself, it is indicative in this 
case of the lack of coherence and focus 
that characterizes the book as a whole.-
Elliott Shore, Institute for Advanced Study, 
Princeton, New Jersey. 

BRIEF NOTICES 

Intertek. Ed. and pub. by Steve 
Steinberg, San Carlos, CA, 94070, 
1990- . Semiannual, $8/year (ISSN 
1066-2472). 
This is the most substantive of the "cy-

berzines" spawned by the computer 
counterculture. The two most recent is-
sues are organized around special themes 
of particular interest to librarians: ''Virtual 
Communities" and "Economic, Social 
and Technical Aspects of Information." 
The first has an extended debate on the 
USENET paradigm of computer com-
munication as well as an essay on the