reviews


  

  

  

494 College & Research Libraries 

Harwell’s Cornerstones of Confederate Col­
lecting. The other large effort, excluding 
Studies in Bibliography, has been the prepa­
ration of textual studies, such as Bower’s 
Essays in Bibliography, Text and Editing, and 
several works by Tanselle, including Tex­
tual Criticism since Greg: A Chronicle, 1950 – 
1985 and Textual Criticism and Scholarly Ed­
iting. 

The society’s most substantial contribu­
tion has always been Studies in Bibliography; 
and Robin Myers, representing the Biblio­
graphical Society, was correct in her com­
ments at the fiftieth anniversary when she 
said that it was “a very special publication 
… causing a yearly frisson of pleasure as it 
thuds down on bibliographical doormats 
everywhere.” However, Tanselle’s assertion 
that in the second half of the twentieth cen­
tury, Studies in Bibliography took over from 
The Library, the publication of the Biblio­
graphical Society (Britain), as the place 
where “one witnessed most dramatically 
the exploration of new techniques and new 
areas” may be going a bit far. This certainly 
is not proven by the essay that would have 
to set the contents of the one against the 
other but, instead, speaks only of Studies in 
Bibliography. Furthermore, an admittedly 
cursory examination of the contents of The 
Library does not bear out the assertion, at 
least not for the first twenty-five years, when 
authors and articles seemed almost inter­
changeable because they were by the same 
people writing about the same things, in­
cluding Tanselle, Wyllie, and Greg. Never­
theless, Studies in Bibliography has carved out 
a niche for itself, primarily in the consider­
ation of American subjects in which The Li­
brary seems to have little interest. 

Studies in Bibliography, of course, was 
the creation of Fredson Bowers, and he 
must figure large in any history of it be­
cause few journals of such standing are 
created and edited by the same scholar 
for forty-three years. 

According to Tanselle, its format was 
fixed with the first volume, which con­
tained eleven articles followed by six bib­
liographical notes; and it came into its 
own with volume three, which contained 
Greg’s “The Rationale of Copy Text,” a 

September 1999 

point of departure for textual critics for 
the next fifty years. Besides this, there 
were eleven other articles by eminent crit­
ics, fourteen bibliographical notes, and a 
checklist of bibliographical scholarship 
for 1949. 

A commemorative volume need not 
have wide appeal, and this one does not, 
but because it chronicles the rise of a 
scholarly society in perhaps an unlikely 
place, it makes for more interesting read­
ing than one would first expect. And be­
cause the society began in Special Collec­
tions at the University of Virginia, all con­
cerned in the administration of rare books 
and manuscripts could benefit from ex­
amining it. —James B. Lloyd, University of 
Tennessee. 

The Education of Library and Informa­
tion Professionals Series 

Education for Librarianship in the Nordic 
Countries. Eds. Ole Harbo and Niels 
Ole Pors. London: Mansell, 1998. 197p. 
$99.50 (ISBN 0-7201-2210-4). LC 97­
19532. 

The Education of Library and Information 
Science Professionals in the United King­
dom. Eds. Judith Elkin and Tom Wil­
son. London: Mansell, 1997. 289p. $85 
(ISBN 0-7201-2233-3). LC 97-52924. 

Library and Information Science Education 
in the United States. Eds. Loriene Roy 
and Brooke E. Sheldon. London: 
Mansell, 1998. 260p. $99.50 (ISBN 0­
7201-2232-5). LC 97-33046. 

Rochester, Maxine K. Education for 
Librarianship in Australia. London: 
Mansell, 1997. 253p. $99.50 (ISBN 0­
7201-2216-3). LC 96-8495. 

Ronnie, Mary. Education for Librarianship 
in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. 
London: Mansell, 1996. 226p. $100 
(ISBN 0-7201-2179-5). LC 95-53302. 

Wu, Guangwei, and Lili Zheng. Educa­
tion for Librarianship in China. London: 
Mansll, 1997. 250p. $99.50 (ISBN 0­
7201-2193-0). LC 96-52866. 

The title of this monograph series, The 
Education of Library and Information Profes­
sionals, indicates the direction in which 
library and information science education 



Book Reviews 495 

has been lurching for the past three de­
cades. Submerging librarianship under 
the information professions rubric has 
resulted in major changes in both the 
pedagogy and the curricula of what still 
must be referred to as LIS schools. These 
curricular and pedagogical changes have 
been less pervasive than the cosmetic 
name changes of academic units reflect­
ing, first, the intrusion of information sci­
ence into the curriculum in the 1970s and, 
then, in the move to drop the “library” 
designation itself in the 1990s, which may 
or may not be a broadening constituency 
and mission. As a whole, this collection 
of papers mirrors these developments in 
the education and training of librarians. 

A thematic element common to all of the 
essays collected here is change, but the ar­
ticles themselves fall short of addressing 
the restructuring of librarianship into an 
“information profession” or even of at­
tempting to define what that might mean. 
Philip Doty, in the volume on the United 
States, is one of the few authors repre­
sented here who has tried to arrive at a defi­
nition, but he fails to offer much beyond a 
few vague generalizations. In all these vol­
umes, the authors restrict themselves, for 
the most part, to addressing the state of the 
art in the education and training of librar­
ians in LIS schools. Essential questions 
about the nature of information profession­
alism and its relationship to libraries are 
almost unanimously ignored in favor of a 
focus on traditional areas of education for 
librarianship. 

Given this limitation, the editors of the 
series and the editors of the individual 
volumes have done an admirable job of 
recruiting authors who are each in a po­
sition to write authoritatively about their 
topics. These are people who have steered 
this boat through the shallow waters of 
academe; the overwhelming majority of 
them are deans, directors, and heads of 
schools recruited to share their accumu­
lated wisdom. What they have produced 
are not research articles but, rather, per­
sonal essays that draw on their experi­
ences, attitudes, and beliefs. In her intro­
ductory essay on the history of what she 

appropriately refers to as “librarian edu­
cation” in the United States, Loriene Roy 
perhaps expressed the expectation for the 
series best when she wrote: “This book 
consists of snapshots of the field from the 
perspectives of a number of leaders in li­
brary education.” The snapshots are, in 
most cases, taken with the participants’ 
own Polaroids of their local campuses. It 
is evident from the documentation accom­
panying each of the articles that virtually 
every author relies more on his or her 
own experiences than on the literature. 

There was evidently a general plan to 
be followed by each of the volumes; they 
all begin with a general introduction 
sketching the historical background of LIS 
education in the particular geographical 
area and conclude with a reflective essay 
on the future of LIS education. There were 
to be sections on topics of special impor­
tance to the specific countries and, of 
course, articles on current trends. Glynn 
Harmon and David Stoker, for example, 
provide excellent articles on distance edu­
cation for the volumes covering the 
United States and the United Kingdom. 
In addition, there are numerous detailed 
reports on the situation at individual in­
stitutions and the special instruction 
available for particular arenas of 
librarianship. 

The volumes for China, New Zealand, 
and the Nordic countries vary somewhat 
from this formula. The China volume be­
gins with a historical introduction, but the 
fracturing of the Chinese effort into sev­
eral different traditions (mainland, Tai­
wanese, Hong Kong, and Macau) forces 
the work in different directions. A simi­
lar pattern of fracturing the area into 
smaller, meaningful parts is used in the 
volumes for New Zealand and the Nor­
dic countries. The Australia volume pro­
vides yet another approach that appears 
more functionalist than thematic and in­
cludes the only systematic treatment of 
education for nonprofessionals appearing 
in any of the volumes, although it is evi­
dent that the distinctions between profes­
sional and paraprofessional training has 
been a central concern in most of the 



496 College & Research Libraries 

countries covered. Each volume presents 
the reader with a sound feeling for the 
state of professional library education in 
the countries represented. 

The volume for New Zealand, written 
by Mary Ronnie, and the volume for Aus­
tralia, written by Maxine Rochester, have 
the advantage of a unified voice. It is a voice 
that is not evident in the other volumes, 
which, instead, are afflicted with the high 
degree of redundancy too common in ed­
ited efforts. In the edited volumes, the au­
thors have been forced to lay their own 
foundation of definitions, touchstones, and 
points of departure resulting in the same 
fields being plowed in different directions 
by different authors and places where the 
sod remains intact. This lack of a cohesive, 
comprehensive approach is particularly 
confusing in discussions of national aca­
demic traditions that are unfamiliar to the 
reader. Many articles assume knowledge 
of the levels of academic attainment, forms 
of degrees, and academic organization ob­
taining in individual countries, rather than 
providing a full explanation. 

Virtually every article also carries the 
freight of its author’s implicit and/or ex­
plicit assumptions. When Wu Guangwei 
and Shao Youliang of East China Normal 
University in Shanghai write about “Cur­
rent Developments in Library Science 
Education in China,” it is reasonable to 
assume that their term information man­
agement has a different connotation than 
it does in the United States. However, 
their meaning is not made explicit. David 
Stoker’s article on distance education in 
the United Kingdom accepts as basic that 
distance education is inherently inferior 
to the traditional process of giving full-
time students the advantage of direct ac­
cess to faculty members and the resources 
of the local institution. This is an idea that, 
like many others in these essays, has great 
appeal and fits conventional wisdom but 
may well be contradicted by fact. 

These volumes, particularly those cov­
ering the United States and the United 
Kingdom, treat education for librarianship 
generically. The focus is on general require­
ments for degrees, general ambiance of 

September 1999 

schools, and on a generic workplace. It as­
sumes graduates are preparing for careers 
in traditional academic and public librar­
ies, workplaces in which, of course, many 
graduates do eventually find employment. 
Further, it is an approach that presents a 
strange ambiguity in that change is the fo­
cus, and the changing environment of li­
brary and information services is a primary 
assumption, yet it is also assumed that 
public and academic librarianship repre­
sent generic librarianship. 

A major lacuna in the volumes on the 
United States and the United Kingdom is 
the refusal to acknowledge the existence 
of school librarians in the catalog of library 
and information professionals. Kate Beattie 
and Maureen Nimon cover the crucial area 
in the volume for Australia and Mary 
Ronnie does the same for New Zealand. 
In both cases, the place of school 
librarianship is portrayed as secondary and 
the prospects for school librarians seem­
ingly dismal, though both authors see a 
potentially brighter future. It is evident that 
in both countries, school librarianship and 
work with children hold pretty much the 
same problematic position as in the United 
States. In describing the situation in Ice­
land, Sigrún Klara Hannesdóttir pointed 
to the rivalry between library education 
and teacher education programs for con­
trol of the school librarian. Klara observed 
that there “are still people who believe that 
school librarianship has very little to do 
with the rest of librarianship.” Although 
the role and status of school librarianship 
is not unknown in the United States or the 
United Kingdom, other than a few asides, 
it is completely ignored in the U.S. volume. 
And in Judith Elkin’s “Special Provision 
in Library and Information Studies Edu­
cation” in the U.K. volume, it is treated in 
a few cursory pages as a subsection with 
music, health, and business information 
work and public librarianship. The almost 
systematic neglect of school librarianship 
in these two volumes is incomprehensible 
if, indeed, the purpose is to describe edu­
cation for the information professions. 

The volumes for the Nordic countries, 
the United States, and the United Kingdom 



Book Reviews 497 

each contain final chapters on the future 
of library education contributed respec­
tively by Niels Ole Pors, head of the Royal 
School of Librarianship in Copenhagen; 
Thomas Galvin, former dean of the School 
of Library and Information Science at the 
University of Pittsburgh; and John Feather, 
former head of the Department of Library 
and Information Studies at Loughborough 
University. These statements are compe­
tent, but undistinguished; each could have 
benefited from having its author read the 
essays preceding his own contribution. 
Pors seems to have taken his assignment 
the most seriously, undertaking a survey 
of possible future labor markets for gradu­
ates of the Nordic schools. But he founders 
on the shoals of too many schools, with 
too many different academic traditions, 
and too many markets to permit any grand 
conclusions. 

Galvin presents an optimistic view of 
a future in which the formal education of 
librarians will become more intense and 
of longer duration in direct response to 
the needs of the agencies that hire the 
graduates. He has perceived that one of 
the major functions of the first profes­
sional position taken by new graduates 
has been to extend the period of training 
to incorporate practical experience— 
something that library education pro­
grams have been incapable of doing since 
the time of Melvil Dewey. In Galvin’s 
view, libraries are no longer capable of 
finishing the training of librarians in a 
practical setting, and it will become the 
responsibility of the schools to undertake 
this making of the complete librarian. He 
probably takes too sanguine a view of the 
potential role of the library associations, 
and particularly the Association for Li­
brary and Information Science Education, 
in leading the way in this curricular ex­
pansion. It is unclear, too, how this pos­
sible future relates to the pessimism with 
which he views the future of doctoral pro­
grams in the field. His prediction of an 
increased role for education in informa­
tion studies rather than librarianship, at 
the undergraduate level, is a relatively 
safe prediction at this point. 

Feather, better known in the United 
States for his work on the history of the 
book than the future of library education, 
presents a vision of the future that is un­
doubtedly more comprehensive and lit­
erate than either Pors’s or Galvin’s, but 
not necessarily closer to the truth. He does 
an excellent job of relating potential 
changes in library education to the chang­
ing climate of higher education in the 
United Kingdom, but like the others, he 
seems to bog down in the immediate 
problems of the institutional settings for 
library education, funding, and other con­
cerns. 

The intent of the series was purely de­
scriptive and, indeed, several articles scat­
tered throughout these volumes are so 
descriptive they are little more than di­
rectories. The combined impact of the ar­
ticles in this series is to overwhelm the 
reader with allusions that are, too often, 
not explained sufficiently to enable the 
reader to fully comprehend their mean­
ing. It was not the intent of the editors or 
the authors to produce a series in com­
parative librarianship, but there are 
enough hints, half-stated themes, and 
parallels running through the entire se­
ries to lead readers to develop their own 
thematic comprehension of the whole, 
raising questions that demand answers. 

One major question is left very much 
unaddressed, although there has been 
some discussion of the issue over the 
years—the international equivalency of 
degrees. Each country covered in these 
volumes has established its own form of 
professional training of librarians based on 
its own educational traditions. Although 
it is apparent that these traditions repre­
sent important differences, it is less appar­
ent that the credentials awarded for the 
completion of the programs leading to pro­
fessional status in the different countries 
are appreciably different. The question of 
equivalency of degrees, and the potential 
for professional enrichment through inter­
national efforts at training and employing 
librarians and other information profes­
sionals, have been seemingly hampered by 
a few hegemonic national traditions. Ap­



 

498 College & Research Libraries 

parently, some effort in this direction is 
being made at the University of Iceland 
and in the Nordic countries, at 
Aberystwith, and in Australia through the 
National Office of Overseas Skills Recog­
nition. U.S. schools have had a large num­
ber of foreign students as have had, pre­
sumably established schools in other coun­
tries. Where these students go after gradu­
ation and what influence they may have 
on library development in their own coun­
tries remain something of a mystery. 

Included are articles that address the 
demographic characteristics of students, 
but none that really answer the questions 
of why students come to the schools in 
the first place or why they choose a par­
ticular school over others. There are also 
curricular questions that need to be in­
vestigated. Each of these volumes deals 
with academic traditions that differ, 
sometimes radically, but there does seem 
to be an international consensus on a com­
mon core of library and information stud­
ies that has been created either through 
cultural transfer or because this particu­
lar knowledge has been found to be es­
sential to the work of all librarians. 

The articles presented in this series re­
veal a, perhaps inevitable, time lag be-

Index to advertisers 
Amer. Economic Association 462 
Archival Products 503 
Assoc. of Christian Librarians 505 
Biosis 439 
Blackwell’s Book Services 453 
Bowker 411 
CHOICE 476, 492 
CQ Books 404 
EBSCO Cover 4 
Endocrine Society 477 
Greenwood Publishing 403 
Haworth Press Cover 3 
ISI 407 
Library Technologies 463 
M. Moleiro Editor 425 
OCLC 506 
Oxford University Press 478 
SPARC Cover 2 

September 1999 

tween the point they were completed and 
when they were published. The “snap­
shot” envisioned by Roy is more accu­
rately a sort of time-lapse photographic 
series of library education in the 1990s. 
As such, these volumes might be reason­
able acquisitions for libraries serving LIS 
schools or for institutions with an active 
interest in comparative education. In 
many cases, much of the information pre­
sented in these volumes will be available 
in libraries collecting comprehensively in 
these fields, however, the personal nature 
of this series’ essays make them unique. 

It is unfortunate that the series ends 
with these volumes. Poor sales have 
forced the publisher to abandon the 
project. At an average price of almost $100 
per volume, this is not a surprising de­
velopment. At present, the volume on 
Africa edited by the late Michael Wise will 
be published by IFLA and the volume on 
the Arab Gulf States also should be com­
pleted and published by Mansell this 
year. Developments in Central and South 
America, the rest of Western and Eastern 
Europe as well as planned volumes for 
India and Southeast Asia will not be pub­
lished. However, the idea behind this se­
ries is valuable enough to be continued. 
Perhaps other volumes would make a fit­
ting project for several Library Trends is­
sues, which would be the more natural 
format and, at the institutional subscrip­
tion rate of $75 for four quarterly issues, 
would be a much more affordable venue 
for this work. —Lee Shiflett, Louisiana State 
University. 

Kors, Alan Charles, and Harvey A. 
Silverglate. The Shadow University: The 
Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Cam­
puses. New York: Free Press, 1998. 
415p. $27.50 (ISBN 0684853213). LC 98­
8728. 

Readers looking for an engaging polemic 
on political correctness run amuck on our 
nation’s campuses will be delighted to 
find The Shadow University. Kors and 
Silverglate provide scores of detailed, 
appropriately spun, and sufficiently 
alarmist accounts of cases in which cam­