Books for Junior College Libraries: A Selected List of Approximately 19,700 Titles by JamesW. PirieReview by: David GreenThe Library Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Oct., 1970), pp. 453-454Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4309983 .

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REVIEWS 453

The author has sometimes failed to write what she meant. On page 21, "classification numbers were put only on the books and cards" ought to read, "classification numbers only (without Cutter numbers) were, put on the books and cards." On pages 48-49, a para- graph beginning with "even though the ratio of reserve books was increased to provide enough copies" ends with "the ratio was once more reduced, this time to one copy for seven students"; yet the ratio in question moved in the same direction on both occasions! The patient reader, if he pauses to translate what is written to what must be meant, can deter- mine why South Carolina excluded journals from its undergraduate library (p. 73), but patience may be overtaxed by the time he reads (p. 133) that "total items borrowed showed that every undergraduate used approx- imately eighteen books during the first year of operation."

It should be unnecessary to suggest to a professional association that anything worth publishing is also worth editing.

EDWIN E. WILLIAMS

Harvard University Library

Books for Junior College Libraries: A Se- lected List of Approximately 19,700 Titles. Compiled by JAMES W. PIRE. Chicago: American Library Association, 1969. Pp. x+452. $35.00. As early as 1937, the American Library

Association was involved in sponsoring a book-selection guide for junior colleges when it published Foster Mohrhardt's compilation of A List of Books for Junior CoUege Li- braries (Chicago, 1937). A second substantial effort, edited by Frank J. Bertalan, appeared from the Association in 1954, entitled Books for Junior Colleges (Chicago, 1954). During the fall of 1965, James W. Pine was selected as editor of a new book list for junior college libraries which was published last year and contains four and five times as many entries as its predecessors.

Designed to serve as a guide for book selec- tion in junior and community college libraries, Books for Junior College Libraries aims pri- manly at programs for transfer or liberal arts students. It is the intention of the editor not only to provide materials relevant to typical course offerings but also to suggest books "be-

yond the curricular experience that will arouse and satisfy intellectual curiosity, sharpen wits and the art of communication, and lift students from the attitudes and ideas of their everyday lives" (p. vii). Subjects common to the basic liberal arts curricula of most junior colleges are covered in depth, while those outside the usual teaching areas are covered to a lesser degree. Terminal and vocational courses are outside the scope of this work. A table of subject coverage compares the percentage of works in significant areas with those held by the Lamont Library at Harvard and the undergraduate library at the University of Michigan, as well those listed in Books for College Libraries (Chicago, 1967). No records or films are listed, nor are period- icals covered. This is a list of books, generally hardbound and in print.

The 1937 list, compiled for the Carnegie Corporation, began as a bibliography drawn up by Mohrhardt. Intermediate help came from two consultants for each section, one a profes- sor in a junior college and the other in a uni- versity. Final selection was by Mohrhardt. Bertalan's Books for Junior Colleges solicited suggestions for inclusion from every junior col- lege in the country. The resulting list of more than 50,000 titles was divided into subject areas, each subject list being distributed to three or more junior college faculty members for review and comment before the final selec- tion, based on frequency of nomination, was made.

The selection of titles in Books for Junior College Libraries began with the identification of three junior college libraries with recognized good collections and with a tradition of active library use. The schools selected were Cente- nary College for Women, Hackettstown, New Jersey; Mount San Antonio College, Walnut, California; and San Antonio College, San Anto- nio, Texas. Through a collation of the shelflists of these libraries, a working list of 40,000 titles was formulated and arranged in groups accord- ing to subject interest. These subject lists were distributed to a corps of consultants numbering 425, selected from a list of 1,000 faculty mem- bers and librarians suggested by 175 junior college librarians and by the editor of Choice. Each subject list was evaluated by at least three consultants who rated each book either as essential, desirable, not recommended, or not known. Every consultant was urged to suggest additional titles. These additional titles togeth- er wIth others culled from significant general and specialized bibliographies, book reviews,

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454 THlE LIBRARY QUARTERLY

and bibliographical review articles in Choice were added to the working list. The final selec- tion was made by Pine, who considered con- sultant recommendations, appearance in bibli- ographies, presence in the three libraries sup- plying their shelflists, in-print status, and his own judgment of books.

The subject arrangement of entries is ex- ceedingly convenient and was designed for the list along with a scheme of letters and numbers to designate divisions and subdivisions. By avoiding the usual library classification schemes, works best viewed together for book-selection purposes are not separated by form or period divisions. In the literature sections, for in- stance, authors are arranged alphabetically without regard to chronology, and all works by an author are themselves listed alphabetically without consideration of form, followed by books of biography and criticism. A compari- son with Bro-Dart's Junior College Library Collection (Newark, N.J., 1968) whose entries are arranged in call number (LC) order shows the desirability of the procedure employed in the Pirie volume.

Entries are bibliographically complete, in- clude price, and give the Library of Congress card number. The list is indexed by author and subject but not by title. Uniformly typed entry cards were shingled at the Library of Congress by a method devised and used for their book catalogs. The resulting photo-offset copy is brilliant and easy to read. While the dimen- sions of the new Pirie guide are identical to Bertalan's list of 1954, improved typography and better paper permitted Pirie to include five times as many books.

After spending some time with this new se- lection aid and with its predecessors, and fol- lowing a careful examination of the introduc- tory material, it is evident that we have in Books for Junior College Libraries a well- conceived and carefully planned work achiev- ing a commendable result. Though it probably is not intended to compete with other aids, the new ALA list might be recommended over Helen Wheeler's Basic Book CoUection for the Community College Library (Hamden, Conn., 1968) or Bro-Dart's Junior College Library Colkction. The former, having only 5,000 en- tries, is probably too small to be widely useful, while the latter chose an editorial group of ten librarians for the evaluation of 40,000 sug- gested titles, eliminating junior college subject faculty from the final selecting process.

The failure of tb preface to describe for

junior college administrators and librarians the appropnate use of such a list is a fault. The compiler does not remind us that such lists, though selective, are only guides; they are not ends in themselves, and, naturally, they should never be the substitute for a librarian. Doubt- lessly, this is a familiar admonition, but one that cannot be given too often.

DAVD GREEN University of Chicago Library

Abot Libraries and Librarianship. (In He- brew.) By SHLOMO SHUNAMI. Sifriyat Dani le-madi ve-haskel, no. 80. Jerusalem: R. Mass, 1969. Pp. ix+ 154. IS ?5; $1.50. Shlomo Shunami is not a new name to lovers

of Hebrew bibliography and literature. He gained well-deserved intemational prominence as the author of two distinct editions of the Bibliography of Jewish Bibliographies. It seems, therefore, that a few bio-bibliographical facts are in order. Shunami was born in Munkacs, Hungary, in 1897 and settled in what was then Bnrtish Palestine in 1921 as a young Zionist pioneer. He went to Paris in 1925 to study li- brarianship at the American Library School in that city. He had occasion to work several times in American libraries. His first experience was at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Insti- tute of Religion, Cincinnati campus, the Klau Library, when it was still simply the library of the Hebrew Union College. Later he was in- vited by the officials of Harvard College 1U- brary to help them reorganize the Hebrew Di- vision within Widener Library. He took part in the work of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction which brought almost 1 million volumes to Is- rael from war-torn Europe after World War II. He taught librarianship for a decade at the Hebrew University's Graduate Library School and was employed for the bulk of his profes- sional career at the Jewish National and Uni- versity Library in Jerusalem. He was one of the founders of the Israeli Library Association as well as the first editor of Yad la-kore.

In addition to the tremendous effort that Shunami exerted in order to produce two edi- tions of his Bibliography of Jewish Bibliog- raphies, he wrote a notable number of articles and book reviews. These were published over a span of many years from as early as 1926 until the present time. Unfortunately for contem- porary readers, these bibliographical essays

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