Changing Patterns in Information Retrieval: Tenth Annual National Information RetrievalColloquium, May 3-4, 1973, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by Carol FenichelReview by: Vladimir SlameckaThe Library Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Apr., 1976), p. 199Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4306654 .

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REVIEWS 199

educators and lay persons. My fear is that the book will be read and found threaten- ing by some administrators or never read. If this publication is read, debated openly, reread, shared among those concerned, adapted in part, considered in long-range goals, or modified to meet specific needs, it will serve the profession and the purpose of its creation-better media service to all users.

Elinor Gay Greenfield, Table Mound Elementaty School, Dubuque, Iowa

Changing Patterns in Information Retrieval: Tenth Annual National Information Retrieval Collo- quium, May 3-4, 1973, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Edited by CAROL FENICHEL. Washing- ton, D.C.: American Society for Information Science, 1974. Pp. 175. 515.00. ISBN 0-87715-106-7.

Occasional stocktaking of progress is a useful service to scholarly and professional fields alike, inasmuch as it helps to detect patterns and trends of their past and of their probable future development. In the professional and scholarly field concerned with the bibliographic control, availability, and use of recorded knowledge-a field rather inaccurately referred to as "information storage and retrieval"-such stocktaking has been conducted in minute detail since 1965 by the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. On the other hand, authoritative state-of-the-art analyses of longer time spans are quite rare; indeed, Changing Patterns in Information Retrieval is able to refer only to one precedent in the United States, the 1961 annual meeting of the American Documentation Institute (now the American Society for Information Sci- ence). The dozen years which had elapsed since this ADI meeting thus provided the sponsors of the tenth annual National Information Retrieval Colloquium, held in May 1973 in Philadelphia, with a tailor-made conference purpose-to take an "objec- tive look, in order to predict the directions in which this field is going" (preface).

The result is neither objective nor predictive. Except for R. S. Taylor's thoughtful and all-too-brief keynote address on "change," the reader will find that the colloqui- um had little to say about future directions of the field. The 4 state-of-the-art papers which determined the subject domain and the format of the major sessions ("User Behavior," by D. W. King and Lee E. Palmour; "Strategies for Organizing and Searching," by M. E. Stevens; "Technology for Storage and Retrieval of Bibliograph- ic Data," by L. Schultz; and "Information as a Product," byJ. W. Murdock) have the flavor of knowledgeable, but personal and eclectic, commentaries, rather than of ob- jective studies of trends. As such, they offer a readable and often perceptive perspec- tive on a decade of efforts which made present-day systems and services possible- efforts which are, however, treated much more exhaustively and systematically in the chapters of the Annual Review.

Each state-of-the-art paper is followed by short, prepared statements of several panelists; these 14 brief papers offer, for the most part, sketchy comrnents on the field and its activities. The discussions at the sessions are not recorded in the published proceedings but are available separately as a transcribed hard copy ($5.00) or micro- fiche ($1.50) from the ASIS National Auxiliary Publications Service.

The annual information retrieval colloquia are sponsored by the Colloquium on Information Retrieval, Inc., a group of a dozen organizations in the Pennsylvania area.

Vladimir Slamecca, Georgia Institute of Technology

Communication, Knowledge and the Libranran. By K. J. McGARRY. Hamden, Conn.: Lin- net Books; London: Clive Bingley, 1975. Pp. 207. $10.50. ISBN 0-208-01369-3. The concept of librarian as the receiver, organizer, custodian, and distributor of all of a culture's preservable knowledge would seem to call for a theory of communication

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