Information Resources: A Challenge to American Science and Industryby Jesse H. Shera; Allen Kent; James W. Perry

Information Resources: A Challenge to American Science and Industry by Jesse H. Shera;Allen Kent; James W. PerryReview by: I. A. WarheitThe Library Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Jan., 1959), pp. 67-69Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4304858 .

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REVIEWS 67

close correlation between growth in subject and the development of the educational program.

Jackson's fourth paper deals with the subject distribution of the collections in the University of Illinois Library. Basically, the author has compared the development of the coHections in various subject fields with those at -Harvard and Northwestern. In addition to the subject distribution of the collections in the three insti- utions, there is also a comparative distribution in ten subjects. The study is useful in showing quantitatively how the institutions have been building their collections.

The fifth study, which originally appeared in Hispania in 1955, is a description of the strength and weakness of collections in the HIispanic literatures in the Newberry Library and nine university libraries. General resources, peninsular Spanish literature, and Spanish- American literature are considered. In addition to general statistics of holdings, the author also shows holdings of seven libraries of 169 titles listed in the Handbook of Latin American Studies and the amount of duplication in holdings of the libraries of these titles. Jackson concludes that the "Midwestern libraries contain important collections of Spanish literature and that these collections are particularly notable in certain areas."

The final study considers the holdings of Spanish-American literature in the Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid), the Bibliothbque Nationale (Paris), the Biblioth6que Royale (Brussels), the British Museum (London), and the Kon- inklijke Bibliotheek (The Hague). The 169 titles checked in the study of the midwestern libraries were also checked in these libraries. The findings show that the European libraries are collecting less current Latin-American ma- terials than the seven libraries in the Midwest. Of the 169 titles examined, 118 were not held by any library. Most publications owned came from the larger countries. The author concludes that American libraries have closer ties to Latin America, that economic conditions have re- duced the buying power of European libraries, and that the poor organization of the biblio- graphical services of Latin-American countries has had some effect upon the failure of Euro- pean libraies to be aware of certain publications.

This booklet is an important contribution to the literature of resources from the standpoint of quantification. However, there is minimal discussion of actual titles (this is done to some

extent in the study of the collections of midwestern research libraries). Jackson has begun a series of analyses which research librarians should find helpful. It is hoped that he will continue these studies, as he is spending the current year in Argentina.

MAURICE F. TAUBEt

School of Library Service Columbia University

Information Resources: A Challenge to Amer- ican Science and Industry. By JESSE H.

. SHERA, ALLEN KENT, and JAMES W. PERRY. (Based on the Special Meeting of the Council on Documentation Research, February 3-4, 1958, Western Reserve University.) Cleve- land: Press of Western Reserve University, 1958. (Distributed by Interscience Publish- ers, Inc.) Pp. xii+214. $5.00. On October 4, 1957, Sputnik I was put into

orbit. This profoundly shocked American think- ing and aroused great anxiety about the ade- quacy of American institutions to meet the Russian challenge. Education, information processing, and all the other handmaidens of science and technology came under close scru- tiny. Loud were the criticisms of American practices, and loud was the praise for the Rus- sian institutions that had made possible the phenomenal advance of what had been so long considered an extremely backward society.

In the field of documentation it was the Soviet Institute of Scientific Information, organized only since 1953, that greatly impressed many Americans. As a result, a whole series of proposals were put forth immediately after October 4, 1957, to the effect that the United States should also establish an information center similar to the Russian Institute of Scientific Information. These ranged from a fifty-million- dollar proposal by the Stanford Research Insti- tute to a quarter-million-dollar cure-alls put forth by organizations and individuals who obviously had little or no knowledge of the problems involved.

In December, 1957, the School of Library Science at Western Reserve University and its Center for Documentation and Communication Research distributed a paper entitled "A Plan for the Creation of a National Center for the Coordination of Scientific and Technical Infor- mation." They invited a select group to meet



68 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY

m Cleveland, February 3 and 4, 1958, to con- sider this plan. The book under review is the transcript of this meeting.

The first part of the book presents Western Reserve's reasons for the need of a national center and discusses how the center would be organized and operated. Part II is made up of statements from representatives of industry, government, libraries, abstracting services, and technical societies explaining the present status of information services and the projected needs. Part III is a brief summary of the meeting, and Part IV consists of several appendixes, most of which are descriptions of Western Reserve's machines and methods.

The main theses put forth by Western Re- serve were that present "techniques for the organization of scientific literature" were "ob- solete and inefficient" and "bankrupt and out- moded" and that a national center should be established to co-ordinate existing services and "provide such infornation services as may be required to fill existing gaps in various fields." These services are to provide "direct information . . . in response to specific requests" (i.e. reference services), "publish abstracts," and "work toward complete translation of the world's scientific and technical literature."

The greater part of the Western Reserve presentation dealt with the system to be used for processing information in order to provide the proposed central reference service. Essen- tially, this was to consist of preparing a "tele- graphic abstract" in accordance with the system developed by the Center for Documentation and Communication Research at Western Re- serve University, coding this abstract, and then recording it on a search medium-tape or film. The standard computers or Minicard equipment would be used to make "a total search of each document in the file, or a 'fail-safe' method of searching." The quantity of material which would have to be absorbed into the searching record is estimated at 400,000 documents a year. A search of ten years' literature would cover four million documents; twenty-five years' literature, ten million. Apparently the rapid increase in rate of document production is disregarded. The cost of processing this mass is estimated to be $26,500,000. The cost of quarters and capital equipment would be about $9,500,000 and operating cost $5,000,000. The number of inquiries handled would average about thirty a day, although the actual capacity would be higher.

AU this is based on the supposition that the chosen system is capable of storing all the information in retrievable form, that the machines will have a scanning speed of 300,000 documents per hour, that there will be an "au- tomatic dictionary" which will permit auto- matic encoding and recording of the material, and that an adequate machine translation will be a fact. Present designs and pilot studies to do these things could be developed into opera- tional tools in about two years, so that within ten years there could be a number of information centers in several of the large cities and at a number of the larger government and indus- trial organizations.

Except for some expressions of skepticism, the assembled group in general did not question the mechanical capabilities of these future devices. It is difficult to argue with the future except to question the time-scale forecast. The main deterrent in everyone's mind to accepting the Western Reserve proposal was the realiza- tion that there is very little information available on which to base any program. No one could tell how effective the present abstracting services are. No one knew what the research scientist needs. How could the material, once it became available, be brought to the person needing it? What evidence was there that the machines will be able to do the job? What did the proponents mean by saying that every document should be indexed and every foreign-lan- guage publication translated regardless of quality?

How large was the problem? How could the processing of thirty reference requests a day possibily contribute very much toward filling the needs of hundreds of thousands of scien- tists? In view of the extreme difficulty of trying to formulate a question and communicating it, how effective could a distant central service be? Would it not become merely a maker of bibli- ographies as have previous attempts at central- ized information services?

With so many fundamental questions to be answered, it seemed foolhardy to approach government and industry with a request for $36,000,000 to finance a scheme that was not even ready for the pilot plant. A comprehensive investigation was obviously necessary. The final decision, therefore, was a recommendation by the representatives at the conference that a study program should be undertaken, under the sponsorship of the National Academy of Sci- ences, to determine the methods to be adopted



REVIEWS 69

for meeting science information needs in the United States.

I. A. WARHEIT

Atomic Energy Commission Washington, D.C.

Information Systems in Documentation. Edited by JESSE H. SHERA, ALLEN KENT, and JAMES W. PERRY. ("Advances in Documentation and Library Science," Vol. II, ed. JESSE H. SHERA.) New York: Interscience Publishers, 1957. Pp. xix+639. $12.00.

Information Systems in Documentation is the report of the second Cleveland symposium, held in April, 1957, under the auspices of West- ern Reserve's School of Library Science and fifteen other sponsors. As is the nature of a symposium, the value of this book depends en- tirely on the values of the individual papers.

The book is divided into six parts: (1) "Fundamentals in System Design"; (2) "Docu- mentation Problems in Specialized Fields"; (3) "Semiautomatic Systems"; (4) "Systems Using Accounting or Statistical Machines"; (5) "Sys- tems Using Computers or Computer-Like De- vices"; and (6) "Cooperative Information Processing." Parts I, II, and VI contain the well-known undercooked articles concerning "these are the lines we are working along, although we haven't got very far yet; and this is what remains to be done- we think everyone should start working toward better things." While this sort of article may be valuable his- torically in tracing the development of documentation, it has a very limited use in the present except to those theorists who are now active in the field and, quite probably, are al- ready familiar with the theories presented.

The best papers in the book are in Parts III and IV, which contain case reports from individuals and companies who have installed various modern literature-searching devices. The organization's need for such devices is described together with the processes of installing them, a description of their operation, and the quality and quantity of the results they produce. Part V contains similar reports, but the devices described are so exotic as to be too esoteric, too expensive, and too specialized for most of us. In addition, at the time of the conference, the devices described in Part V were still in the

developmental stage, albeit the late developmental stage.

Within Parts III and IV there are excellent articles describing experiences with those documentation devices or systems which are most discussed nowadays. The American Society for Metals classification system and its use with edge-notched cards is described by Marjorie Hyslop (chap. x). The use of the same classification with IBM equipment is described by Barbara H. Weil and E. A. Clapp (chap. xx). Claude W. Brenner describes the installation and operation of a Zatocoding system (chap. xi) prefaced with a poignant introduction tell- ing of the documentary confusion from which the need for such a system became apparent.

"Co-ordinate indexing" in one forn or an- other is described in several places. Patricia A. Mines (chap. idi) describes the application of Documentation Incorporated's simplest, un- mechanized Uniterm System; W. A. Wildhack and Joshua Stem (chap. xiii) describe the same principle applied to Peek-a-boo cards; Gilbert L. Peakes (chap. xix) describes the application of IBM equipment to the principle.

The book is printed by photo-offset from IBM typewriter composition with justified right-hand margins but on a not very high- quality paper. At $12.00 it seems a little over- priced. Although the book is well illustrated, this reviewer sorely missed the lantern slides, closed-circuit television, tape recordings, flash- ing lights, ringing bells, clicking machinery, and transatlantic telephone calls which accompanied the papers as originally presented.

EMMETT B. MCGEEVER

University of Tennessee Knoxville

Die Entwicklung der wissenschaftlichen Bibli- otheken Jugoslawiens seit 1945. By KLAUS- DETLEV GROTHUSEN. ("Arbeiten aus dem Bibliothekar-Lehrinstitut des Landes Nord- rhein-Westfalen," No. 14.) Cologne: Greven Verlag, 1958. Pp. 176.

By American standards, Yugoslavia is a small country-slightly smaller than Oregon. But in political significance Yugoslavia looms large. It has had a long and checkered history, becoming a separate political entity only after the Austro- Hungarian empire collapsed. It was first a mon- archy-for a time absolute and for a time con-



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Information Resources: A Challenge to American Science and Industryby Jesse H. Shera; Allen Kent; James W. Perry