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Book Reviews

Gesamthochschulbibliothek Essen Postjach 10 14 54 4300 Essen 1 Federal Republic of Germany

ELAINE SVENOIUS University I$ Ca~~orn~a Los Angetes

The Future of the Union Catalogue: Proceedings of the International Symposium on the Future of the Union Catalogue, University of Toronto, 21-22 May 1981. C. DONALD COOK, (Ed.), Haworth Press, New York, 1982. - 136 pp, - (Cataloging and classification quarterly; Vol. 2, No. l-2). $19.95 (Pb) ISBN: O-86656-1 75-7.

This book, a special issue of the useful, if erratic in appearance, Cutulog~i~g and classz~catjo~ quarterly, contains nine papers by not unfamihar names on the present and future on the union cataIogue. The term union catalogue, though slightly demode, still carries a lot of class and clout. The massive Manse11 Nat~~nu~ union catalogpre-1956 culminated in the same era that saw the prime of the OCLC On-line union catalogue-the first of the electronic mega union catalogues. These two towering achievements signal the end of the print union catalogue and the early years of its electronic replacement. It is an important and interesting time for union catalogues, and, therefore, a good time for a conference and publication of this sort,

The introductory paper is interesting and well written. James Govan is somewhat self deprecating in providing a good survey of the present and future opportunities and problems of card catalogues. He clearly-and which ARL Director does not?-understands the value of money and its relative scarcity. In the light of this understanding, he covers the issues of standardization, of networks, and of the lack of, and need for, information of solid worth about union catalogues and their variants. His conclusions are cautiously optimistic.

Stephen Salmon’s lengthy paper covers such matters as the nature of records in modern union catalogues, the purposes to which union cataIogues may be put, single consolidated records vs multiple records for single copies, and centralized vs distributed data bases. His paper is illustrated by many figures.

William Kurmey’s and Margaret Beckman’s papers concentrate on modern technological changes. Mr. Kurmey’s paper is the more speculative and futuristic. Ms. Beckman deals with local service and, in particular, with the implications of the configuration of her University of Guelph system and its relationship with other systems. Both are informative and combine practicality and vision.

Tom Delsey’s paper is, as usual with this writer, incisive and analytical. It deals with the many aspects of standardization in the context of union catalogues. Mr. Delsey concentrates on the enormously greater dimensions of the standardization problem in union as opposed to local catalogues. Maintaining consistency and quality in the catalogue of one institution is a thankless task enough; how much more stony the task of integrating records from autonomous institutions with different missions. Mr. Delsey addresses the questions of levels of cataloguing (for example, the monographic series level versus the monographic Level), minimal data sets, and the correlation of related entries.

The next two papers are descriptive and factual in nature. Joseph Howard (a High Panjandrum at L.C.) describes “The Library of Congress union catalog experience” (a little like “The Mount Everest climbing experience”) and concentrates on the National union catalogue-its present and future. Mr. Howard describes the problems, economic and organizational, of the manual production of NUC and the automation and registerization of that massive tool. He, too, talks of standards- especially the NLBR (National level bibliographic record) project and MARC.

Jean Plaister describes the United Kingdom LASER project-an ambitious computerization of an interlibrary loan union catalogue. Her paper is bestrewn with, to North American readers, exotic acronyms (EMMA, LOCAS, COPOL, etc. ad infinitum) which make the paper tough sledding. This is a pity, because her short paper raises some pertinent questions which transcend the U.K. scene.

Book Reviews 265

Samuel Rothstein provides a glum coda in the final paper. A self described “sceptical outsider”, Mr. Rothstein is clearly cynical (in the Wildean sense) about library cooperation and, by extension, about one of its chief tools-the union catalogue. By his own testimony, his scepticism is based on a recent personal survey of cooperation and networks. Either he was unlucky or his survey was less than comprehensive, because all of the examples he cites are of undue expense, insignificant resource sharing (a term to which, for some reason, he appears to take exception), and of futility and failure. In particular, he takes a jaundiced view of shared cataloguing based on the experience of one library which leads him to a demonstrably mistaken conclusion. His answer to the, in his view, failure of cooperation are institutions modelled on the British Library Lending Division (formerly the National Lending Library). He does not explain with any plausibility how a British system (with all its differences in geography, society, and cultural history) could readily be recreated in North America. I wish Mr. Rothstein had taken a more cheerful and positive look at the reality and complexity of local, state, provincial, and regional cooperation, but if one starts out “disinterested and sceptical,” I guess a negative conclusion is very likely.

Susan Martin provides a concise and useful summary of the issues addressed by the conference. This book deals with a good and timely topic addressed comphrensively and readably.

Recommended.

Director, General Services Departments University qf Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

MICHAEL GORMAN

Developing a Data Dictionary System. J. VAN DUYN, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey 1982, 218~. $25.00 ISBN: o-13-204289-4.

A data element dictionary is an important instrument for the organization of any set of data, whether computerized or not. Due to their close affinity to index languages and thesauri, data dictionaries form an area of study where the interests of workers in business data processing and information storage and retrieval converge. Thesaurus builders can learn from data dictionary builders and vice versa. Thus, a good book on this topic, combining thoughts from both fields, would be highly welcome. But ,a good book this is not. It is so bad that I herewith nominate it for the worst book of the year award. The reader cannot form a clear and complete image of what a data dictionary is and does until the very end of the book, in the description of the UCC Ten Data Dictionary/Manager. In the beginning, we are offered such definitions as

data catal’og: a structured listing of data elements with or without a description of the listed elements. dura dictionury : an organized compilation of data elements, data items, attributes, structure, and characteristics. (p. 22)

Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the definition and with the benefits of a data dictionary. There are several overlapping lists of benefits; none of them shows a logical structure. Chapter 5 deals with contents and functions. Functions overlap with benefits and the discussion of content is skimpy. There are two sample data dictionary records, but nowhere is there a comprehensive list of all the attributes of a data element that one might consider for inclusion in the data dictionary, nor, for each attribute, a discussion of the uses to which it may be put and the costs that arise from its inclusion. Chapter 6, “Steps Prior to Building a Data Dictionary System,” seems to address the problem of collecting the data to be included in the data dictionary. There is no mention of a requirements :study that would determine the uses of the various data elements present in the files of an organization. Such a study is crucial if one wants to make the data dictionary the basis of user-oriented data base design. Chapter 7, “Building a Data Dictionary System,” mainly expounds obvious steps in the planning process, but does not lose a word on introducing a logical structure in the set of all data elements collected so that related data elements are brought together and duplicate data elements, defined under different names, can be recognized. Several chapters, particularly Chapters 8 and 9, contain reprints from actual system descriptions, some data dictionary systems and some not, but all written for in-house use and not for a larger audience. Besides the UCC Ten description mentioned above, the only part of the book which may be of some use is a table commencing on page 156 which compares seven commercially available data dictionary/directory system packages with respect to 40 criteria (which, needless to say, are organized