Librarianship: An Introduction

Citation

Vilar, P. (2009), "Librarianship: An Introduction", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 65 No. 5, pp. 861-864. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410910983182

As said on the cover, the book is intended for students of librarianship and new entrants to the profession. We also read an ambitious statement that it gives a complete overview of all aspects of professional librarianship in the twenty‐first century, and offers an up‐to‐date, authoritative analysis of modern libraries and librarianship.

The book consists of 26 chapters, introduction and an epilogue. The chapters are divided in seven parts. Each part, and also each chapter, has an introduction and a summary. At the end of the book there are a glossary, a resource guide, and an index. Part 1 carries a somewhat provocative title “Libraries and information services: evolution or revolution?”. The content itself is not so provocative. It covers library history, types of library service and of libraries, library design and the future of libraries. Part 2 is about library and information resources and services. It deals with content, storage and delivery, library services, collection management and collection development, and preservation and digitization. Information organization and access is the topic of the third part of the book. The four chapters cover classification, cataloguing, bibliographic formats and metadata, subject indexing and vocabulary control, and information retrieval. Part four deals with library and information users and society. Its three chapters deal with themes such as library as social institution, services to library users, and government legislation and policies. In part five the reader finds out about library technologies. The four chapters cover the fundamentals of computing and the information age, IT standards (databases, markup and the Internet), library management systems and digital libraries. Part 6 presents management and marketing in libraries. Chapters are: The importance of management in librarianship, Core management skills, Missions, planning, projects and partnerships, and marketing in libraries. Two chapters of part seven cover education and research in librarianship. The epilogue tries to bring attention to the classic dilemma of today's librarianship: is it obsolete or not?

It is not easy to compile a thorough and comprehensive coverage of all aspects of such a wide and interdisciplinary area, which LIS undoubtedly is. The authors have certainly made a good attempt at it, although in some parts, perhaps inevitably, they have done the job better than in others.

The first thing which one notices is quite a lot of repetition of similar information, which is due to numerous introductions, summaries, and an epilogue, which introduce and summarize basically the same things. Although repetition is the mother of wisdom, it would probably be wiser to allocate some of that space to more thorough coverage of certain topics. For example, it is rather odd to see most of the chapter on collection management and collection development dedicated to print materials with emphasis on ISBN and ISSN, and weeding, while circulation is not mentioned at all.

Another thing, which comes to attention is rather superficial coverage of some areas which are considered the core of librarianship. Already the above example could fall into this category, but, there are also others, of which we mention a few. Some contents, e.g. information services, are scattered throughout the book in several places, which makes it difficult for the reader trying to get a complete picture of the subject. It seems odd to find one ten page chapter covering three huge topics: cataloguing, bibliographic formats and metadata. Interestingly, the chapter tells the reader about history of library catalogues, bibliographies, objectives of catalogues, process of cataloguing, bibliographic formats, and metadata, but nothing on who makes catalogue entries, how they go about doing it, what is important in the process, not to mention almost complete lack of catalogue codes (with exception of AACR2, which is dealt with in two paragraphs). Another such example is the chapter on classification which tells the reader about the principles of knowledge organization as the basis of classification, types of classifications where it leaves out non‐numeric classification schemes, and gives examples of a few, so called, major classification schemes (of which colon classification is not relay such, it is interesting rather due to its author, Ranganathan). Thus we must say that the chapter does not provide a clear overview of the area; on top of that, it is full of unsound and misleading statements; some examples are given in the next paragraph.

Careful reading reveals numerous inconsistencies, we may even call some of them mistakes, which should not appear in a basic text, intended for students and new LIS professionals. Here are some examples: When introducing different types of libraries, the authors completely omit school libraries, although it later turns out that they are dealt with in the section on academic libraries. This decision seems odd, if not completely inappropriate. In the chapter on classification we find rather bizarre statements: that classification serves as a link between the catalogue entry and the shelf, that library classification is the same as bibliographic classification, etc. The chapter on collection management gives more strange advice, namely it tells the reader that it is good to know the size of the book when ordering it, because this way the librarian also knows if he/she needs to order additional shelves.

There are some strong points, which need to be mentioned. These undoubtedly include parts six and seven of the book, covering marketing and management, and education in research in librarianship. They give a nice and clear overview of important points in these areas.

We were also a bit disappointed with the remaining three parts of the book, glossary, resource guide and index. The question is what were the criteria for compiling the glossary, since it seems rather unbalanced and inconsistent. On the one hand it includes very detailed entries, such as RT for related term in a thesaurus, but on the other lacks more global librarianship terms like ISBD, collection development, etc. The resource guide (referred to in the list of contents as “Resource list”), is in fact a list of information resources, mostly web sites, giving additional information on each of the seven parts of the book. We could not help wondering how they will help the reader and why the authors did not include them at the end of each part. The index is also quite disappointing. Not only it is not very comprehensive, it also contains numerous mistakes. One of the more amusing ones is the entry “layout”, which leads the reader to a blank page. The entry “cataloguing” does not refer to the main chapter on this topic. Some cross‐references lead to each other, e.g. “pre‐coordinate indexing systems” and “cost‐coordinate indexing systems”. We also could not help noticing that some cross‐references are quite odd for a book on librarianship: “library catalogues” instead of “catalogues”. We find some blind references, which are also inconsistent. DCMI guides the reader to the nonexistent Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, while Organization for Economic Co‐operation and Development guides to OECD, which also does not exist in the index.

To summarize: We would not recommend this text as a basic text for a LIS education programme at a university level. We can't avoid a feeling that the book somehow can not decide what it wants to be, a textbook, a manual, a career guide or something fourth, and all this results in a rather scattered and disorganized product. A good technique for a textbook is the introduction of numerous thinking points and review questions, which appear in the text and help the reader check his/her understanding of the material. It is also good to provide further reading, although in this book we find it in some parts, and not in others. But, there are also things, which should not find their way in a textbook. It is rather unusual to see large number of references in the text which can be found in some chapters; such a technique is, of course, much more common in scientific writing. But the main problem, as said before, is that too many topics are dealt with too superficially, also the style of writing is often too casual or journalistic. The result is inadequate coverage of librarianship as a whole. Due to all this, it seems that the book would be best suited as a starting manual for fresh entrants in librarianship who do not have formal LIS education. What it does best is explain in lay terms what day‐to‐day library work is like, thus acting more as a career guide for non‐librarians than a basic textbook. It seems that the book has become the victim of trying to be both comprehensive and concise.