Handbook of Special Librarianship and Information Work (7th edition)

Citation

James, S. (1999), "Handbook of Special Librarianship and Information Work (7th edition)", Library Review, Vol. 48 No. 8, pp. 413-424. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.1999.48.8.413.5

At one stage of my career an earlier edition of this work was just about my bible, as the work no doubt has been over the years to many other special or industrial librarians. Now we have a lot of different names and supposedly new concepts, of which “knowledge management” seems the latest and just about the most pretentious. Nor is that just my snide comment; Alison Scammell refers in the Introduction to the value of traditional skills within a new environment: paradoxically, the extraordinary technological advances and the sheer volume of information now available on a global scale are causing a return to the basic principles of information management. Many of the functions associated with traditional library procedures are being re‐examined in the context of today’s information imperatives and are proving to be of fundamental importance.”

That is a very true and important statement with implications far beyond the structure and content of this book. This whole process is happening at the very time when as a profession (in the UK at least) we are busy abandoning most of our basic traditional professional skills – not least among them classification and cataloguing which have taken on a broader significance in the information age just as UK LIS schools are deleting them almost entirely from their curricula – in favour of a superficial (“market‐led”?) following of current fads. How many of our current professional ills have as their root cause the abandonment of just those skills which defined us as librarians (or documentalists, or information specialists)?

A bible this remains for many (surely most) information practitioners. It is, of course, thoroughly revised and brought into our information age (according to Alison Scammell we are still only on its brink, although to many of us it feels as though we are well inside it). It is five years since the last edition, during which information and communication technologies, and above all the Internet, have transformed many aspects of the information scene. So, there are chapters on “The role of the special librarian in the electronic era” and the Internet, as well as revised chapters on “Information technology in the information centre” and “Towards the electronic library?” (note the questionmark – Charles Oppenheim’s, not necessarily mine). But they are only four out of 18 chapters: the other 14 all deal with fundamental aspects of running a special library (or any kind of library for that matter), from analysing information needs and understanding end‐users, through such as the enquiry service, serials management and copyright, to managing people and marketing the information service.

All are written by appropriate authors – practitioners and experienced academics mainly – and all the chapters are full of sound common‐sense applicable advice, with useful check‐lists and examples as appropriate. Six case study chapters show the use of ICT in various special library settings for specific purposes: intranet developments, electronic publishing, computer aided learning, cross‐domain database searching, and selection of an integrated automation system. These are well chosen and illustrate the greater range of applications of information work (or special librarianship) today. Each chapter has lists of references, although in the circumstances of a handbook such as this annotated lists of further reading might have been useful also. A general index helps the user find more specific advice or information. And advice and information there are still here a‐plenty. Over the years this has surely been one of Aslib’s most consistently useful publications, which had established its own niche even before the relevant earlier stage of my own career, and has retained it succssfully by regular up‐dating into the electronic information age. It remains a bible for increasing numbers of our profession in non‐standard and non‐library employment, and is also of interest and value both for LIS students and practitioners in other fields of the profession.