Lyle’s Administration of the College Library, 1997 text edition

Citation

Calvert, P. (1999), "Lyle’s Administration of the College Library, 1997 text edition", Asian Libraries, Vol. 8 No. 2, pp. 60-61. https://doi.org/10.1108/al.1999.8.2.60.6

Guy Lyle’s first edition of The Administration of the College Library appeared in 1944. The fifth edition was published in 1992, which is testimony to the author’s success in writing a practical yet theoretically sound introduction to library administration. The target market of the fifth edition is library school students and individuals new to academic libraries. This text edition is much reduced in size from the fifth edition (which is 603 pp.) in order to reduce its cost to library school students, and at the same time produce a book of a manageable size for class use.

Lyle tried to avoid writing a theoretical treatise on library management which he felt would be unattractive to practitioners. But he also knew the weakness of a purely experiential approach that gave readers no underlying conceptual understanding of the problems they were to face in their libraries. This edition maintains Lyle’s intention and is very much a middle ground text.

Chapters 1 to 6 of the fifth edition are largely unchanged here, and cover the contextual background of college libraries, including the evolution of higher education in the US, the growth of academic librarianship, the library’s place on campus, its legal status, and the organisation of the library. The last‐mentioned chapter (the sixth in the text) contains some simple yet useful guidance on formulating goals and objectives, and on the most suitable structure for the library’s organisation. Remaining chapters cover user services, the library staff, planning issues, and evaluation. They are all important topics, and this text is useful as an introduction for the complete beginner.

What is missing is consideration of the rapid change in the academic library environment which has come with new information technology, greater customer demands for service quality, and a much tougher financial environment for all public sector library managers. There is not enough on communication between the manager and the other staff, nor on personnel management in general.

There are bibliographical notes following each chapter, but no end bibliography. The index is adequate. The Appendix gives the text of Standards for College Libraries, 1995 edition. Quite a bit of the text is useful to managers and students only in the US, yet its budget price and simple yet solid content make it a useful purchase for Australasian libraries serving library schools.