World Librarianship: A Comparative Study by Richard Krzys; Gaston LittonReview by: W. L. WilliamsonThe Library Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 2 (Apr., 1984), pp. 202-204Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4307730 .

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202 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY

gleaned from archives of the Soci&e typographique de NeuchAtel (printers of the Encyclopfdie); Francis Walton on Andreas Janus Lascaris (1445-1534), scholar, collector, and politician, who was respected in all major courts of Europe; Elizabeth Eisenstein on social and political effects of the invention of printing; Hans-Joachim Koppitz on problems in the history of the German book trade and a new Kapp-Goldfriedrich; H.-J. Martin on social aspects of the printing and distribution of books in the ancien regime, with particular attention to the provinces and to popular lilterature; and Frangoise Parent on popular books and cabinets de lecture in Paris during the Restoration (1815-30).

Valuable as these essays are, most would probably have appeared elsewhere in some form. The basic significance of this collection lies in the various essays on the neo-Hellenic book in the latter phases of the Osmanli domination and the early period of independence. There are studies of book production and distri- bution at the end of the Turkish period (G. D. Bokos); the Greek book as seen through Greek periodicals before the revolution of 1821 (E. N. Frankiskos); the popular book and its readership (Alkis Anghelou); the occidental book in the atmosphere of Hellenic culture (C. Th. Dimaras); Greek libraries in the Turkish period (Loukia Droulia); Phoskolos (Loukia Droulia); bourgeois ideology in prefaces to neo-Hellenic manuals of philosophy during the Enlightenment (Rox- ane Argyropoulou); neo-Hellenic scientific thought of the eighteenth century (lannis Caras); attitudes of Greek intellectuals toward publication in Greek at the end of the eighteenth century (A. Koumarianou); correlation between oral tradition and the printed word (Alexis Politis); discrepancies between manu- scripts and printed texts, with particular reference to Greek books (Tr. E. Sclav6nitis); the Greek book in Roumania (Cornelia Papacostea-Danielopoulu); books and readers in Bulgaria in the Turkish period (Nadja Danova); and bibliographies of Hellenic bibliography (Thomas Papadopoulos). Here are the prolegomena to a major history of the book in modern Greece. From the quality and content of these studies it is clear that such a work is quite feasible.

The title page is in Greek, translated exactly in the heading of this review from the facing French title page. Contributions are in Greek, French, or English (including Koppitz), and there are r6sum6s in French of essays in Greek and in Greek of those in English and French. There is a discussion section, not particu- larly important, of which there is no translation or resume, which really should have been provided. Even the classicist has some trouble with modern Greek unless he knows what is coming, but there are relatively few contemporary bibliographers and only exceptional rare book librarians who know even the classical language. There is a complete index.

Lawrence S. Thompson, University of Kentucky

World Librarianship: A Comparative Study. By RICHARD KRzYs and GASTON LIT-

TON, with the assistance of ANN HEWIrr. Books in Library and Information Science, vol. 42. New York: Marcel Dekker, 1983. Pp. xiv + 239. $38.50. ISBN 0- 8247-1731-7.

This ambitious work seeks to establish a new field of study to be called world librarianship. It aims to analyze "the worldwide aspects of our profession" by depicting librarianship's "diverse philosophies and services in all parts of the world. . . in the form of a comparative study" (p. ix). The goal of this new field is,

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REVIEWS 203

through "international standardization and cooperation," to satisfy the "biblio- graphic and information needs" of all humanity (p. 201). This new discipline, once fully realized, will then dissolve "into its principal areas" (p. 23), thus developing, within an internationally unified field of study, new specializations. Once the profession has reached its new high state, its logical next step will be "extraterrestrial librarianship" because "the future of civilization, including li- brarianship, we believe, lies in outer space" (p. 203).

Anyone critical of these conceptions must be cautious, for, we are warned, "only experienced researchers and mature students will fully appreciate" this work (p. vi). Perhaps intimidated, I hasten to affirm that the study does indeed have many virtues. In a gracefully written foreword, former director of the Dag Hammerskjold Library Natalia Tyulina speaks of the increasing importance of librarianship "as technology acts as a cultural eraser" (p. vi). International and comparative studies do indeed promise to help us preserve cultural distinc- tiveness and increase our understanding of similarities and differences as sources of insight and generalization. The work as a whole, despite its hyper- boles, is a valuable contribution, for it carefully sets forth the principles of comparative study as expressed by the educationist George Bereday and then meticulously follows those principles to provide a textbook demonstration of the method.

The authors developed eleven rubrics under which to include all aspects of librarianship. They then recruited seven distinguished librarians to carry out, within that framework, "area studies" of the major regions of the world. The area studies, though not published here, form the basis for a comparative study of librarianship throughout the world in the classic four stages of the Bereday method: description, interpretation, juxtaposition, and comparison. The result has value not only as a demonstration of this conception of comparative study but also as an organized compilation of information about librarianship around the world. Once facts about more than one case are juxtaposed in this fashion, the information stimulates and encourages analysis and, often, leads to new insights. Of course, the obverse of these merits is that the scope is limited to the topics originally envisioned, that the characteristics investigated tend to be defined vaguely and to be judged impressionistically, that the descriptions and conclusions tend to be both general and superficial, and that there is a dangerous circularity of reasoning implicit in the method. Yet, for all the limitations, the outcome of this sort of comparative study can often be a better understanding than we would otherwise have.

One problem that critics of the method have with it is a tendency of its advocates to state its capacities and aspirations in grandiose and overblown style. Not content with the quite genuine contributions that can be made, they propose to redefine librarianship as only truly to be understood through comparative study-and what they accept as comparative study must meet rigid and arbitrary criteria, usually those stated by Bereday. An illustration of some of these prob- lems is the concluding promulgation of "Four Laws of World Librarianship," the laws of appropriateness, of interdependence, of partial convergence, and of total convergence (pp. 196-97). Less grandly stated, libraries must fit their settings, their features relate to each other, and library practices will be only partly the same from country to country until universal standardization is achieved.

Beyond this sort of earnest pomposity, to be found in many comparative studies, this particular book has some detailed defects. The footnotes to chapter 1 are badly jumbled: the page reference in note 2 is wrong; note 28 should be to

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204 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY

Winger, not Hessel; notes 34 and 35 should be to Vann, not Winsor; and note 41 should be to Butler, not Munthe. Beyond lapses of this sort, an especially unfortunate mistake comes when, to support a conclusion, the authors quote the Bereday Bible as saying that comparison is "the newest and least well-worked-out state [sic] of comparative procedures" (p. 41). Sadly, Bereday was referring, not to comparison, but to juxtaposition. More substantively, the authors, in their historical review, set aside their otherwise rigid definition of comparative librari- anship so as to claim such figures as Naude, Dury, Edwards, Jewett, Leibniz, and Panizzi as their spiritual forebears. The writings of these and others whom the authors cite are indeed characterized by breadth of vision and awareness of diversity of practice; yet the loose criteria of judgment here applied contrast strangely with the doctrinaire view of comparative study in the rest of the book.

Still, the work does have its merits. It is the product of assiduous effort. It has an impressive earnestness and sincerity of purpose. The information sum- marized has value. And, most important for those interested in comparative studies, it is a faithful demonstration of a method more often described than exemplified.

W. L. Williamson, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Library Education Programmes in Developing Countries with Special Reference to Asia: Proceedings of the Unesco Pre-IFLA Conference Seminar, University of the Philippines, August 15-19, 1980. Edited by RUSSELL BOWDEN. IFLA Publications, no. 20. London: Library Association, 1982. Pp. x + 211. $16.00. ISSN 0344-6891.

What should be the model for library education programs in Third World countries is a resounding, but unproclaimed, theme throughout this book. It is significant for two reasons: (1) It represents the first IFLA preconference held in a developing country, and (2) the majority of the papers were prepared by Third World librarians from Asia and the Pacific Islands. These two factors eliminate significant bias in the discussions of library and information education in the two regions. The 16 papers are distributed throughout 12 chapters and discuss such matters as the environment of library education, practitioners and library educa- tors, staff requirements on all levels, planning and management of library and information manpower programs, the integration of library and information- science education, the place of library schools in higher education, curriculum and admission requirements, and research and library education. There is only I paper dealing with library education in the Pacific Islands. Among all of the participants on the program there seems to be agreement that (1) library educa- tion is in desperate need of support in the two regions; (2) Western influences have their place, but there must be library education programs designed to meet the real needs of indigenous populations and institutions; (3) librarianship as it exists today in each country has evolved its own distinctiveness; (4) beginning professionals do not require graduate education to practice professional librari- anship; and (5) there is a need to differentiate between training and education.

Considerable discussion developed around the proposal to encourage integra- tion of teaching librarianship, information science, and archives administration. It was recognized that much work still needs to be done to identify and define the details of the convergences and knowledge base for each of these related fields. Jinna of Suva, Fiji, emphasized the growing practice in the South Pacific of

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