ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

New Publications

George M. Eberhart

The Best of OPL II: SelectedReadings from The One Person Library, a Newsletter for Librarians and Management, edited by Andrew Berner and Guy St. Clair (336 pages, Febru- ary 1996), offers practical ad- vice to librarians who must singlehandedly manage an information center. Among the topics included are: ab- senteeism in the OPL, over- coming procrastination, the empowered librarian, disas- ter planning, when unsolicited materials get out of hand, and promoting the reference collec- tion. $43.50 (SLA members, $34.50). Special Li- braries Assn., 1700 Eighteenth St., N.W., Wash- ington, DC 20009-2508. ISBN 0-87111-438-0.

Blast from the Past: A Pictorial Historyof Radio’s First 75 Years, by B. Eric Rhoads (463 pages, January 1996), chronicles the radio broadcasting industry from Marconi to Frasier Crane. It’s ironic that the excitement of a purely audio medium is captured so well by the more than 900 photographs in this book, many of them discovered in personal collections by the author and published here for the first time. Radio was the world’s first multimedia, however, with the visual imagery supplied by the listener’s imagination, as Paul Harvey reminds us in the introduction. The book’s commentary is brief but substantial as it winds around the many pictures and captions. A directory of museums, organizations, and publications devoted to radio history rounds out the text. $39.95. Streamline Press, 224 Datura St., Suite 718, West Palm Beach, FL 33401. ISBN 1-886745-06-4.

Correction

“There must be 50 ways to be a leader” (C&RLNews‚ April 1996) gave incorrect contact information for the Kellogg Foundation National Fellowship. The Foundation can be reached at 1 Michigan Ave. East, Battle Creek, MI 49107; (6l6) 968-1611. The e-mail address of the author, Judy Reynolds, was missing a letter; the correct e-mail address is judyr@sjsuvml.sjsu.edu. The editors regret the errors.

Brief Tests of CollectionStrength: A Methodology for All Types of Libraries, by Howard D. White (191 pages, September 1995), describes the use of a rela- tively brief test to assign li- braries a score for existing collection strength in a par- ticular subject area. The test draws on both expert human judgment and holdings from the OCLC union catalog. White exhibits the results of hundreds of trials in many different subjects at dozens of American librar- ies and provides a scheme for giving test de- signers greater control over the difficulty of brief tests. $55.00. Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881-5007. ISBN 0-313- 29753-3.

Canadian Business Handbook,by Vivienne Monty (304 pages, February 1996), is a practical guide for setting up a small business in Canada. Monty, senior librarian at York University and former president of the Canadian Library Association, offers some tips that are valid for businesses in any country—marketing and sales cost-cutting techniques, a financial reality test, negotiating a franchise contract—and much of the material will be useful for U.S. firms doing business with Canadian companies. $34.95 Canadian. CCH Canadian, Ltd., 6 Garamond Court, North York, Ontario, Canada M3C 1Z5. ISBN 1-55141-753-7.

The Great Comet Crash: The Collision ofComet Shoemaker-Levy 9 and Jupiter, edited by John R. Spencer and Jacqueline Mitton (118 pages, September 1995), documents the cometary collision of July 1994 with abundant astronomical images and speculation on what might have happened if Earth had been the target. The fact that the zones of destruction on Jupiter greatly exceeded the size of our own planet (despite nearly everyone’s predictions to the contrary) dramatized the need to take such collisions or near-collisions very seriously. The salient facts of comet SL9 are summarized here—including the estimation that the object had begun to orbit Jupiter sometime between 1914 and 1930. An eye-opening object lesson that reminds us of the dynamics of the solar system and our vulnerability to extraterrestrial forces. $24.95. Cambridge University Press, 40 W. 20th St., New York, NY 10011-4211. ISBN 0-521-48274-7.

George Eberhart is editor and compilerof The Whole Library Handbooks for ALA Editions (1991, 1995). He was editor of C&RL News from 1980 to 1990.

Nightsong: Performance, Power, andPractice in South Africa, by Veit Erlmann (446 pages, 1996), describes the politics and prov- enance of isicathamiya music in South Africa, the unaccompanied vocal song that gained in- ternational recognition through the efforts of Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo in the 1980s. Erlmann starts with the roots of the music which, like American jazz, sprung from minstrel shows and ragtime. He goes on to examine its contemporary power in Zulu soci- ety and the forces that shaped it. An extensive discography and bibliography supplement the text. $75.00. University of Chicago Press, 11030 S. Langley Ave., Chicago, IL 60628. ISBN 0-226- 21720-5.

Weathering the Storm: Tornadoes, Tele-vision, and Turmoil, by Gary A. England (225 pages, 1996), contains veteran weather fore- caster England’s reminiscences of his career at sta- tion KWTV in Oklahoma City and describes his efforts to obtain Doppler radar so that the residents of “Tornado Al- ley” might have more time to seek shelter from dangerous storms. Fifty-five color photographs of midwestern twisters punctuate his meteorological memoirs, which are as much about tempestuous TV politics as tornadoes. Anecdotal but informative. $26.95. University of Oklahoma Press, 1005 Asp Ave., Norman, OK 73019. ISBN 0-8061-2823-2. ■