UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES: PREPARING FOR A LONG HARD WINTER?

THE reader should not be misled by James Thompson's title into expecting a history of university libraries chronologically from Alexandria to Atkinson or geographically from Bolivia to Taiwan. The aim of this volume of fifteen essays is more modest and more uncertain. The editor's original idea, one suspects, was for a survey mainly of the last 30 years' developments in British university libraries, with overseas contributions to give the international or comparative dimension. The contributors however—nine from the United Kingdom, three from the United States, one each from Canada and Australasia, and one expatriate Briton from Italy—have interpreted their brief variously. The period covered by each consequently varies considerably. With the somewhat anomalous exception of Italy the countries represented in the “comparative” essays belong exclusively to the Anglo‐Saxon tradition in the universities and their libraries. Despite the limited connotation of “international”, this book may be read as a complement to the recent SCONUL‐German symposium on the current situation in British and German university libraries to gain a somewhat more truly international overview.