The present volume, whose title page tells only half the story, consists of eight papers, all by working librarians, four from the USA and two from Germany, indicating the various changes both in the provision of reference services in particular and also in the wider role of subject specialists in US and German university libraries. Leaving aside the inadequacy of the title page, the value of the papers reproduced here lies not merely in the fact that that they are written from the writers’ everyday experience of these changes, but also in the case of the US writers that they have gained part of their education as Germanists at universities in Germany or Austria.
The first paper by Marianna McKim is especially useful in its overview of the shift in US university librarianship from the graduate staff’s subordinate role as “bibliographers”, who check details of works recommended by the teaching staff and which they catalogue on arrival in the library, to that of subject specialist, in which they work much more closely with the teaching staff in building up the library’s collections, a process which she illustrates by including a typical day’s diary. This professionally more challenging role is especially interesting since UK universities’ use of “subject specialists”, despite the persiflage, still corresponds in the main to the older US pattern. One must congratulate McKim further for her candour in admitting that these changes have imposed strains on the the staff in how they can fit these new responsibilities into their working week.
That user education now forms a greater part of the role of subject specialists in the US university libraries, which is taken up by Gordon Anderson, should come as no surprise to us, but that it is now being undertaken to an increasing extent by their German peers, as Uwe Laich makes clear, represents a major sea‐change in the relationship both of the university library, which is a strictly research‐level institution administratively separate from the rest of the university, and of the subject specialists to the teaching departments. As the term, sea‐change, implies, this development in the latter country is the more interesting professionally. While the German subject specialist’s task of building the collections in the university library and on maintaining the subject catalogue is still paramount, teaching staff or doctoral candidates were still able to consult these academically and professional highly qualified librarians. The usual analogy was of humble suppliants ascending the mountain to consult some lofty, remote figure. Now, however, they are descending to offer instruction in their mystical skills to the initiates, a change mirrored in some of the tasks now being undertaken by their non‐graduate, professionally trained colleagues.
One area which has helped to advance the status of the graduate staff of university libraries in the USA is information technology (IT), in which many of of the teaching staff confess to a lack of familiarity or even ignorance. The increasing amount of scholarly material available exclusively online, and the necessity of researchers to access it both for their own use and as an aid to dealing with researchers’ enquires is dealt with by Jeffrey Garnett, whose expertise in IT as well as in more traditional printed formats is well known to the present reviewer. The ready availability of e‐mail has been a boon to the work of specialist staff in university libraries, in that it allows them to solicit help and to pass views and expertise through discussion groups.
Gordon Anderson and Garnett outline the work of the US‐based Western European Specialists Section, in which the Germanist members have a very useful online forum, German‐E. Fortunately this facility is open to non‐US librarians and booksellers, the present reviewer being both a beneficiary and an occasional contributor.
The pre‐eminence of Harvard University in the USA is highlighted by Michael Olson, who makes clear from anecdotes familiar to the present reviewer that it is only in the last century that Harvard has achieved its international education status. This status, financed largely by its excellent financial resources, is coupled with a robust determination to ensure that its numerous libraries hold the very best of research‐level materials in all fields of academic enquiry. Academic librarians and teachers in this country, who know all too well the effects on research of goverment parsimony, can only look on in stunned envy.
This is an extremely useful litle volume, whose combination of factual information and honest appraisal of some current problems deserves wider dissemination. Given the UK’s appalling lack of facility with foreign languages, that wider dissemination will only be achieved by a translation into English.
