This handy, A5 sized book contains over 6,000 words, expressions and acronyms related to the information management profession. Concise, sentence‐length definitions are given with the grammatical part of speech and pronunciation. Some entries are augmented by a phrase illustrating usage, while others have quotes from journals giving further elaboration. Thus the entry for “heuristic searching” has quotes from “Reeves, 1993” and Integrated Manufacturing Systems (though we perfectionists would prefer a fuller reference!). An occasional “Comment” is given, such as that under “preface” which distinguishes a preface from a foreword. The book has a number of supplements. These range from “The Paris Principles”, “Major Classification Schemes” and the “Five Laws of Library Science” to “Resources on the Web”, a listing of UK Acts relating to copyright and data protection, “Book Prizes and Awards”, “Major Newspapers in the UK” and “Major Magazines in the UK”: a bit of a rag‐bag (not listed!) but quite useful nonetheless.
The cover blurb claims that “Topics covered include computer systems, librarianship, knowledge management, language classification and cataloguing, the Internet and library management terminology”. Certainly all these subjects are covered. Examples are: lithography, italics, ISBD, iterative searching, interleaved, MESH; heading, n.d., AACR, A4, ac (both as “the top‐level domain for academic organisations” and as the domain indicator for Ascension Island), solidus, and synecdoche. A close examination of the dictionary, however, reveals a large number of words so general that one wonders why they are included at all. Examples are: thriller, town plan, working party, gnostic, staffroom, rapid, handwriting, education, private and memo pad. Granted that information and library management professionals may use these terms, it has come to a sad state of affairs when they need to consult a dictionary for their meaning, except for “gnostic” perhaps! A “gnostic library manager” (?!). Surely standard dictionaries are readily available and quite adequate for such terms? I would not think of using a Dictionary of Information and Library Management to check the meaning of “generalisation”, “out of date”, “meeting” or “true”!
There is some defence, though, and this is an important point, that many words have different meanings in different contexts, and here the ‘LIS’ environment predominates; three examples that amused me were “handshake”, “kill” and “milking parlour”. It is no surprise that, like “mouse” and “spider”, both come from the burgeoning IT taxonomy! This taxonomy is a strength of this little book: “Wikipedia”, “TIFF”, “top‐level domain”, “fuzzy logic”, and numerous other IT terms are present. Once or twice I found myself disagreeing with the definitions: “taxonomy” and “spring back” for example. The former is defined as “the principle of classifying items such as books, e.g. in a hierarchical structure” – surely it is terms that are classified, not the objects themselves, while the latter is surely a clip‐like binding for holding loose pages together – not to lie flat! A “ring binder” (also listed) does that. Still, it is only a little book and maybe I am a pedant! Another criticism is the over‐use of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Excepting abbreviations, every word is given the cryptic IPA. Does anybody ever use this? Do we need to know how to pronounce “goatskin”, “desktop unit” or “india paper”? This seems a tiresome waste of compilers' time and of valuable space.
Despite the unnecessary IPA and the mass of unsought words, there is much of value here, at least for very quick reference. Other useful terms are the titles of well‐known “reference works” such as Hansard, Index Translationum, and National Union Catalog; organizations in the LIS field such as European Online User Group, Book Aid International (with reference from Ranfurly Library Service) and Newsplan; and other terms in the field such as Moon type, Ordnance Survey Map and FAQ. This little book is no substitute for Harrod (Prytherch, 2005) or Feather (1997) on the library shelves, but useful for the student bag.
