Guide to Collection Development and Management Administration, Organization, and Staffing. Collection Management and Development Guides No. 10. (Association for Library Collections and Technical Services. A Division of the American Library Association) Free

Over the past several years the Collection Management and Development Section (CMDS) of ALA’s Association for Library Collections and Technical Services has produced guides for collection managers. Each guide, although not called “best practices”, essentially functions in that manner by providing material on the common practices, methods, and ideas as found in US libraries. This particular guide is intended for the manager who is undertaking an assessment of a unit’s organisational structure and/or workflow. Like other guides in the series it is not intended to be in‐depth but rather serves as a starting point that identifies the commonly employed options (in this case ways to organise collection management work) with a brief discussion of the pros and cons of each. Six sections make up this guide and it is the final four that are of primary interest (section one is the introduction and the second outlines the basic components of collection development work). The section on administrative functions covers familiar ground for experienced collection managers but will be valuable to a newcomer to the field. Sections four and five that address organisational and reporting structures will be of use to anyone assessing a collection development unit as will the last page and a half (section six) that deals with “linking” collection development staff in an era of ever‐increasing interdisciplinary publications. A major issue for all the guides, not just this one, is the fact they are intended to be starting points. Thus the bibliography at the end of the guide serves to direct the reader to a selection of what should be the best current references on the topic(s) covered. To some extent they do that but, due to the very slow publication process, in most cases there are long delays (often several years) between manuscript completion and final approval for publication. The result frequently is the there are more current and better references available that do not appear in the bibliography. In the case of this guide, the editors did manage to get a January 2000 publication into the list. (This reviewer writes from first hand knowledge about the slow progress of manuscripts through the ALCTS publication process as he is about to begin his third term on the CMDS Publication Committee.) This guide and its co‐publications serve a very useful purpose; we just need to find a way to speed the process along so information is still current by the time it becomes available.