Two features endear me to this book. The first is the truly excellent layout. The whole work is beautifully crafted, from its smart functional cover and detailed contents pages, which itemize every subheading, through the 12 chapters with their quotes, introductions, clearly marked sections and headings, to the glossary, bibliography and index at the end. Each chapter starts with a suitably thought‐provoking quotation, a brief introduction, and then divides and subdivides into page or half‐page sections of straightforward factual prose. Bullet points, summaries, boxed definitions, case studies, abstracts of legislation and other relevant documents, chapter bibliographies and notes, all add to the achievement of a textbook design of high order. I say “textbook” since this is a book of referral and help rather than one to read sequentially. It is a book for frequent use and practical guidance: a book for the library manager’s desk. You have a problem with maternity leave? Then a section in the chapter on employee benefits will outline the law and give you the main points of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978. Concerned with staff training? Then in the section on continuing education you will find 25 suggested topics on which to train your staff. One of your staff has a grievance? Then the chapter on discipline and discharge has six subsections covering grievances
The book starts with a chapter on the general issue of public library staff management and ends with one on sound library management. In between are chapters on recruitment and selection, the employee relationship, wages and hours of work, employee benefits, discrimination, health and safety and privacy, discipline and discharge, compensation and insurance, collective bargaining, and the preliminaries to litigation. I’ve Anglicized the wording, and that’s the problem. The book is written for the US market. The generalities have global application; the headings and subheadings give a useful structure to staff management issues; and much of what is written can be translated into local law and practice, and provide useful prompts, but overall this impressive book is not one for UK staffing officers’ desks (human resources managers in US parlance). It is public library based, true enough, and the broad thrust of equal opportunities applies. We all need to ensure we respond sensitively to the increasingly complex demands of staff management but wide areas of labour legislation, the tendency to litigation, and unionisation, are all very different in other countries.
The second feature which endears me to this book is that the publisher names the production editor, copy editor, proofreader, indexer and designer. Well done, Kay, Jan, Nancy, Linda, and Pamela. Clearly Libraries Unlimited have concern for their own human resources! If I were a US library manager, or if this book covered UK practice, I would commend this book to all library managers, and not just those specifically concerned with staff management (for aren’t we all?). But I’m not, and I can’t, which is a pity.
