At a time when the majority of his contemporaries have long since lapsed, at best, into their anecdotage Sauppe, a retired professor of librarianship at Hanover’s Fachhochschule, has produced the third edition of this now standard work, first published in 1988.
Although not in itself a proof of its practical value, the increase of 150 pages over the previous edition, published in 1996, is an indication of the work’s determination to keep abreast of the advances made in information technology in the interval. Nonetheless, the total increase in the number of entries in this edition is not affected by the removal of some on editorial or, I suppose, historical grounds. Sauppe admits that, as a very large part of the everyday language of information technology in Germany, as in the rest of the world, is English, only a small number of appropriate German equivalents have been coined. For this reason the work has been established from its first edition as a translation dictionary and not as a glossary, which makes it an essential tool even for those professionals who are familiar with the technical language of German librarianship. Thus one can find the German equivalent of dos‐à‐dos binding or the English one of präkombinierte Klassifikation, to take only two examples at random. On this account this edition should be in every large library which attempts to provide an in‐depth coverage of international works on librarianship in its reference collection. As with the previous edition, the only one immediately available to me, the work has a useful, brief explanation of the method of construction of the entries. It also has a list of selected German, English and polyglot printed sources consulted in its compilation, in which I can detect no obvious omission.
To counteract my career pattern as a librarian of an older generation trained in the humanities whose knowledge of IT resembles that of the average motorist of the workings of the combustion engine, I have deliberately concentrated most of my attention to this edition on the IT terms. While I can cope with terms such as pixel and its components, others such as time‐division multiplexing and AKO have left me stumped, but that is no fault of this work, as it is not a glossary. For an answer I must look elsewhere. It is not always possible to keep one’s prejudices, particularly those of a linguistic nature, at bay, when reviewing a work such as this. However much I accept that the phrase workstation is now current in English, and Arbeitsplatz in German, I still find it pretentious. I always use the term, desk, and all the Germans of my acquaintance still refer to their Tisch. On the score of accuracy of translation, which is the real test of this work, I found only one instance of a translation which did not ring true to my ear, the first one given under Prachtausgabe, “book of magnificence”, – “de luxe edition”.
As with the previous edition a review is merely the start of a constant and profitable process of dipping. This volume is a continuing embodiment of all that is best in German librarianship, while Sauppe, now in his late 1970s, is a magnificent rebuttal, if any were needed, of the absurd assertion of a former colleague that no one over the age of 50 has anything worth saying.
