Career Profiles and Sex Discrimination in the Library Profession (Book Review)

Abstract

College & Research Libraries to which citation analysis has long been applied, Bulick examines the degree to which disciplines use their own literatures or borrow extensively from others. Those which rely heavily on endogenous litera- tures are considered to be analytical disciplines whose paradigms, in Kuhn's sense, are well developed; those which borrow heavily from other fields are '' syn- thetic'' and have less full and mature para- digms. Using his measures this way, Bulick ar- gues that economists' focused, or ethno- centric'' use of materials shows a degree of consensus on basic issues of theory and technique not matched by the other social sciences. Geography, with its notoriously unfavorable balance of trade with other disciplines, is ranked lowest on these measures, leaving sociology, anthropol- ogy, and political science somewhere in between. Bulick' s discussion of the individual so- cial sciences incorporates a skilled and in- formed interleaving of the history both of the several disciplines themselves and of their treatment by the LC classification scheme. We too often think of the latter as received from above, but Bulick reminds us that in its developmental stages, LC was an emerging commentary on and at- tempt to organize emerging disciplines. Bulick' s most interesting conclusion, based both on patterns of cross- disciplinary use and on various measures of association which assess the conjoint reading between pairs of disciplines, is that the boundaries of the individual so- cial sciences .may never become as clear as those of the physical sciences. But the so- cial sciences as a whole, with their com- munal interests in literatures within social science and its special cousin, history, may be blending into a unified social sci- ence. This is not a perfect book. It is somewhat specialized, in that the structure of branch libraries at Pittsburgh necessarily ex- cluded the sciences from consideration, and Bulick chooses not to discuss the hu- manities. One might ask for more consid- eration of use patterns between specific pairs of disciplines and of what this means. One can quibble with the misuse November 1984 of the term sociology of knowledge or argue that the Bradford/Zip£ distribution t€lls us little of interest to librarians that a simple J-curve of use does not convey and that it does not merit the attention Bulick gives it. One can definitely become upset, as I imagine Bulick himself is, that an im- portant table is mislabelled-readers should bring themselves to note in their li- brary copies that the column headings of Table 6.23 should all slide one place to the right. Imperfect? Of course, and fascinating. The only serious flaw with this book is that we are ignoring it. Reviews have been few and only some 120 OCLC libraries have cataloged it. Either librarians are unsure that an understanding of the disciplines they serve has anything to say about how they should conduct their business, or there is something wrong with the system of gatekeepers that is supposed to help us sort out the big books from the little books.-Paul Metz, Virginia Polytechnic In- stitute. Career Profiles and Sex Discrimination in the Library Profession. Prepared by Kathleen Heim and Leigh S. Estabrook. Chicago: American Library Assn., 1983. 82p. $15. LC 83-3838. ISBN 0-8389-3282- Results of statistical surveys frequently pose more interesting questions than those which prompted the survey in the first place. Heim and Estabrook's project is no exception. The task that Heim, Esta- brook, and the ALA Committee on the Status of Women in Librarianship (COSWL) set for themselves was a com- prehensive career study of librarians, ex- amining in particular the differences in status (salary, administrative responsibil- ity, career advancement) between female and male members of the American Li- brary Association. Career Profiles and Sex Discrimination reports the results of their research but, in a mere 46 pages of text, ac- complishes much more. As principle investigators Heim and Es- tabrook are quite explicit about the dual purpose and goal of their research, this study was designed not only to provide data useful for analyzing and evaluating