AARL

Book reviews

Guide to Archives of Australia's Prime Ministers

Our First Six Susan Marsden and Roslyn Russell Canberra National Archives of Australia 2002 218pp ISBN 0 642 34480 9 $19.95 ex GST

Stanley Melbourne Bruce John Connor Canberra National Archives of Australia Canberra 2003 136pp ISBN 0 642 34489 2 $19.95 ex GST

Joseph Lyons Susan Marsden Canberra National Archives of Australia 2002 108pp ISBN 0 642 34481 7 $19.95 ex GST

John Curtin David Black and Lesley Wallace Canberra National Archives of Australia and John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library 2004 251pp ISBN 1 920807 12 8 $19.95 ex GST

Harold Holt Pennie Pemberton Canberra National Archives of Australia 2003 171pp ISBN 0 642 34484 1 $19.95 ex GST

These five guides list and describe records of and about ten of Australia's prime ministers and their wives. Together with Federation: The Guide to Records, which the National Archives of Australia published in 1998, the guides are the most comprehensive and informative introductions to modern Australian political sources to have appeared so far and they will be of enormous value to a wide range of researchers. While not as lavish in appearance as Federation, the Prime Ministers' guides share many of its virtues and a few of its weaknesses.

Like Federation, the guides cover records held in many archives and libraries throughout Australia and even a few overseas. The core of each volume are records held in the National Archives, which in some cases include personal and private papers of prime ministers. The Curtin guide provides a good summary of the holdings of the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library at Curtin University, showing its considerable success in collection-building since it was set up in 1994. Personal papers in the National Library are well covered in each volume. Other repositories represented range from the National Film and Sound Archive and state libraries to small public libraries and school archives. 'Archives' is interpreted in a broad sense and include not only written and photographic records but broadcasts, recorded speeches, oral history interviews, portraits, memorabilia and personal libraries.

There are common features in each guide: short biographies, illustrations, notes on descriptive terms and citations, timelines, bibliographies, addresses of repositories, and indexes. Closer inspection reveals differences, such as the length of the bibliographies or the quality of the indexes. The big differences are in the descriptions of the records and it is evident that the editors were given a lot of freedom as to how they organised the data and how much detail they provided. Some, like Curtin and Holt, are grouped firstly by repository, while the Bruce guide is heavily biographical. In all cases, the careers of the prime ministers are divided into phases, but they range from four slices with Barton and Fisher to seventeen slices with Bruce. Readers will have different preferences, but the danger of too many divisions is that either the placement of particular record descriptions can become arbitrary or there can be a lot of repetition. The level of detail also varies considerably, especially with the records in the National Archives. The Lyons guide is very much a summary of record series, now and then followed by the titles of a few items (files) within those series. The Holt guide, in contrast, focuses on a smaller number of series, but has much longer lists of items. The Bruce and Curtin guides sometimes get down to the level of a single letter, suggesting that the compilers have not just relied on finding-aids but have actually read particular documents.

Consistency is an impossible ideal in guides of this kind. Some Prime Ministers have clearly been given preferential treatment: Curtin has his own volume of 251 pages, while poor Chris Watson has a mere 18 pages in Our First Six. Barton, Fisher and above all Deakin have suffered by being placed within Our First Six. No prime minister left a richer private archives than Deakin and none maintained such a huge private correspondence over an entire lifetime. Yet the Deakin Papers in the National Library are condensed into three pages and many collections containing long runs of his letters have been missed. The Dilke Papers is one example, another is the huge archive of his biographer, John La Nauze. Another biographer, Cecil Edwards, gets only a couple of lines in the Bruce guide, although his papers have possibly the largest series of private letters of Bruce in existence. In the same guide, a single letter from John Latham to Bruce is given more space than the entire Latham Papers, a collection which contains many hundreds of references to Bruce. It would be easy to point to other examples, but with so many collections and such a variety of records being described inconsistencies are unavoidable.

Although the series title is Guide to Archives of Australia's Prime Ministers, the introductions make it clear that they extend to both the records created by prime ministers and records about prime ministers. The of/on distinction is an important one, but in some of the guides insufficient information is given about provenance and the distinction is blurred. Archivists may be familiar with multi-provenance series, but some explanation could be provided for the humble researchers. Many of them will be expecting to find descriptions of the personal archives kept by prime ministers and their families, but these records are sometimes hidden within the guides. The Holt guide is exemplary in devoting the first section to his personal records, but in the Bruce and Lyons guides references to personal records kept by the two men are scattered among lengthy descriptions of departmental records. It would also be useful to know how and when personal archives were acquired by libraries and archives; these details are provided in comparable publications, such as Cameron Hazlehurst et al, A Guide to the Papers of British Cabinet Ministers 1900-1964 (1996). The acquisition in 2002 of Holt's briefcase and its contents is mentioned, but it is the exception. Some of the personal archives were in the possession of family members or biographers for many years before they came to rest in an archives or library and some, like the Barton, Cook and Lyons papers, were split between two institutions. Information of this kind can be helpful to researchers.

The inclusion of prime ministers' wives and their records is a novel and interesting feature of the guides. Two wives, Edith Lyons and Zara Holt, were prominent public figures and are well represented in archives. Most of the others, especially in the early years of Federation, were more private figures and the compilers were clearly struggling to find relevant records of any significance. The Curtin guide has quite a substantial biography of Elsie Curtin, but other biographies are barely adequate. The compilers could have made more use of Diane Langmore's Prime Ministers' Wives (1992).

Despite the minutiae that appear on many pages, the great virtue of these published guides is that they give a broad overview of the records of the prime ministers, their governments and their associates. Archival databases are fine when searching for particular references or items, but they often lack a hierarchical structure and researchers can easily be lost in a morass of irrelevant detail. The top-down approach offered by the guides enables users to assess quickly the extent, nature and location of the records that have survived and identify the strengths and weaknesses of primary source material. Even biographers are likely to be surprised by the breadth and variety of records described in the guides. The compilers and contributors have done a valiant job and it is to be hoped that the National Archives will continue the series and publish guides to the archives of at least another ten prime ministers.

Graeme Powell, National Library of Australia

Leadership in the Library and Information Science Professions: Theory and Practice editor Mark D Winston Binghamton NY Haworth Information Press 2001 Co-published as the Journal of Library Administration vol 32 nos 3/4 2001 198pp ISBN 0-7890-1415-7

For anyone interested in library leadership, this is a great book. It contains ten essays, each with an informative abstract and handy list of references. There's even an index.

Topics covered include the need for library leadership, the qualities and required characteristics of leaders, technology and library leadership, women and leadership, and international leadership in Australia, Russia, China and the US.

All authors are careful to distinguish between management and leadership: 'You manage things, you lead people' (p134), and closely follow the definition of a leader as 'a person who guides others in action or opinion; a person who takes the lead in a business, enterprise, or movement'. This makes leadership 'the action of leading or influencing; ability to lead or influence' (New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1993).

I thought all the articles were good - some excellent, and informally rated each out of ten on relevance, informativeness, readability and complementarity. I scored 1 ten, 2 nines, 4 eights and 3 sevens, for an average of 81 per cent. My favourite was written by Becky Schreiber and John Shannon, the course leaders for the Library Leadership Institute at Snowbird in the US (now defunct), and for our own Aurora Library Leadership Institute (very much alive). Theirs is a fascinating and revealing article on the conceptual framework, rationale, core beliefs and leadership traits which are covered in designing training experiences for library leaders. Anyone curious about what actually happens on these courses - and about experiential learning in general - will find few better sources.

We all know we need more leaders than we have. Do yourself a favour: read this modest volume (or the cited issue of the Journal of Library Administration) and decide whether you are part of the shortage - or part of the supply.

Ian McCallum, secretary, Aurora Foundation Ltd; director, Libraries Alive! Pty Ltd

The Philosophy of Information editor Ken Herold Urbana-Champaign Ill University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science 2004 (Special Issue of Library Trends vol 45 no3 pp373-670)

This special issue of Library Trends was inspired, or rather provoked, by Luciano Floridi's recent work on the philosophy of information (PI), and particularly by his recent book, Philosophy and Computing: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1999), which covers many areas of interest to library and information science, but without focusing explicitly on the discipline or, in the view of several contributors to the present volume, properly acknowledging its centrality.

As one of the authors notes (Don Fallis, p464), it is fairly unusual for philosophers to engage directly in matters relating to LIS, and the concept of PI is itself a relatively recent one. It naturally draws, however, on age-old philosophical debates and relies on the insights of metaphysics, the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language as well as those of semiotics and communication studies. The various essays draw on a very wide range of previous scholarship to address such questions as: What is information? What is a document? What is the relationship between information and knowledge? Is 'information' even a useful concept in theorising the relationship between data and the use to which it is put? How is relevance best defined? To what extent is the practice of information retrieval implicated in social constructions?

The eighteen contributors to The Philosophy of Information are for the most part affiliated to university departments of information science rather than philosophy, and accordingly space is given to the theoretical underpinnings of practical information management tools such as classification and subject analysis as well as to more abstract matters. Floridi, in a thoughtful 'Afterword', takes the opportunity to respond to implied criticisms and to point to future directions for the development of PI.

We are still far from having a unified theory of information, even supposing that such a thing were possible or desirable. But understanding precisely what we are doing when we search for, classify and retrieve information is not merely a theoretical concern, but at the centre of effective library practice. This volume contributes much to an understanding of a core subject and offers much fruit for thought and inspiration for future debate.

David N Wells, Curtin University of Technology

Special Collections in the Twenty-first Century a theme issue of Library Trends editor Barbara M Jones University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science 2003 201p ISSN 0024-2594 US $28.00 including postage

This issue of Library Trends journal examines the issues which are challenging special collections and special collection librarians in the 21st century. The journal is a collection of essays by experts within the field of special collections. As stated in the first essay, The Continuing Development of Special Collections Librarianship by Cloonan and Berger,

The authors look at the current world of special collections, showing how it has evolved and how in many ways the issues of the past are still with us. (p9)

The journal is divided into six sections comprising the vision and challenges for special collections, public service and cataloguing practices, preservation and conservation issues, global issues, a look at the future of special collections, and an afterword by Terry Belanger. In her attempt to comprehensively cover the issues associated with special collections the editor has selected articles which will inform the reader. Several specific collections are described, including the Elmer L Anderson Library and the library of the American Antiquarian Society. Although the journal is written primarily for special collections librarians, there is much within the articles that can be applied to the wider library sphere, particularly in regard to public programs.

As a reader with little experience of special collections I was intrigued by the number of issues confronting special collections and the diversity of special collections referred to in the journal. The journal has something for everyone in the sense that although many of the articles use detailed descriptions of collections and processes which will appeal to colleagues in the field, there are enough articles which explore more general aspects of special collections to make the journal accessible to the less experienced reader.

Bonnie Rae Bruce, Curtin University of Technology