University of Virginia Library

IV

The profession of librarianship is fortunate in having its specialised indexing service, Library Literature (Tanselle, pp. 181-184), but its utility for bibliographers is severely limited. In the first place the list of periodicals indexed contains many which in fact are indexed only selectively. There is no published policy statement, and I am indebted to Mr. George F. Heise, Associate Director of Indexing Services, the H. W. Wilson Company, for supplying information about policy as it affects BC, Library, PBSA and SB. Policy is 'to index completely the periodicals listed', but there are so many exceptions that a user of LL simply

has no means of knowing whether a particular issue of a particular title has been fully indexed, selectively indexed, or indexed not at all.

The following notes are based on the information supplied by Mr. Heise:

• BC: All articles indexed; 'English bookbindings' given a blanket entry once a year; 'News and Comment' indexed selectively; Notes and Queries omitted.
• Library: All articles indexed; bibliographical notes indexed selectively; correspondence concerning articles or bibliographical notes which were indexed previously also indexed.
• PBSA: All articles indexed; notes indexed selectively: 'News, Notes, and Queries' indexed selectively.
• SB: Indexed selectively.

Some indication of the degree of selectivity can be gauged from the Summary Table. The explanation for the disparity in treatment between the British publications on the one hand (fairly fully indexed) and the American on the other (sparsely indexed) may lie in the fact that other H. W. Wilson indexes cover the American ones comprehensively: HI indexes PBSA, and EGLI indexes SB.

It would be easy to dismiss LL as contributing nothing to the indexing done by MLA and MHRA, but six items are indexed by LL and not by the other two:

• BC: 'Contemporary Collectors XLVII: Bibliotheca Franciscana'
• 'The Golden Compasses' (editorial)
• 'The Art of Writing' (editorial)
• Library: 'Some notes on the legibility of texts for the partially sighted'
• PBSA: 'The White House Transcripts'
• a letter from Fredson Bowers

The selection for PBSA is probably to be explained by what appears to be a disposition towards big names, both as authors (here W. B. Todd and Fredson Bowers) and as subjects (Shakespeare and Milton are admitted from PBSA).

And LL is the only index to have caught up with the belated part 4 of Library—in August 1975: all three articles and two of the four notes are indexed, but not the letter.

Where, in principle, LL stands to supplement the other indexes is in the inclusion of bibliographical articles from librarianship periodicals, for it is a feature of LL that it indexes comprehensively a number of 'mainstream' librarianship periodicals, even when occasionally the articles are outside scope.

The major concerns of LL are librarianship, information science and publishing, and within these areas detailed subject headings are

provided. For peripheral subjects—of which bibliography is one—only broad subject headings are provided. Consequently many of the articles of bibliographical interest included in LL are to be found under Criticism, Textual (often quite wrongly included there) and Printing. History. Since LL appears six times a year there may be virtue in such broad headings in that they can be used for current awareness purposes, but there would seem to be no other virtue. Indeed, one might ask why LL worries about BC, Library, PBSA and SB at all, or indeed about the whole area of bibliography.