Commemorating the Past, Celebrating the Present, Creating the Future: Papers in Observance of the 50th Anniversary of the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (review)

Commemorating the Past, Celebrating the Present, Creating the Future witnesses the rapid and complex evolution libraries and librarianship have experienced in the past half-century. Most particularly, the book focuses on the fifty-year history (1957–2007) of the American Library Association’s Resources and Technical Services Division (RTSD), which in 1989 underwent a name change to become the Association of Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS). The library profession has published little about its recent history, likely because librarians are fully occupied creating and living out history. Commemorating is a welcome and important contribution to the field’s historical documentation.

Miriam Palm’s role as compiler of Commemorating is evinced in the excellent array of selected authors, well known in the field for their leadership and thoughtfulness. The consistency of each essay’s structure and flow speaks to Palm’s careful attention to the monograph’s intellectual construction. Pamela Bluh, known for her significant and longtime contributions to the development of best practices in serials librarianship, shines as editor of this technically well produced publication.

Commemorating opens with an essay entitled “RTSD and ALCTS: A Personal History through the Eyes of Our Leaders” by Palm and Brian Schottlaender of the University of California, San Diego, that briefly charts the historical development of RTSD and its organizational structure, headquarters staffing, and publications. The essay includes remembrances of seventeen past RTSD/ALCTS presidents, executive deputy directors, and newsletter editors, including David Weber, Karen Horny, Alex Bloss, Jennifer Younger, and Sheila Intner—professionals at a range of points in their career, and some now retired. These leaders reflect on how they became involved in the field, noting early role models, mentors, and stars of the profession as well as personal career challenges and the changes in technical services librarianship and RTSD/ALCTS. What results is a richly personal accounting by the leaders in technical services librarianship of the most exciting and complex years in the history of cataloging, acquisitions, collection development, and preservation. Recollections range from that of luminary David Weber, former director of Stanford University Libraries, recalling his father, who was a professor of English, and his early influence on Weber’s education in bibliography, to Judith Canaan noting the highlight of her work during the early 1980s in RTSD as organizer of ALA’s first video teleconference, which allowed librarians around the country to “attend” an ALA annual conference. For the library profession the long list of noted mentors and role models represents nothing less than its own Hollywood Walk of Fame.

The greater part of the 207 pages of Commemorating comprises substantial papers on the topics of technical services education and the historical development of AACR2, collection development, serials identification and control, ALCTS’s international role, and preservation.

Although the papers are primarily historical in nature, some are more reflective of the authors’ personal roles in events, while others include proactive elements. Michael Gorman’s “The True History of AACR2” is a beautiful, often sardonic firsthand description of how the drafting of AACR2 unrolled both in language and structure (and cast of characters). Particularly personal and amusing is Gorman’s account of his role as an author of AACR2. In the pre–word processing days of 1971 Gorman did not know how to type, so he produced more than 511 pages of handwritten text (while serenaded by the songs of the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt), which he then took to an office in the British Library “to be typed, corrected, amended, and otherwise done over until they were ready to be copied and circulated to the interested parties” (69). Peggy Johnson’s essay on the historical evolution of collection development recalls that the term “collection development” was not introduced until 1977, when during...