Medical Librarianship in Nigeria--a review of the literature and comments on some problems and prospects.

The literature of medical librarianship of Nigeria is reviewed. The staff structure of Nigerian univeristy libraries and, in particular, of the medical libraries attached to them is restrictive, unprogressive, and unconducive to the development of medical librarianship in Nigeria. These medical libraries should cease to be administered and regarded as just unavoidable appendages of the main university libraries. They should be independent, full-fledged libraries of their own, recognixed as full academic departments of their respective colleges or faculties, with their heads being in no way inferior in status to other heads of academic departments.The granting of faculty status to Nigerian unviersity librarians should go the whole way and let the principle of multiple professorships be applied to the staff structure of unviersity libraries. Efforts are being made to effect bibliographic organization of Nigerian medical literature. A national library of medicine for Nigeria, however, humble its beginning, should be established.     

A description of the catalog division project at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia Library.

This paper describes the procedures used at the Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia to divide its ninety-year-old dictionary card catalog. The division was necessitated by overcrowding, obsolete subject headings, and lack of a complete authority list which resulted in like materials being scattered throughout the catalog under several headings. Two catalogs were created: the historical-biographical catalog, representing all works published before 1950 and all works of historical or biographical nature; and the current catalog, containing all works published from 1950 on, excepting historical or biographical materials. The 1950- catalog was further divided into name and subject catalogs, and the subject section was revised according to MeSH. The project was completed in about two years. As a result, searching time has been much reduced, and the library is able to take advantage of the annual revisions of MeSH to update the subject catalog.     

American historians and European archival theory: the collaboration of J.F. Jameson and Waldo G. Leland

J. Franklin Jameson and Waldo G. Leland remain forever linked in American archival history as the founders, respectively, of the National Archives and the American archival profession. From the immediate post-Revolutionary period until the eve of the First World War, American historians recognized that their nation's early history remained locked in European archives. However, not until the pioneering efforts of Leland, working under supervision of Jameson during the early 20th century, did any of these historical researchers bring to the United States, along with the voluminous copies of archival documents, the emerging tenets of European archival theory. This is the story of the collaboration between Jameson and Leland, and of Leland's efforts to professionalize American archival practice on the basis of European archival theory.     

Bakhtin Applied: Employing Dialogism to Analyze the Interplay of the Ideologies of Individualism and Community Within the Discourse of Alcoholics Anonymous

An ongoing debate regarding the nature of therapeutic communities concerns the extent to which these communities reinforce the ideologies of individualism and community. This article engages this discussion through a process of social text analysis informed by the dialogism theory of Russian philosopher and literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin. Dialogism seeks to understand the multiple voices interpenetrating particular utterances, revealing an emergent social construction of meaning. Applying this approach to examples of discourse from a prominent therapeutic community, Alcoholics Anonymous, illustrates how meaning in the discourse of this movement can be understood to emerge among the interplay between the ideologies of individualism and community as expressed within the movement's narrative practice.