Book reviews 199

R. C. Barquin and G. P. Mead (Editors). Towards the information society: selectedpapersfrom the Hong Kong Computer Conference, 1983. Oxford: North-Holland, 1984. 164 pp, ISBN 0 444 87564 6. $38.50/ Dfl. 100.00.

The outpouring of publications devoted to possible computer and telecom- munication dominated futures is increasing. Obviously, publishers believe the public’s appetite for such matter to be insatiable and, in the light of what is published, uncritical. There is little in this work to modify such an opinion.

However, it has to be said that the editors have no such doubts. The papers selected for publication ‘truly transcend the confines of time and space. [They] deserved to be seen and read beyond the hospitable but narrow confines of Hong Kong, and even Asia . . . ‘. This reviewer searched hard for these ineffable qualities in such papers as ‘Group medical practice billing system’, ‘Citibank global telecommunications network’, ‘Electronic banking’, ‘On-line living’, ‘Informalisation of T. C. Mits’, etc. The ideas encountered were commonplaces of futurology pundits, newspapers, colour supplements and the like. Trans- cendental they were not.

The ordinariness of the presentations perhaps could be justified by the purpose of the conference. It was not intended to be ‘an event about computers and for computer specialists. Rather it-was an attempt to review life as we will be facing it in a world where computers will be an inescapable fact of life-and to start planning accordingly. It is an opportunity seized to give us all a glimpse of the future. ’ In considering the problems of the peoples of Asia the urge to qualify the use of ‘we’ and ‘all’ in this particular context is difficult to resist. However, the Hong Kong Computer Conference may have created a greater awareness of the future ‘benefits and impact of information technology’ at a time when the colony was seen to be ‘slipping behind its other Asian competitors’ in this field.

Allowing, even though with some scepticism, such beneficial practical consequences, have we uncovered an acceptable justification for the publication of these papers, rather than for holding the conference? The answer must be no. The conference may have been both needed and useful. The publication of the papers neither. The conference was intended to evoke a local response in, it has to be assumed, a largely non-specialist audience. If the delivered papers had achieved their specific aims in this context it was mistaken to require them to act out a similar role on the wider world stage through publication. In this wider setting, because they have nothing new to say and because what is said is not presented in a novel manner, the banality of these papers is all too obvious. They should have been left in decent obscurity.

Norman Roberts University of Sheffield

Henry Evelyn Bliss. Bliss bibliographic classification. 2nd edn. J. Mills and Vanda Broughton with the assistance of Valerie Lang. Class K-Society. London: Butterworths, 1984. 167 pp. ISBN 408 70830 1. 232.00.

Class K, entitled ‘Society’, is the seventh volume of the second edition of the Bliss classification (BC2) to appear since 1977, the others being Anthropology, Human biology, Health sciences (H); Psychology and psychiatry (I); Education (‘J); Religion, the Occult, Morals and ethics (P); Social welfare (Q; and the