These new and updated discursive review-volumes from the 1980s have greatly improved bibliographical guidance in both modern composition and historical rhetoric. More serious, and more difficult to solve, has been the underlying problem of what librarians call bibliographical control--the provision of a basic and inclusive year-by-year bibliographical record. Such a serial list is absolutely essential in any discipline, both to identify material published since the retrospective volumes' various cut-off dates, and to provide the basic factual information for tracking and retrieving published material through the library system. The previous ad hoc and selective listings, useful at the time, were no substitute for an inclusive annual record, and in any case Larson CCC list was suspended after its 1978 coverage-year (while he took over the duties of CCC editor). Not only was the quantity of relevant publication far outpacing the older selective lists, but during the later 1970s, the field as a whole had been shifting its boundaries, with bibliographical repercussions. As long as "composition" had meant "the teaching of (college) writing," most items would turn up in one of the two education serials, the commercially produced Education Index, which indexes journal items rapidly and stretches back well before most other indexes, or the massive federally funded ERIC database, which combines two print-form serials, the Current Index to Journals in Education, covering articles, and Resources in Education, covering research reports, monographs, selected conference papers, etc.

Similarly, strictly linguistic aspects of composition were usually covered in the linguistic database, Language and Language Behavior Abstracts. The education serials especially, published monthly and then cumulated, remain essential tools for composition researchers. But as compositionists broadened their focus to cover the mental processes and social components of writing in nonpedagogic settings, the education indexes recorded only part of what was being done. The problem of basic bibliographical control was not easy to solve, because it criss-crossed so many of the developments (and insecurities) of the new discipline. Because composition is a mission-centered field, rather than one based on a single theoretical approach, it is very difficult to make a clear demarcation on subject-grounds alone of what exactly should or should not be included in a composition bibliography; for instance, does a study of a literary author's worksheets, or a management report on journalists' workhabits, belong to the field? Second, because compositionists have always written for varied audiences, their ideas have quite often been published in typically non-research formats--everything from columns in local newsletters to teachers' manuals for freshman textbooks. Much of this material never even gets into the Library of Congress. How does a bibliographer decide what is worth listing for posterity and what is simply ephemeral? Decisions about both field demarcation and formats covered need to be made on a consistent basis from item to item and year to year, so that users can predict what the bibliography has covered. Third, and most embarrassing, there was right into the 1980s little initiative from the relevant professional organizations to get anything done about composition bibliography. Even star-studded symposia about trends in the field are simply no substitute for basic informational services, yet those who take the most active part in conference-based professional organizations like MLA or NCTE have sometimes seemed reluctant to pay more than lip-service to composition's development as a research discipline, perhaps because the development itself threatens the concordat of the later 1970s, by which compositionists had won a new but almost exclusively teaching-based recognition within "English." So a disciplinary bibliography of record threatened some professional identities and was closely involved in how other ones were being redefined. What broke the deadlock was a new serial composition bibliography, Erika Lindemann CCCC Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric. This project originated independently of either professional organization, under the aegis of a farsighted commercial publisher, Longman (its original title was the Longman Bibliography. . .), but it drew on an impressive number of individual compositionists as its contributors, and it is now officially linked with the NCTE's Conference on College Composition and Communication. It covers material published from 1984 onwards, thus ensuring a reasonable overlap with the cut-off or end dates for coverage in the Tate or Greenwood Press retrospective volumes.

The CCCC Bibliography differs from the previous annual bibliographies in the new clarity with which Lindemann defines what exactly is to be surveyed (see the extensive preface to each volume). For the first time, the CCCC Bibliography gives composition researchers the assurance of systematic coverage of items from a stated list of journals; inclusion or exclusion of an item no longer rests solely on the ad hoc decision of an individual bibliographer but on the highly mediated decision of journal editors and referees about its relevance to a recognizably composition-directed readership. The new bibliography also broadens the format-coverage from previous lists by including dissertations and conference papers distributed through ERIC, and provides comprehensive coverage of ERIC papers from the relevant core professional meetings (such as the CCCC). Each entry is supplied with a brief paragraph of descriptive annotation. The emphasis on predictability of coverage and on relative objectivity in annotation mark the bibliography as aiming to serve fellow-researchers now and in the future by compiling a record of long-term reference usefulness, a real change of purpose from earlier composition bibliography. The result is a pretty accurate reflection of a full range of research activity and discussion within modern composition studies. Of course, by comparison with earlier composition bibliographies, these double-columned volumes with almost 2000 entries each year don't look particularly user-friendly, and subject-classification in a large-scale print-form bibliography is an intractable problem. Unlike the old Larson listing from the 1970s, the CCCC Bibliography is divided under subject-headings, and subdivided, with the subject classification getting more refined in successive volumes. There is also a comprehensive name index to each volume (including authors of individual essays from essay collections), but no subject index until 1987, although the generous cross-referencing at the end of each subsection somewhat compensates for this. Researchers need to follow up these cross-references fully and should be prepared to look in more than one subject-section. Some of the subsections can run to many pages, yet further subdivision of the categories could be counter-productive, because one would end up with either a false selectivity or too many cross-references to look up. As the cross-references indicate, many articles could already go in more than one category. Instead of getting frustrated with this unavoidable fact about composition bibliography, it is worth asking what it tells us about the field. Researchers coming into composition from literary history have, in a way, been spoilt in their expectations of what an annual bibliography can do, because the traditional literary serials (the MLA International Bibliography and the MHRA Annual Bibliography) could classify virtually everything under the literary author's name; something either is about Author X or it isn't, and there's only one place to look for relevant items. Composition bibliographers don't have that easy a way out. Compositionists tend to talk about more than one topic in an article, and to raise issues that cut across simple subject-categorization. However, because of the ease of proper-name categorization, literary bibliographers, until very recently, simply repressed any attempt to let scholars track material by subject (say, parallel discussions of ironic voice in two texts of different periods, or applications of the same theoretical perspective to dissimilar texts). Historical rhetoricians face a similar problem. It is much easier to find everything written about, say, Richard Whately, than to find all recent discussion of a theoretical issue Whately treated (like, say, the variety of rhetorical openings; even if there were an historical subject-index, "rhetorical openings" might also be indexed as "introductions" or "exordia" or dealt with under such topics as voice or ethos or relation to audience). Whole generations of literary and rhetorical scholarship (especially in dissertation research) were channeled away from general or theoretical issues, at least in part, by the nature of bibliographical indexing in their fields. Even since 1981, when the MLA introduced subject-classifications alongside the traditional author-classification, subject-searching in literary research is still a very frustrating prospect. The new fourth volume ("General") of the MLA Annual Bibliography, which has to deal with the subject-dependent field of critical theory (and, incidentally, the teaching of writing), provides the real parallel to the problems a composition bibliographer faces, and that volume is notoriously difficult to use, with overlapping categorizations and page after page of underdifferentiated and unannotated entries. Subject-classification is an intrinsically difficult problem, but at least composition bibliography has fully recognized that the problem exits, and is tackling it about as well as is possible in print-form or hard-copy. However, logically, the problem of bibliographical compilation (or "control") is prior to and distinct from the problem of subject-indexing (or "retrieval"); the importance of the CCCC Bibliography is in breaking the deadlock on the first of these problems. The problem of retrieval is one that is only worth solving once a discipline has a decent comprehensive and systematic record of publications to retrieve from. The very existence of a serious annual bibliographical record should have the effect both of stabilizing and pluralizing the field--stabilizing it, because it provides composition scholars with new opportunities to build responsibly on the work of their predecessors, and pluralizing it, because researchers now face the full range of contemporary discussion on a topic, rather than a preselected subset of what has been published. It is an historic development for composition studies, which deserves compositionists' ongoing cooperation.