Book Reviews 103

As Dow notes, the “conflict between 
archivists and dealer/collectors comes 
down to a matter of perspective,” and 
she devotes an enlightening chapter ex-
amining the different perspectives and 
theoretical backgrounds of each group. 
She then creates a series of 17 case studies 
based on actual events and hypothetical 
situations, offering questions for consid-
eration for each case, along with advice 
on how each case should be approached

The volume concludes with a chapter 
on avoiding conflict and replevin, re-
minding archivists to adhere to archival 
best practices for security and documen-
tation of their collections. Finally, she 
wraps up with advice on how to avoid 
replevin and, if it becomes necessary, how 
best to approach a replevin case.

This book does an admirable job of il-
lustrating many aspects of a complicated 
legal situation, providing archivists, col-
lectors, and dealers with insight, analysis, 
and practical advice. Well-written and to 
the point, this volume is highly recom-
mended for archivists and dealers alike.—
Gene Hyde, Radford University. 

Interdisciplinarity and Academic Librar-
ies. Eds. Daniel C. Mack and Craig 
Gibson. Chicago: Association of Col-
lege and Research Libraries, 2012. 238p. 
alk. paper, $62 (ISBN 9780838986158). 
LC2012-018651.

It is not often that one encounters a col-
lection of essays so thoroughly aligned 
in their approach and perspective as to 
merit reading the collection from cover 
to cover; yet such is the nature of this 
recently published collection in ACRL’s 
Publications in Librarianship series (no. 
66). Edited by Daniel C. Mack, Head of 
the George and Sherry Middlemas Arts 
Humanities Library at Penn State, and 
Craig Gibson, Associate Director for Re-
search and Education at the Ohio State 
University, this work brings together 
14 authors from across the landscape of 
academic librarianship, including admin-
istrators, department heads, catalogers, 
technologists, reference and instruction 

librarians, subject specialists, and profes-
sors of library science. Each author brings 
his or her unique perspective to the effects 
that interdisciplinary work has wrought 
on higher education and, specifically, 
academic libraries; and each essay seem-
ingly builds upon the foundation laid by 
those that came before it, a credit to the 
editors’ choice of organization.

Mack introduces the collection by de-
fining interdisciplinarity and its related 
work: multidisciplinarity, cross-discipli-
narity, and transdisciplinarity. A number 
of significant factors have led to the rise 
of interdisciplinary work in higher edu-
cation and thus merit the importance of 
forming this collection of essays, namely: 
the internationalization of the academy, 
the increasingly global perspective of the 
university, the growth and proliferation of 
external partnerships, the conglomeration 
of electronic resources across disciplines, 
the evolution of search and retrieval 
systems that must account for multiple 
approaches to knowledge management, 
the rise of born-digital materials and 
cloud computing, and, perhaps most 
important, the desire of institutions of 
higher education to solve the world’s 
“grand problems.”

The first two chapters discuss the in-
herent nature of academic disciplines and 
how interdisciplinarity rises within them. 
Roberta J. Astroff (Chapter 1) focuses on 
many of the policing functions (such as 
epistemological, administrative) that keep 
disciplinary boundaries in check. Jean-
Pierre V.M. Herubel (Chapter 2) continues 
this discussion with a concentrated ex-
amination of specific fields of knowledge 
and the interdisciplinary turn those fields 
took in recent decades. 

Each of the following chapters inspects 
a specific aspect of library work and 
the effect interdisciplinarity has had on 
each. Jill Woolums (Chapter 3) looks at 
scholarly communication—the players, 
the opportunities, and the threats—and 
concludes with a list of roles for librar-
ians in the new scholarly landscape. In 
Chapter 4, Ann Copeland discusses “the 



104 College & Research Libraries January 2013

artisan activities of cataloging, classify-
ing, and creating authorized headings” 
in light of the need for experts who can 
effectively navigate the quickly changing 
information environment that interdis-
ciplinary work generates and requires. 
Continuing the conversation of the role of 
technical services, Gretchen E. Reynolds, 
Cynthia Holt, and John C. Walsh (Chap-
ter 5) report the findings of their survey 
of academic librarians’ perspectives on 
interdisciplinarity and the effects it has 
had on collection development, including 
a case study conducted at George Mason 
University Libraries. Dan Hazan (Chapter 
6) takes a brief step back in time to exam-
ine the rise of area studies, a forerunner 
to interdisciplinary studies that shares 
many of its origins, challenges, and needs. 
In Chapter 7, Mark Dahl scans a number 
of digital collections, emphasizing the 
various technological, creative, and infor-
mational needs that digital scholarship re-
quires, and highlights the potential role of 
the library in fulfilling these needs. Evelyn 
Ehrlich and Angela Carreño (Chapter 8) 
focus on the role of the subject librarian 
and outline what they see as two distinct 
phases of effects originating from the in-
terdisciplinary turn in higher education. 
Notably, they conclude with an appendix 
of ideas for how subject librarians can 
leverage library services toward the ends 
of interdisciplinary work. In Chapter 
9, Maralyn Jones succinctly defines her 
chapter as an answer to librarians asking 
themselves, “How should I teach inter-
disciplinary research to maximize criti-
cal thinking and information literacy?” 
Jones provides a list of resources, tools, 
and tips for librarians seeking to educate 
themselves in interdisciplinary methods. 
Finally, Johann van Reenan and Kevin 
J. Comerford (Chapter 10) conclude the 
main body of essays with a look at specific 
interdisciplinary centers, collaborative 
data initiatives, and centers of excellence 
and the role of the library in each.

Craig Gibson brings all these chapters 
to a close by examining trends within the 
academy and outlining six possible char-

acteristics of its future. As he and other 
authors in this volume have noted, the 
future of higher education and the effects 
that interdisciplinary work will bring 
about are far from certain, but the library 
can begin the work of laying the founda-
tion for what will certainly be a change in 
the view of knowledge itself. As Gibson 
notes: “If the library can demonstrate that 
how it organizes itself and its services 
makes a difference in addressing [big 
challenges], it will become the essential 
partner that its strategic plan advocates.” 
Interdisciplinarity and Academic Libraries is 
a volume created for those librarians and 
library leaders who seek to strategically 
shift the role of the academic library and 
recenter it as the heart of the research 
institution.—John M. Jackson, University 
of Southern California.

John Buschman. Libraries, Classrooms, and 
the Interests of Democracy: Marking the 
Limits of Neoliberalism. Lanham, Md.: 
Scarecrow Press, 2012. 239p. acid-free 
paper, $65 (ISBN 9780810885288). LC 
2012-010128.

Should library marketing and advertising 
be allowed in educational institutions or 
classrooms, and do policies grounded in 
the current political paradigm of neolib-
eralism advance the mission of libraries 
and democracy? These are the guiding 
questions that frame John Buschman’s 
book, Libraries, Classrooms, and the Interests 
of Democracy: Marking the Limits of Neo-
liberalism. Neoliberalism, as Buschman 
quotes David Harvey (2007), is defined 
as the advancement of humanity “by the 
maximization of entrepreneurial free-
doms within an institutional framework 
characterized by private property rights, 
individual liberty, unencumbered mar-
kets, and free trade.” The author describes 
this book as an “extended meditation 
on the historical roots and connections 
between our educative institutions and 
democracy, on the entanglements of those 
institutions with commerce—and its most 
recent neoliberal instantiations, and on 
a selected set of resources within demo-