College and Research Libraries 184 College & Research Libraries flamboyant image." He also argues that librarians attain professional authority through their control of "a bureaucratic organization having the power to dis- tribu,te a public good." The professional model often touted as an alternative-that of the physician as solo practitioner-is actually anachronistic; even physicians now operate within bureaucracies. The disadvantage of Birdsall's adver- sarial rhetorical strategy is that the two library myths seem to be running on separate tracks that never intersect. The library universe cannot be as Manichean as Birdsall paints it. If it were, how could the two visions ever be reconciled? (For reconciliation there must be, if historic library values are to be preserved.) If the electronic library is such a monster, how can it be contained by a physical building, as in Birdsall's recommendation that "the ritual library as place incorporate the transmissional electronic library." Birdsall does not deal directly with academic libraries, except to note that they have been moving increasingly closer on the continuum to the special library model. It would have been more interesting, perhaps, to ask whether academic and school librar- ies have ruling myths of their own. In any case, the issues raised in this book can be transposed readily to an aca- demic context. The academic library's function as place and institution, the academic librarian's role as teacher and guide, have no necessary place within the electronic library. Technology will not provide for them. Only humans can do that.-Jean Alexander, Northwestern Uni- versity, Evanston, lllinois. Mitcham, Carl. Thinking through Technol- ogy: The Path .between Engineering and Philosophy. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1994. 397 p. $47.50 cloth (ISBN 0-226-53196-1), $17.95 paper (ISBN 0- 226-53198-8). Mitcham writes that as a student he was attracted to the idea that the distin- guishing characteristic of our time was not so much modem science as modern technology. This is not startling if tech- nology is taken, as it very often is, to be March 1995 simply applied science; then it just means that applied science overshad- ows pure science. It has real force only if technology is seen to be an independent realm of activity that makes use of sci- ence when it can and otherwise works on its own. This is how Mitcham under- stands it. The issue is an important one that ought to interest librarians and in- formation scientists and others in- volved with information technology. It makes a difference how one thinks of one's work and its goals and criteria of evaluation whether one is oriented to- ward a model of scientific practice or toward one of technological practice. It may have made a difference that people once thought there was or ought to be a "library science," or that information sys,... tem designers thought of themselves as information scientists rather than as in- formation engineers. The science-technology relationship can be explored in many ways; Mitcham set himself the task of discovering what there was in the literature of philosophy that was of relevance to serious reflec- tion on technology. He published bibli- ographies and anthologies as preparation for what he now offers-a critical intro- duction to the philosophy of technology. It falls roughly into two parts, one a his- torical review of relevant literature, the other an analytic exploration of four as- pects of technology: as artifact, as activ- ity, as knowledge, and as volition. The historical review is dominated by a distinction between two supposedly opposed traditions: engineering phi- losophy of technology and humanities philosophy of technology. The engineer- ing approach is analysis of technology from within. The humanities approach is interpretation from the outside, from the vantage point of religion, poetry, or phi- losophy (i.e., not just philosophers-Le- wis Mumford and Jacques Ellul are prominent exemplars of the humanities approach). The engineering approach tends to be enthusiastically pro-technol- ogy; the humanities approach tends to be suspicious and critical. Mitcham quite pointlessly fusses over which of the two approaches is superior (inside and out- side views are complementary), but de- cides in favor of the humanities approach. The whole review is a bit disappointing, though this is not Mitcham's fault. While one might have thought that philoso- phers would have had a lot to say about technology and its relation to science and human life in general, with a very few exceptions (Heidegger, most impor- tantly) they have not; they have simply left the issue in the dark, perhaps assum- ing that technology raised no interesting issues or none that philosophical reflec- tion on science did not adequately il- luminate. (The 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy has no index entries for "Tech- nology" or "Philosophy of Technology.") Contemporary philosophers find plenty of problems of applied ethics involving technology, but Mitcham prefers to avoid ethical questions in this introduc- tion. So while this is a very scholarly work with a strong international empha- sis, with forty-nine pages of notes and a thirty-two-page annotated bibliography, the historical part of Mitcham's book is unavoidably rather thin. It is ironic that while he argues for the superiority of the humanities approach, he then goes on in the second part of the book to produce quite vigorous examples of analysis of technology from the inside: analyzing "what engineers know and how they know it" (the title of a fine book by Wal- ter G. Vincenti published in 1990), what they produce (for Mitcham, technology is primarily the production and use of artifacts, where others would see it as encompassing technique in general), what is most characteristic of their activ- ity (design). The fourth section of the analytical part of the book, on technology as "voli- tion," does not fit in well with its neigh- bors. Though Mitcham apologizes for his analyses ("the perhaps clumsy and bookish analysis of technical texts ... ," chapters that "intentionally wallow in the details of engineering texts"), these analyses are exactly the kind of thing one needs if one wants to get clear about the relations between science and technol- ogy. Mitcham's deference to the humani- ties leads him to undervalue his own Book Reviews 185 186 College & Research Libraries contribution. This is an introduction to what he recognizes to be an underdevel- oped field; it is also a very conservative introduction. For example, it ends with sketches of three attitudes toward technology, "ancient skepticism," "en- lightment optimism," and. "romantic un- easiness." No hint of anything post- modern here. And while Mitcham is head of the Science, Technology, and So- ciety Program at Pennsylvania State University, there is not much society in this book, nor much attention to so- ciotechnical systems, nor to the material and social infrastructure that technolo- gies create and in which our lives are embedded. (Concentration on technol- ogy as production and use of individual artifacts makes it easier to neglect so- ciotechnical systems.) For that we may have to look to some new field of tech- nology studies. Nevertheless, Mitcham's book can be a useful starting point for a newcomer to the questions concerning technology.-Patrick Wilson, University of California, Berkeley. Branscomb, Anne W. Who Owns Infor- mation? From Privacy to Public Access. New York: Basic, 1994. 241p. $25 (ISBN 0-465-09175-X). Anne Wells Branscomb, a legal scholar- in-residence at the Harvard Program on Information Resources Policy, is an ex- pert on high-tech intellectual property. In Who Owns Information? From Privacy to Public Access, she authoritatively dis- cusses how "electronic-mediated infor- mation" has been dealt with in "three areas of the law-First Amendment rights, intellectual property rights, and privacy rights," with the thrust of the analysis on the second area. Though unmentioned in the title or subtitle, Branscomb's primary focus is on com- puters and digital information. She makes no claim to survey this expanding field exhaustively; for example, she mentions music only in passing and ar- chitects' blueprints not at all. The bulk of the book consists of choppy microchapters on topics or cases involving different kinds of personal in- formation and the video and computer March 1995 industries. In each the author jumps into the subject in medias res with a drama- tized narrative to particularize the issue. The astute reader learns to jump over the journalese to the analytical background that sets forth the pertinent considera- tions at play in the illustrative case. This inconsistent treatment, along with the gee-whiz introduction to such high-tech entities as "electronic laser beams" or tele- marketers' "800 WATS lines," makes for a schizophrenic work that cannot make up its mind whether to address the technical legal/ computer questions or to appeal to an impressionable wider audience. Branscomb does not limit herself strictly to digital data; the most cohesive chapter-on the Dead Sea Scrolls-in- volves computers only peripherally, as she acknowledges. This chapter-said to be on "religious information" but deal- ing more centrally with the control and sharing of scholarly data and knowl- edge-touches on issues of plagiarism; this term is absent from her text, but the problems she discusses relate to analo- gous conflicts (unmentioned here) that are besetting other fields of scholarship. Similarly, Branscomb does not acknow- ledge that the Reagan administration's restrictive information policy was not limited to electronic media, as any ALA member would well know. Her occa- sional discussion of nondigital informa- tion makes it difficult to understand why she does not make similar connections in other cases. Despite the intermittent dumbing- down of the prose, Branscomb presents a series of serviceable state-of-the-ques- tion surveys. The references to the litera- ture seem, with the possible exception of the chapter on the Dead Sea Scrolls, mostly limited to what can be found on Lexis/Nexis: largely, the extremes of case law and articles in the popular press. The reader's confidence in her scholarship is a little shaken, however, when Fantasia video sales are docu- mented, not as would be expected by a reference to a trade journal, but to one of those anthology news summaries that pop up in Nexis keyword searches. In this instance concerning Fantasia, a cita-