reviews


 

Book Reviews 287 

remote sites), students, and tutors. It pre­
sents an interesting view of services cur­
rently provided to franchised students, 
along with each group’s perceptions of 
those services and the libraries. Recom­
mendations include enhanced communi­
cation between university librarians and 
college librarians, greater collaboration 
with instructors, provision of more cop­
ies of materials at both university and 
college libraries, allocation of additional 
funding, and implementation of more 
user and librarian training.—Barbara J. 
D’Angelo, Southeastern Louisiana Univer­
sity, Hammond. 

Hjørland, Birger. Information Seeking and 
Subject Representation: An Activity– 
Theoretical Approach to Information Sci­
ence. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Pr. 
(New Directions in Information Man­
agement, no. 34), 1997. 213p. alk. pa­
per, $59.95 (ISBN 0-313-29893-9). LC 
96-51136. 

Hjørland is a member of the faculty of the 
Royal School of Librarianship in 
Copenhagen; his academic background is 
in psychology and information science. 
This work should interest theoretically 
inclined research librarians because it is 
centered on information gathering by and 
for researchers—indeed, it is almost ex­
clusively focused on researchers. It is a 
work on theoretical foundations, not of 
practical details; and it has a very strong 
programmatic aim. The author wants to 
change the orientation of information sci­
ence research from what he sees as the 
dominant individualist and subjectivist 
approach to information science’s prob­
lems, to an objectivist, group-oriented 
approach that completely accepts and 
appreciates the social character of scien­
tific and scholarly research. He refers to 
this orientation as “methodological col­
lectivism,” contrasting it with an estab­
lished “methodological individualism.” 

The author describes various psycho­
logical theories favored by, or consonant 
with, different approaches to information 

science problems, contrasting, for ex­
ample, a widespread affinity for an infor­
mation-processing model of human cog­
nitive processes with the approach he 
prefers—activity theory. This last ap­
proach is derived from the work of Rus­
sian psychologist Lev Vygotsky and em­
phasizes social and cultural factors in 
cognitive development. Hjørland also 
shows the relationships of information 
science research strategies to philosophi­
cal theories of knowledge, and argues that 
activity theory is highly compatible with 
philosophical pragmatism, both of which 
support the kind of objectivist, socially 
oriented approach he calls methodologi­
cal collectivism. Reflection on 
pragmatism’s view of knowledge and 
activity theory’s approach to cognition 
leads Hjørland to propose that we under­
stand the concept of the subject of a docu­
ment in terms of the document’s episte­
mological or informative potentials, that 
is, potentials for helping to solve research 
problems and thus contribute to knowl­
edge. 

Information needs are to be under­
stood in a similarly public, objective way, 
as relative to scientific problem-solving, 
not (or not primarily) as inner psychologi­
cal states. Literature searching by indi­
vidual researchers must be seen as 
guided, and in a sense disciplined, by 
established practices within the disci­
plines and smaller research communities. 
A fruitful approach in information science 
research is domain analysis, the study of 
the information and communication 
structure of a discipline or smaller spe­
cialized field, with an interest in improv­
ing the information systems available 
within the domain. Such research can 
usefully draw on the history, sociology, 
and philosophy of science as background. 

The proposal, to define the concept of 
a subject in terms of informative poten­
tials, sounds strange if understood as an 
analysis or reconstruction of what people 
ordinarily think about a document’s sub­
ject. But it can be revamped easily into a 



288 College & Research Libraries May 1998 

proposal: The best way to do content de­
scription would be to describe informa­
tive potentials. In that form, it clearly par­
allels the proposal, which has been 
around for years, to describe content by 
predicting subjective utilities of docu­
ments (which the author oddly does not 
discuss, though it obviously provides 
another striking case of subjectivism to 
be opposed by methodological collectiv­
ism.) In that form, of course, it is subject 
to the objection that prediction of future 
epistemological or informative potentials 
is bound to be excruciatingly difficult, 
made all the more so by the author’s in­
sistence on long-range as opposed to 
short-range utilities (he rejects “short­
term pragmatism,” which he blames on 
William James). And it is oddly optimis­
tic to suppose that many documents now 
produced actually have any future util­
ity or informational value for solving fu­
ture scientific problems. So Hjørland’s 
proposal faces very serious challenges. 
Despite this, however, it is a major pro­
posal, an addition to the small repertory 
of serious alternative approaches to con­
tent description, and deserves to be re­
flected on and worked over carefully by 
others. 

Some of the other proposals, such as 
the advocacy of domain analysis, are less 
controversial. Every good subject special­
ist in a research library practices an in­
formal kind of domain analysis simply 
by accumulating knowledge of the bibli­
ography of a field, of its literature patterns 
and types, its intellectual leaders and cen­
ters of activity, and the like. Many of 
Hjørland’s proposals will sound intu­
itively plausible to the subject specialist. 
The emphasis on the philosophically 
pragmatic foundation of the proposals 
probably will seem attractive as well; ac­
tivity theory is not described in enough 
detail to provide really solid backing, and 
in effect is treated as a Russian version of 
John Dewey’s approach. The whole di­
rection of this work will make sense to 
those familiar with the literature on the 

sociology of knowledge and, in particu­
lar, the sociology of scientific knowledge 
and of social epistemology. 

However, a big question remains. 
Hjørland starts by proposing that infor­
mation seeking is the key problem for in­
formation science but then concentrates 
exclusively on literature searching by re­
search workers. What about information 
seeking by others? What about informa­
tion seeking that does not take the form 
of literature search? As one works 
through this book, it appears that the au­
thor really does think that information 
science has as its subject matter prima­
rily, or exclusively, the research use of lit­
erature. The study of information use by 
others is apparently to be left to others— 
for example, students of the mass media. 
This seems a quite unnecessary limitation 
on the scope of information science, for 
which the author presents no convincing 
argument. We should ignore this limita­
tion, but we should welcome method­
ological collectivism and apply it widely 
to the study of knowledge and of infor­
mation production, distribution, and uti­
lization.—Patrick Wilson, University of 
California-Berkeley. 

Outsourcing Library Technical Services Op­
erations: Practices in Academic, Public, 
and Special Libraries. Eds. Karen A. Wil­
son and Marylou Colver. Chicago: 
ALA, 1997. 239p. $38 ($34.20 ALA 
members) (ISBN 0-8389-0703-2). LC 
97-22901. 

Published by ALA, this volume was is­
sued under the sponsorship of the Asso­
ciation for Library Collections and Tech­
nical Services’s Commercial Technical 
Services Committee whose members in 
1995 “. . . were aware of the lack of pub­
lished case studies on technical services 
outsourcing in the 1990s. . . . This book 
was conceived to provide readers with 
greater insight on the managerial aspects 
of outsourcing, based on a variety of suc­
cessful experiences in different kinds of 
library settings.” The introduction and