reviews


394 College & Research Libraries July 1998 

benefits. Full-time faculty are stratified 
into researchers and teachers. The further 
away from teaching duties one is, the bet­
ter off one is perceived to be. 

Supreme Court decisions such as the 
Yeshiva decision in 1980 have diminished 
the rights of university faculty to engage 
in collective bargaining because they have 
empowered the state to intervene in ne­
gotiations. Shumar, however, presents 
impressive statistical data that show an 
increase in unionization and collective 
bargaining efforts during the 1980s in 
spite of these rulings. Increasingly, uni­
versity professors are organizing to pro­
tect the interests of this much-misunder­
stood category of workers. 

The strength of Shumar’s analysis is 
in his use of powerful theoretical models 
to analyze higher education. Ironically, al­
though he uses a somewhat economistic 
model, he falls into an idealist trap by 
suggesting that we simply need to 
reimagine our roles as educators. When 
Shumar claims that academia is not fun­
damentally a meritocracy, perhaps he is 
trying to identify “false consciousness”; 
skilled educators do not rise to the top 
and marginalized adjuncts are not the less 
skilled. Unmasking the denial and 
mechanisms used to make adjuncts invis­
ible is a step toward change. More impor­
tant, by focusing on faculty unionizing 
efforts, Shumar encourages collective 
political responses. However, one has to 
wonder how adjuncts might engage in 
these efforts when many faculty associa­
tions exclude them in their bylaws. 

The status of “permanent adjunct” is, 
as Shumar has argued so eloquently, un­
recognized. The growing presence of this 
cheaper more flexible work force threat­
ens general educational wage levels and 
benefits. On my campus, the faculty as­
sociation has responded to the perceived 
threat posed by this process of 
commodification; a committee has been 
formed that includes adjuncts and per­
manent faculty members to voice de­
mands for better salaries and institu­

tional resources for adjuncts.—Elizabeth 
Higgs, University of North Florida, Jackson­
ville. 

What Else You Can Do with a Library De­
gree: Career Options for the 90s and Be­
yond. Ed. Betty-Carol Sellen. New 
York: Neal-Schuman, 1997. 335p. 
$29.95 (ISBN 1-55570-264-3). LC 97­
18679. 

In this era of specialization and heavy 
credentialism, it is refreshing to take a 
moment and browse through this up­
dated edition of a book that highlights 
alternatives and describes the use of li­
brary training as a transferable skill. 
Building on an earlier Neal-Schuman ef­
fort (New Options for Librarians, eds. Sellen 
and Dimity S. Berkner, 1984), Sellen has 
gathered in these sixty-two essays per­
sonal accounts from librarians who have 
chosen to work outside the traditional li­
brary setting. She has divided the essays 
into seven major categories: publishers, 
writers, booksellers, and reviewers; pur­
veyors of products and services to librar­
ies; independent librarians on their own; 
independent librarians who have devel­
oped their own companies; those in­
volved in association work and work in 
the academic world; librarians involved 
in the corporate world; and finally, librar­
ians who have traveled farther afield. 
Within these seven categories are ac­
counts from librarians working in fields 
as disparate as an art dealer (Jim 
Linderman), a contract cataloger (Joni L. 
Cassidy), an independent publisher of 
academic books by young and upcoming 
authors (Rao Aluri), and a risk-manage­
ment researcher for Arthur Andersen 
(Anne McDonald). 

Despite vast differences in job descrip­
tions, some common themes emerge in 
these essays. Each writer describes his or 
her own transition from traditional li­
brarianship, and those progressions dem­
onstrate an impressive level of flexibility 
on the part of their authors. Many of these 
people ended up in their current roles 



 
 

Book Reviews 395 

through serendipity, not by following a 
carefully planned lifelong career chart. 
Most of the essays convey a sense of 
optimism, as well as an ability to cope 
well with less job security than many of 
our ilk tolerate comfortably. The ben­
efit for these essayists (particularly 
those who are self-employed) is free­
dom from bureaucracy, supplanted by 
the ability to absorb and adapt to 
change quickly and responsively. An­
other hallmark of the collection is the 
number of people who have created 
new careers for themselves out of fam­
ily necessity: Aluri developed his pub­
lishing venture when he moved to North 
Carolina with his wife Mary Reichel 
when she assumed the university librar­
ian post at Appalachian State, whereas 
Mary K. Feldman married, raised four 
children, and started college at age 42— 
all in preparation for her return-to-work 
career as an independent librarian! 

There are two vital lessons for aca­
demic library readers in What Else You Can 
Do with a Library Degree. The first is that 
librarians—even those firmly entrenched 
in academe—can do something else with 
that MLS. (Perhaps we would all do well 
to venture outside the box on occasion to 
refresh ourselves, our perspectives, and 
our organizations.) The second lesson is 
this: When one of these people decides to 
return to traditional librarianship in 
higher education and applies for work in 
our organizations, we should consider 
seriously what they bring—flexibility, 
ingenuity, creativity, and a heavy dose of 
optimism. Rather than focusing on the 
presence or lack of traditional academic 
credentials, we might see that these 
people are high-energy innovators whose 
skills and perspectives could be of enor­
mous benefit in the conventional library 
setting. 

What Else You Can Do with a Library 
Degree is far from a scholarly work. Its 
essays are chatty, personal, and readable. 
They all have potential use for profes­
sional development collections in aca­

demic libraries, particularly those with 
encroaching burnout among professional 
staff and those facing staff cutbacks or 
retirement buyouts. Many of these librar­
ian-writers have made lemonade from 
lemons, and their stories are worth read­
ing and sharing.—Diane J. Graves, Hollins 
University, Virginia. 

Meadows, A.J. Communicating Research. 
London: Academic Pr., 1998. 266p. alk. 
paper, $59.95 (ISBN 0-12-487415-0). LC 
97-23432. 

In the great chain of scholarly communi­
cation, there really are only two essential 
beings—author and reader. The rest of 
us—publishers, libraries, indexers, book­
sellers—are all in the middle foraging for 
existence in the hard ground between the 
two. Some of us are more successful than 
others, such as Elsevier with its huge net 
profits. All of us, as A. J. Meadows points 
out, occupy niches that have been defined 
over the past three hundred years. 

Since the middle of the seventeenth 
century, the number of people engaged 
in research and, correspondingly, the pub­
lications describing their research, have 
been increasing exponentially. Every ten 
or fifteen years, the volume of published 
information has doubled—meaning that 
over the course of any individual’s career, 
the number of publications and the vari­
ous channels for those publications has 
at least tripled. Meadows uses the illus­
tration of the volume of research expand­
ing like a balloon with researchers inhab­
iting the expanding surface. To cover the 
same area, researchers have learned to 
specialize and to collaborate in an effort 
to become more focused and simply to 
be able to keep up. Exponential growth 
cannot continue forever, and Meadows 
suggests that the expansion in research 
and in the communication of that research 
will follow an S-shaped curve that will 
flatten out around the middle of the 
twenty-first century. If it does not, Mead­
ows points out, every adult and child in 
the world, along with every dog and cat,