reviews


Book Reviews 175 

and periodicals, broadsides, pamphlets, 
and posters which reflect the activities 
of various communities, organizations 
and movements, and individuals. 

The essays in Print Culture in a Diverse 
America are organized under three themes. 
Four essays are included on the role of for­
gotten serials. Rudolph Vecoli tracked a 
number of immigrant Italian newspapers 
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth 
centuries, demonstrating their significance 
in Italian-American social life and their 
importance in maintaining a distinctive 
ethnic identity in the immigrants’ new 
world. Yumei Sun traces the history of 
Chun Sai Yat Po, a San Francisco-based 
newspaper that “engaged the Chinese 
community in a reflexive process of 
self-examination that led, inevitably, to 
greater assimilation.” Violet Johnson’s es­
say on the Boston Chronicle extends our 
understanding of cultural institutions and 
social change in Boston’s black communi­
ties, and Norma Fay Green contributes an 
original essay on empowerment and the 
homeless in the publication of the Chicago 
newspaper, StreetWise. 

Part two of the anthology shifts focus to 
the relationship between readers and their 
texts. Again, four essays are presented, this 
time on topics ranging from hobo 
self-publication to the discovery of the read­
ing interests of public library users in a ru­
ral Iowa community. This section is particu­
larly noteworthy in the authors’ use of of­
ten-overlooked resources, such as the pre­
viously undiscovered circulation records of 
a small public library, vestiges of the 
records/archives of social clubs and orga­
nizations, and obscure, forgotten newspa­
pers that were used to piece together evi­
dence of the early American labor move­
ment. In the third and final section, authors 
wrestle with what Wiegand describes as 
“print materials’ reconstruction of events,” 
including an analysis of how the Titanic di­
saster was constructed by marginalized 
communities and Langston Hughes’s ef­
forts at self-publication in the 1930s. The 
latter is especially instructive in the study 
of similar efforts among black writers in sub­
sequent decades. 

As this volume indicates, the benefits 
in applying print cultural studies to the 
analysis of America’s cultural diversity 
have yet to be exhausted. Yet, there are limi­
tations. Vecoli writes: “While print culture 
can be read for various ideologies that 
sought to influence readers, other sources 
need to be consulted to determine its effi­
cacy.” This is an important warning that a 
single-minded (and ethnocentric) focus on 
print culture ignores much that is valued 
by cultural communities: that which re­
sides outside the realm of print culture or 
of the reading interests of their members 
(e.g., in music, stories, and visual and 
performance-related arts). Also, print cul­
ture scholars will need to exercise caution 
as they apply the theory of book and print 
cultural studies to inquiry about the modes 
of communicating ideas among diverse 
cultural groups. Although these theoreti­
cal perspectives can provide great insight, 
they also may cloud scholarly understand­
ing of cultural nuances. 

Wiegand concludes his introductory 
essay by writing that “each of the eleven 
essays in this book represents a foray into 
the multicultural world of readers and 
reading in America over the last century 
and a half.” Through their work at the 
Center for the History of Print Culture in 
Modern America, Danky and Wiegand 
have broadened the narrowly constructed 
scope of studies in print culture to include 
different perspectives, themes, methods, 
resources, and objects of investigation. It 
is no wonder that the book won the 1999 
Carey McWilliams Award for its contri­
bution to multicultural scholarship. This 
volume is strongly recommended not 
only for students of print cultural stud­
ies, but also for those who are interested 
in how changing technologies affect the 
way communities record their lives.— 
William C. Welburn, The University of Iowa. 

Technology and Scholarly Communication. 
Ed. Richard Ekman and Richard E. 
Quandt. Berkeley: Univ. of California 
Pr., 1999. 442p. $45.00, alk. paper, cloth 
(ISBN 0-520-21762-4); $19.95 paper 
(ISBN 0-520-21763-2). LC 98-30679. 



176 College & Research Libraries 

Since 1994, the Andrew W. Mellon Foun­
dation has awarded thirty grants total­
ing $12.8 million in support of projects 
that attempt to evaluate the effects of 
electronic publishing on scholarly com­
munication. In April 1997, Richard Ek­
man, secretary of the foundation and se­
nior program officer, and Richard E. 
Quandt, Hughes-Rogers Professor of 
Economics Emeritus at Princeton Univer­
sity and senior advisor to the foundation, 
organized a conference hosted by Emory 
University, in Atlanta, to discuss the 
progress of these projects. Technology and 
Scholarly Communication includes 
twenty-five papers that were presented 
at the Atlanta conference. The papers 
were authored by librarians, publishers, 
journal vendors, foundation officers, and 
experts in information technology (IT). 
Deanna B. Marcum, president of the 
Council on Library and Information Re­
sources, contributed summary com­
ments at the end of the book.

 These papers focus on electronic pub­
lishing for scholarly communication; they 
analyze a number of case studies and offer 
original insights on a range of interesting 
topics. How is the new IT used for schol­
arly publication? What are the technical 
standards for digital documents? What is 
the impact of electronic publishing on 
scholarly productivity? Do electronic pub­
lications, as compared to traditional print 
publications, enhance scholarly communi­
cation? What is the economic status of elec­
tronic journals, especially in relation to 
their price, costs, and markets? Does the 
purchase of electronic journals reduce li­
braries’ expenditures for serials? What are 
the licensing, intellectual property, copy­
right and associated user rights when us­
ing electronic publications? What is the 
future of electronic publishing in the aca­
demic community? All of these questions 
are addressed in this book, making it valu­
able to librarians, publishers, researchers, 
and university administrators as the most 
comprehensive assessment of electronic 
publishing to date.

 Ekman and Quandt raise questions 
and comment on issues emerging from 

March 2000 

the papers in this book. They think that 
convincing people that “IT will raise 
scholarly productivity” is tough because 
of the difficulty of measuring the effects 
of IT on scholarship. They point out that 
pricing publications depends on the costs 
of publications, the demand and usage 
from readers, and the supply provided 
by publishers; and conclude that future 
research should focus on the cost and 
price of electronic publishing and the 
usage and effects of IT on academic pro­
ductivity, in both the short and long term.

 The twenty-five essays, each pre­
sented as one chapter, are grouped into 
four parts. In part one, “Technological 
Fundamentals,” Hockey and Kenney 
summarize the recent progress of IT, es­
pecially SGML and technical standards 
for creating image files, as applied to 
digital documents. Okerson gives an 
overview of copyright and licensing of 
electronic publications.

 The papers in “Electronic Publishing: 
Empirical Studies” analyze various eco­
nomic issues related to electronic pub­
lishing—including costs, prices, markets, 
and production—from the perspective of 
librarians, publishers, and journal ven­
dors. Bennett concludes that digital ma­
terials may enhance information-based 
productivity. Regier thinks that electronic 
publishing is cheaper than many kinds 
of publishing, but “the demands of schol­
ars and libraries for enhanced electronic 
publishing make it more expensive.” 
Several publishers present pricing mod­
els for their products and discuss how 
they measure the costs of electronic pub­
lication. Getz, a professor of economics, 
analyzes the process costs of editing and 
publishing from the economic perspec­
tives of, in turn, scholars, publishers, li­
brarians, and electronic agents.

 In “Use of Electronic Journals and 
Books: Empirical Studies,” the authors 
evaluate electronic journals and books 
used in university libraries. These stud­
ies, both domestic and foreign, show that 
the usage rate for electronic resources is 
growing and that academic users are gen­
erally satisfied with electronic journals. 



 Interuniversity consortia are consid­
ered an effective means of overcoming the 
high costs of electronic publication. The 
members of consortia share the costs of 
accessing electronic resources simulta­
neously through networks. But consortia 
also give rise to new problems, including 
licenses, copyrights, and associated user 
rights, not only between publishers (or 
vendors) and libraries, but also within the 
consortia. A special software system “the 
Rights Manager” has been tested and 
shown effective in the management of in­
tellectual property and licenses in a con­
sortia setting at Case Western Reserve 
University. Finally, as Rosenblatt and 
Whisler mention, it will take a joint effort 
of the whole academic community— 
scholars, students, university administra­
tors, librarians, publishers, and academic 

Book Reviews 177

information technologists—to solve the 
economic crisis in scholarly communica­
tion.

 “Visions of the Future” discusses the 
future development of electronic pub­
lishing, including new legal regulations, 
new encoding standards, new Web tech­
nologies for electronic publications, and 
new models of analysis (on demand) for 
scholarly communication.

 This book comprehensively explores 
the current issues surrounding electronic 
publishing’s use in scholarly communi­
cation. The academic community will 
appreciate it for its thorough examina­
tion of the issues, even though few con­
clusions and no final solutions to the 
problems associated with electronic pub­
lishing are offered.—Chengren Hu, Vir-
ginia Commonwealth University.