reviews.indd


356 College & Research Libraries 

development and the acquisition of new 
knowledge and skills. 

The goal of a grant-sponsored col-
laboration between West Virginia State 
College and the National University of 
Benin was to improve library services 
in their respective regions. This paper 
addresses the collection development 
and acquisitions activities of this project 
along with concomitant issues associated 
with language barriers, unreliable com-
munications infrastructure, and cultural 
differences. The paper concludes that the 
best way to acquire materials is “either 
to do it in person or to hire a person or 
business with dealings in Benin to get 
them for you.” Starting a special collection 
requires institutional and administrative 
support for additional personnel, facili-
ties, budget, and technical resources. This 
author, too, feels that collection policies 
are critical for defining the purpose and 
profile of the collection. Suggestions for 
selecting, purchasing, and shipping ma-
terials are detailed. 

“Providing Access to Sources for India 
Studies at Indiana University Libraries: 
Piecing a Quilt” describes an initiative 
by Indiana University academics and 
administrators in cooperation with the 
consulate general and the local Indo-
American community. The librarian was 
asked to develop collections to support 
a curriculum offering language instruc-
tion in Hindi and Sanskrit and classes 
in the philosophy, religion, and culture 
of India. Networking with organizations 
and agencies, both within and without 
the university system, fostered success 
in supplemental fund-raising, selection, 
technical processing, and the continual 
expansion of the collection’s profi le. Web 
links provide access to electronic resourc-
es at other CRL member libraries that 
include full-text journals and e-books. An 
appendix presents tips for selection in an 
unfamiliar language, searching databases 

July 2004 

in transliteration, and using standard 
reference tools to identify and clarify title 
information. 

The articles on popular fiction and 
poetry collections each qualify for the des-
ignated “different” from this collection’s 
title. Because they are not subjects, their 
social, historical, and literary values can 
be easily overlooked. A classic, textbook 
case in favor of popular fiction in academ-
ic and public libraries presents a course 
of reasoning that challenges mainstream 
views of librarians and points up contra-
dictions reflected in traditional collection 
policies for literature. The value of popu-
lar and genre fiction (including works by 
authors of color) is judged by their effect 
on the reader and by the prominence 
of such works in popular culture; they 
should not be judged by traditional liter-
ary standards. The author provides guid-
ing principles, criteria, and procedures for 
selection, and concludes with general and 
focused bibliographies, review resources, 
reader ’s advisory services, and Web 
sources as tools for developing popular 
fi ction collections. 

The value of works by local and 
regional poets and writers is that they 
enhance the historical record because they 
articulate the feelings and document and 
interpret the quality, meaning, and value 
of human experience in a given time and 
place.—Rashidah Z. Hakeem, University of 
Mississippi. 

Bastian, Jeannett e Allis. Owning Memory: 
How a Caribbean Community Lost its 
Archives and Found its History. (Contri-
butions in Librarianship and Informa-
tion Science, no. 99). Westport, Conn.: 
Libraries Unlimited, 2003. 106p. alk. 
paper, $59 (ISBN 031332008X). LC 
2003-54609. 

When the people living in a particular 
place gain sovereignty, lose it, or have it 
transferred to some other country, what 



Book Reviews 357 

happens to their records? The answer 
varies according to the circumstances of 
the change. In the case of Kuwait, when 
occupied by Iraq, records and artifacts 
were trucked wholesale to authorities 
in Baghdad who were intent on denying 
that the “recovered province” ever had 
sovereignty. In places such as Bosnia, 
where the goal was ethnic cleansing, 
the archives were simply burned even 
as identity papers were taken from the 
expelled people. As Jamaica and the 
Bahamas approached independence, the 
British made additional investments in 
the colonial archives to ensure that they 
would be preserved in situ. 

But what happens in a case in which 
an entire colony is sold as property in a 
commercial real estate deal? Just such 
a situation occurred in 1917 when the 
Danish West Indies was transferred to the 
United States in exchange for $25 million. 
The treaty permitted the colonial archives 
to be removed to Copenhagen, and most 
of the records were, with the exception of 
recent police, court, and land records. The 
renamed United States Virgin Islands was 
put initially under the administration of a 
not very sympathetic Navy and eventu-
ally became a responsibility of the Depart-
ment of the Interior. With the creation 
of the U.S. National Archives in 1936, a 
Danish-speaking employee surveyed the 
content and condition of the remaining 
records and, in a series of shipments, 
nearly all the remaining records were sent 
to Washington, except for land and legis-
lative records. Although the treaty with 
Denmark included a stipulation that the 
records would be available for use by the 
citizens of the Virgin Islands, for practical 
purposes they were inaccessible, located 
in distant Copenhagen, with others nearly 
as difficult to consult in Washington. 

What happened when a people were 
separated from their records? Nationals 
relied almost exclusively on oral tradition 

to create their history. When this history 
was at variance with the history prepared 
by nonnative historians, confl icts arose. 
One of the most interesting aspects of 
this volume is the historiography of the 
territory, and several well-illustrated 
examples of “our” history versus “their” 
history are revealed through an examina-
tion of four “national” holidays. 

An individual pursuing family history, 
even of a family that might extend back 
more than a score of generations and 
whose ancestors rarely moved more than 
fifty miles from their place of birth, might 
be relatively easy for European Ameri-
cans. Success is usually more difficult 
for African Americans, but for citizens of 
the U.S. Virgin Islands, it is nearly impos-
sible because most of the relevant records 
are kept in distant repositories. In time, 
more of the records may be accessible via 
microform or electronically, but currently 
only a few are available in these formats, 
despite the desires of sympathetic archi-
vists in the holding repositories. 

Dr. Bastian was Director of the Territo-
rial Libraries and Archives of the USVI 
for a dozen years and currently directs 
the Archives Management Program at 
Simmons College. This book is appar-
ently based on her dissertation for the 
University of Pittsburg, but it is entirely 
readable, without the usual conventions 
of “dissertationese.” She does an excellent 
job of discussing the philosophical ques-
tions concerning a community’s records, 
the interplay of documentary history and 
oral history, the methods of professional 
and lay historians, and the technical 
problems of ownership, custody, and 
provenance. However, her principal goal 
is to make arrangements that will permit 
citizens of the Virgin Islands to “go back 
and fetch it”—to allow the people to have 
access to resources for the development 
of their own histories. Without actually 
calling for the repatriation of the records 



358 College & Research Libraries 

to their place of origin, this is clearly her 
preference. 

The National Historical Publication 
and Records Commission of the United 
States, the International Council on 
Archives, and UNESCO all have ac-
knowledged the importance of colonial 
records as a product of both colony and 
metropolitan country, and they encourage 
access and joint-custody arrangements to 
permit functional access to both parties. 
Nor, it seems, is Denmark unsympathetic. 
Some Icelandic sagas were repatriated in 
the 1970s. The problem, of course, is to 
determine what the limits of such efforts 
should be. Shall the British return the 
Elgin marbles to Greece? And shall Greek 
obelisks be returned to Egypt?—Charles 
Wm. Conaway, Florida State University. 

Cooperative Efforts of Libraries. Ed. Wil-
liam Miller and Rita M. Pellen. New 
York: Haworth, 2002. 273p. cloth $59.95 
(ISBN 0789021870); paper $34.95 (ISBN 
0789021889). LC 2002-156756. 

The virtue of cooperation among librar-
ies is so ingrained into the profession as 
to have become a virtual cliché. Most 
academic librarians have worked in a con-
sortial environment at least once at some 
time during their professional lives. But 
at least one such academic librarian, this 
reviewer, can still manage a relatively pa-
rochial underappreciation of the breadth, 
depth, and creativity of the cooperative 
enterprise among libraries. This collection 
of seventeen essays by thirty-one authors, 
also published as vol. 16, nos. 1–2, of 
Resource Sharing & Information Networks 
(2002), offers a comprehensive makeup 
course in library cooperation. 

Part I, “Regional and State-Wide Coop-
eration,” passes over the more familiar ter-
ritory of OCLC and regional networks (e.g., 
SOLINET) to examine statewide activity in 
larger states, regional efforts among smaller 
states, and collaborations within large 

July 2004 

metropolitan areas. Reporting on statewide 
programs includes Virginia’s VIVA-based 
adaptation of vendor-supplied catalog 
records for full-text poetry databases, com-
plete with sample records and examples of 
most common errors found. Readers also 
will discover the Minnesota State Colleges 
and Universities System’s response to leg-
islatively mandated cooperative collection 
development. In today’s reality of overlap-
ping consortia, many librarians will find 
Carolyn Sheehy and Bernie Sloan’s descrip-
tion of Illinois’s long (late 1960s) history of 
academic library cooperation and the state’s 
2002 initiative to unite several related col-
laborations under a unifying council both 
instructive and helpful. 

Linkages with narrower topical, if not 
geographic, focus will appeal to more 
particular interests. Dottie Hiebing and 
Timothy Johnson share the birthing pains 
associated with New York City’s mul-
titype METRO consortium’s work with 
OCLC’s virtual reference soft ware. Their 
chronological account points to the effects 
of differing levels of institutional interest, 
but also to valuable and organizationally 
healthy responses. As reported by Susan 
Curzon, the California State University 
developed a systemwide collaboration to 
encourage the development of shareable 
approaches to enhancing “information 
competence.” Though created to advance 
the state’s commitment to informa-
tion literacy, this model has important, 
generalizable applications in systems 
relying more on voluntary participation 
by individual institutions as opposed to 
mandated cooperation (e.g., Minnesota’s 
collection development project). 

The articles of Part I provide an ef-
fective overview of collaborations old 
and new, narrowly focused and more 
generally supportive of broader missions. 
However, they are somewhat limited by 
their descriptive, “how-we-did-it-good” 
motif. Most authors were project partici-