reviews.indd


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-



pants; some were project directors. All are 
advocates. Although several forthrightly 
identify obstacles encountered, virtu-
ally all are solved and overall outcomes 
universally praised. And like much of 
library literature, these conclusions are 
proffered without supporting assess-
ment such as cost-benefit analysis. Do 
libraries never try collaborative projects 
that fail? Projects that we thought would 
provide better collections or improved 
services, but ultimately proved too costly 
to justify the investment? This reader, 
for one, would like to have also visited 
cooperative efforts that just didn’t make 
it, proved too expensive, or had outlived 
their useful life. Objective analyses of the 
not so successful would provide produc-
tive opportunities for learning. 

Part II, “Variety of Cooperative Ven-
tures,” takes a somewhat more for-
ward-looking approach to collaboration 
as it samples “of the wide variety of 
cooperative effort which makes librar-
ies so unusual among institutions, and 
librarians unusual among profession-
als.” In an article highlighting the Center 
for Research Libraries’s (CRL’s) role in 
providing collective storage space for 
little-used research materials as well as 
the economies of collective acquisitions, 
Bernard Reilly looks to advances in net-
work technology to help overcome at least 
some of the obstacles that have limited 
collective action in the past. Ultimately, 
he proposes a cooperative national 
preservation program modeled on the 
national energy grid. David Weeks and 
Ron Chepesiuk examine applications of 
“Harvard Model,” high-density storage 
facilities serving consortial relationships. 
The three examples present funding 
models and operating guidelines fol-
lowed by an excellent summary of lessons 
learned. 

Although a number of chapters focus 
on the relationships and concerns of 

Book Reviews 359 

large libraries and their systems (e.g., 
CRL and statewide storage programs 
in Ohio and California), collaborative 
success also is apparent among smaller 
college collections. Rachel Cheng et al. 
report on a collaborative digital reference 
experiment involving five, small (though 
notably prestigious) liberal arts colleges. 
Responding to needs expressed in faculty 
and student surveys, the Wesleyan Uni-
versity Library secured a grant to extend 
the availability of real-time reference ser-
vice. Eventual participants also included 
Wellesley, Vassar, Smith, and Connecticut 
Colleges. After the first of two years 
provided by the grant, the authors pres-
ent some cost data and comparative use 
statistics on the way to concluding the 
importance of the extended hours and 
benefits to users. Although this essay of-
fers considerably more evidence of assess-
ment, analysis of data, and consideration 
of cost-benefit, nevertheless, conclusions 
seem to owe more to belief in the efficacy 
of the project on the level of faith than to 
hard analysis. 

Seiden et al. offer a more cautionary 
analysis in their description of the Tri-
College Consortium’s effort to build the 
equivalent of one research collection from 
three undergraduate college libraries. 
Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swathmore 
have collaborated since the 1940s and 
since then have discussed how to enhance 
the composition and accessibility of their 
collections. A 2001 planning grant from 
Mellon renewed the impetus. Interest-
ingly, despite the enabling power of tech-
nology, growing fiscal prudence, and the 
librarians’ commitments to collaboration, 
user data from faculty “suggest taking a 
conservative approach to weeding and 
collaborative collection development.”

 Miller and Pellen, director and associ-
ate director of libraries, respectively, at 
Florida Atlantic University, have pulled 
together an effective tour of library col-



360 College & Research Libraries 

laboration past, present, and future. A 
first resource for librarians interested in 
everything collaborative from statewide 
document delivery and catalogs to virtual 
reference, replacing brittle books, or inter-
national cooperation.—James R. Kuhlman, 
University of North Carolina at Asheville. 

Encyclopedia of Library and Information 
Science, 2nd ed., Ed. Miriam A. Drake. 
New York: Marcel Dekker, 2003. 4 vols. 
alk. paper, $1,500 (ISBN 0824720776; 
0824720784; 0824720792; 0824720806). 
LC 2003-48938. 

The first edition of the ELIS, published in 
a base set of thirty-five volumes from 1969 
to 1983 and continued with thirty-seven 
annual supplemental volumes to 2002, is 
undoubtedly very familiar to this reader-
ship as a wall of blue and red bindings in 
the reference area taking up much more 
room than its use in most collections 
would warrant. The second edition, under 
the general editorship of Miriam Drake, 
attempts to update the first and compress 
the span into four volumes with projected 
electronic supplements.

 The intended readership for this 
second edition is still as unclear as it 
was to reviewers of the first edition. 
Library and information professionals, 
students in LIS programs, interested 
people outside the field, and, perhaps, 
an assortment of others may well find 
it of interest or potential value, but it is 
doubtful if many of these, particularly 
those on the periphery of the informa-
tion professions, would think to look for 
authoritative information in articles titled 
“Humanities Computing,” “Taxonomy” 
(as a subject apparently divorced from the 
traditional concerns of our occupations), 
or “Mapping Object-oriented Model into 
a Relational Model” in this particular 
source. This, of course, is part of the ma-
jor difficulty with which reviewers of the 
first edition of this encyclopedia found 

July 2004 

fault. The scope of the work is ill defined 
and vague, and the headings used for 
the articles are frequently obscure. There 
must be a better or more generally useful 
name for “An Intelligent Dictionary Help 
System” than leaving it in the alphabetical 
sequence under I. 

In face of the lack of any preface or 
introduction detailing the processes used 
in the compilation of this monumental 
effort, it would be hoped that the articles 
focusing on the field would be able to 
elucidate the concerns of LIS as a spe-
cialization. But there is neither an article 
on library science nor one on information 
science, thus leaving both to be defined 
by inference from the contents of these 
four volumes. One could perhaps cobble 
a definition of the term information from 
following the index references, but that 
effort defeats one of the essential func-
tions of an encyclopedia. If the scope of 
the compendium is LIS and the coverage 
is comprehensive, it should follow that 
the coverage of the various topics is co-
terminous with the field. 

The array of topics chosen by the edi-
tors and executed by the contributors to 
these volumes is impressive, but fails, as 
did the first edition, to adequately cover 
the myriad potential topics that compete 
for inclusion under the LIS rubric. We 
have individual articles on the universi-
ties of Arizona, British Columbia, Colora-
do, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Toronto, 
among many others, but none for Illinois, 
Florida, or Wisconsin. There are entries 
for the libraries of Wayne State, Oklahoma 
State, and Washington State universities, 
but none for Florida State, Georgia State, 
or North Carolina State. There is none on 
Harvard or Yale, though Georgetown and 
Northwestern make the cut. 

The national libraries of Albania, 
Australia, Denmark, Estonia, France, Ger-
many, Hungary, Kuwait, Liechtenstein, 
Lithuania, Malaysia, Namibia, the Phil-