reviews.indd


84 College & Research Libraries 

ment. Geiger puts it best: “The commercial-
ization of university research at the dawn 
of the twenty-first century would seem to 
possess an inexorable momentum.” Both 
books complement each other very well and 
are rich sources for further research. It is a 
pity that neither work provides a systemati-
cally arranged bibliography. It is worth not-
ing that nothing in either book hints at the 
potential impact of these new arrangements 
on academic/research libraries, nor are the 
great national, computerized bibliographic 
networks even mentioned. 

Both titles are recommended for uni-
versity research libraries, large public 
libraries, and the libraries of schools of 
education and business. Both would be 
invaluable for major university officers, 
faculty, laboratory directors, members of 
boards of regents, and legislators.—Allen 
B. Veaner, University of Arizona. 

1. A spate of works on the academic–in-
dustry connection has been published in recent 
years, and most are cited by both Kirp and 
Geiger. Perhaps the most prominent of the 
new titles is the recently reviewed Universi-
ties in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of 
Higher Education (Princeton 2003), by Derek 
Bok, retired president of Harvard (C&RL 65, 
no. 1 ([Jan. 2004]: 78–81). 

2. Stephen M. Ross’s recent $100 million 
gift to the University of Michigan’s business 
school—the largest ever to any business 
school—may ultimately result in a degree of 
autonomy from the main university adminis-
tration comparable to that at the University of 
Virginia. 

3. In this last category, a recent news item 
on the Web noted that in 2004 the University 
of Texas was forced to issue a booklet, “Avoid 
the Freshman 15,” a reference to the fifteen 
pounds that, on average, freshmen gain their 
first school year away from home. 

4. That this is not just a U.S. phenomenon 
is attested to by the rise of the “enterprise uni-
versity” in Australia, a development analyzed 
by Simon Marginson and Mark Considine in 
The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and 
Reinvention in Australia (Cambridge University 
Press 2000). Many of the influences and forces 
summarized in Kirp and Geiger are even more 
powerfully operative among Australian uni-
versities, where income from foreign ventures 
has become essential to survival. 

January 2005 

Libraries without Walls 5: The Distrib-
uted Delivery of Library and Infor-
mation Services. Eds. Peter Brophy, 
Shelagh Fisher, and Jenny Craven. 
London: Facet, 2004. 269p. £44.95 
(ISBN 1856045110). 

Libraries without Walls contains the pro-
ceedings of the fifth Libraries without 
Walls Conference held in Lesvos, Greece, 
in September 2003. This and previous 
conferences have been designed to bring 
together participants from around the 
world to discuss, from an international 
perspective, access to materials and ser-
vices by patrons external to the actual 
bricks-and-mortar library. As the editors 
of this volume note, when the conference 
was first held in 1995, participants con-
cerned themselves primarily with issues 
of distance learning and related matters. 
Eight years later, however, technological 
advances have changed the focus of the 
conference to the provision of services or 
materials to people who used them “re-
motely,” which, paradoxically, oft en means 
within the very site of the library itself. 

The book contains twenty-four papers 
grouped together under five main top-
ics or “themes.” Theme one deals with 
the integration of library services and 
virtual learning environments. A variety 
of issues is addressed, including how to 
provide staff with the skills and training 
required to deal with new library services 
in support of e-learning. How the library 
as a whole might work collaboratively 
in this relatively new environment also 
is considered. 

Theme two discusses the relationship 
among user needs, information skills, 
and information literacies. The papers 
here examine the pros and cons of generic 
versus customized information skills 
packages delivered via e-learning. Also 
addressed is how to respond to the needs 
of traditional and nontraditional students 
in this setting. 



Book Reviews 85 

Theme three looks at usability and ac-
cessibility of digital library services. The 
papers in this section are quite diverse, 
moving from a broad and general ex-
amination of the characteristics of the truly 
usable and accessible digital library to far 
narrower studies involving barriers to 
library use by Nigerian professionals and 
digital library services at the Italian Health 
Institute library. Theme four is similarly 
structured. Its focus is on designing the 
information environment from the na-
tional and institutional perspective, and, 
again, the papers vary in content, from an 
examination of broad principles involving 
researchers and resources to specifi c stud-
ies such as those involving Web services in 
Portuguese public libraries and Denmark’s 
electronic research library. 

The last section focuses on the creation 
of digital resources by user communities 
and the provision of “usable” reposito-
ries for others. These communities can 
be large or small—for instance, the gen-
eral public that might wish to participate 
(aided by museums, libraries, or archives) 
in the sharing of cultural heritage infor-
mation online or the “closed” community 
of a university where an “open archive” is 
established to store an institution’s schol-
arly output such as papers (published or 
not), data, reports, and so on. 

The diversity of papers in this volume 
is indicative of a number of major ways 
in which libraries and librarians are 

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changing. Technology is occupying a tre-
mendous amount of our time and energy, 
and “knowledge workers” are not afraid 
to experiment, customize, and play with 
various products and resources. Nor, if 
these papers are accurate, are we reluctant 
to specify when the results have been 
less than stellar: Great emphasis is now 
placed on pinning down and defining 
the ingredients that make up a successful 
service, project, or product via the use 
of social science research methods. Our 
profession seems hungrier than ever for 
statistics on anything and everything that 
can be measured, looking for the answer 
to such elusive matters as: What makes 
this thing tick, run, work, succeed? What 
doesn’t? What characteristics are we look-
ing for? How should we quantify this? Is 
it quantifiable? Could we do this again 
somewhere else? Do we really want to? 

Nevertheless, until the day comes that 
librarians work from their homes in front 
of computers—in the same manner as the 
programmers and other computer work-
ers we hear about who simply roll out of 
bed, make coffee, and start their day in 
front of the computer in their home of-
fice—libraries will continue to be places 
with walls. Accordingly, the idea of space, 
place, and geography in these papers is 
real and palpable even when discussing 
patrons not using the resources located 
within the actual building itself. The char-
acter of a physical institution—a place 
with walls from which projects and ideas 
emanate—is overwhelmingly evident in 
every single paper in this volume. And 
that rootedness in place is, quite frankly, 
the real joy in reading a collection such 
as this.—Nancy McCormack, Queen’s 
University. 

Staikos, Konstantinos Sp. The History of 
the Library in Western Civilization, Vol. I: 
From Minos to Cleopatra: The Greek World 
from the Minoans’ Archival Libraries to