reviews.indd


Book Reviews 

Comparative Perspectives on E-govern-
ment: Serving Today and Building 
for Tomorrow. Ed. Peter Heron, Ro-
wena Cullen, and Harold C. Relyea. 
Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2006. 412 
p. alk. paper, $50 (paper); $80 (cloth) 
(ISBN 0810857359;0810853574). LC 
2005-33580. 

As flexible and extensible tools that en-
able information access and distribution 
become more widely available to govern-
ments, many of the constraints once be-
lieved embedded in the structure of state 
bureaucracies are revealed as surmount-
able. Increasingly, citizens and their lead-
ers find themselves not only at a point 
where they must rethink the means of 
distributing government information and 
social goods, but in a position to evaluate 
the core roles of government agencies in 
light of the new possibilities presented 
by information technology. Questions 
about the use of information technology 
in government are revealed as questions 
about the function of government in the 
era of the Internet. E-government, and 
its companion term, e-democracy, are 
the monikers assigned to the transforma-
tive governments and the governments 
transformed through and by the use of 
information technology. 

Comparative Perspectives on E-govern-
ment brings together the expertise of 
twelve scholars from schools of knowl-
edge management and public policy 
to provide an overview of the history 
and issues involved in the creation and 
maintenance of national e-governments. 
As the title indicates, the editors take a 
comparative approach, including de-
scriptive and evaluative essays focused 
on e-government policy and practice in 
the United States, the United Kingdom, 
Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. 
Case studies from other countries such as 
China and Singapore are also presented. 
Together these scholars assess the effect 

of information technology 
on government efficiency 
and efficacy and engage in 
the ongoing debate about 
best practices and future 
directions. Along with their 
appraisal of the cost-benefits 
of past and current initiatives, many chal-
lenges are addressed. Special att ention is 
paid to how different e-government poli-
cies approach concerns about access to 
archives and archive life-cycles, govern-
ment accountability and the transparency 
of its operations, issues about information 
security and privacy, and the persistent 
problem of the digital divide. Even in 
the United States, a nation with one of 
the highest percentage of Internet users, 
we learn that only sixty-six percent of the 
population uses the Internet. In some less 
affluent countries the percent of users 
drops precipitously. These studies reveal 
that access to the Internet is just the most 
obvious of barriers to e-government par-
ticipation. The language and design of e-
government can in the best-case scenarios 
positively communicate structure, but in 
the worst cases it can function as jargon, 
presenting a barrier to the social benefits 
of the State. 

This book will be of interest to policy 
makers and political scientists interested 
in how people interact with the new 
electronic faces of governments. It may 
also be used by sociologists studying 
contemporary processes of citizen subjec-
tification and forms of governmentality. A 
central topic is the citizen responses and 
citizen attitudes to diff erent manifesta-
tions of e-government. Using focus-group 
interviews and questionnaires, Rowena 
Culler and Peter Hernon examined the 
impact of government services in the 
daily life of New Zealanders by recording 
their research behavior on government 
Web sites. Many of the challenges found 
will be familiar to analysts: questions of 

82 



citizen trust, cultural diversity, economic 
stratification, and educational attainment 
have long affected participation in democ-
racy and access to government services. 
While there is no question that these 
obstacles persist in our era of e-govern-
ment, the methodologically sound stud-
ies presented here offer social scientists 
a way to test how these challenges are 
mediated through diff erent e-government 
initiatives as well as how to implement a 
variety of Internet discovery tools. 

Librarians and students of information 
studies will also benefit from this book’s 
careful analysis of end-user behavior 
in relation to Web sites, databases, and 
portal design. While the underlying goal 
of e-governments in democracies is to 
create systems that efficiently deliver 
needed information and services, diff er-
ent information structures, such as user-
centered or agency-centered approaches, 
are shown to offer distinct advantages 
and disadvantages. Unlike commercial 
Web sites, democratic e-governments are 
quintessential public service institutions. 
As such, they can provide librarians with 
alternative models and (sometimes) in-
novative solutions to the problems of 
organizing a complex information envi-
ronment for diverse end-users. Library 
Web designers undertaking Web usability 
studies will benefit from the performance 
metrics used to evaluate e-government 
portals. 

Comparative Perspectives on E-gov-
ernment collects for its readers, in one 
volume, the thoughtful analysis of the 
discourse of information policy most 
important to researchers. It is a wonder-
ful entrance into a developing political 
institution.—David Michalski, University 
of California at Davis. 

Buckland, Michael. Emanuel Goldberg 
and His Knowledge Machine: Informa-
tion, Invention, and Political Forces. 
Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited 
(New Directions in Information Manage-
ment), 2006. 380 p. (ISBN 0313313326). 
LC 2005-34357. 

Book Reviews 83 

A invented it, while B and C got the credit, 
fame, and glory. Sound familiar? That, in 
a nutshell, is a major aspect of the story 
Michael Buckland recounts in his biog-
raphy of Emanuel Goldberg (1881–1970), 
one of Germany’s most creative engineer-
ing geniuses. Writing a biography of a 
man whose career the Nazis attempted 
to discredit is no small challenge: many 
of the documents essential to learning 
about Goldberg’s life and work were 
destroyed in air raids during World War 
II or willfully obliterated by the Nazis. 
Many people who knew vital details did 
not survive the war, while some who did 
survive were unwilling to concede genius 
to this inspired inventor. In addition, air 
raids destroyed the working models of 
one key invention that is a prime focus 
of this biography. 

Buckland, former dean of the Univer-
sity of California’s School of Information 
Management Systems at the Berkeley 
campus, is now an emeritus professor. 
Because of his deep and broad knowledge 
of library and information science, he is 
uniquely qualified to research the life and 
achievements of Emanuel Goldberg, a re-
markable but little known scientist. What 
makes his book especially noteworthy 
is that Buckland was able to assemble a 
fairly detailed portrait of Goldberg’s life 
from very meager and widely scattered 
sources. Buckland’s achievement is the re-
sult of long, arduous labor and intensive 
research. Further, his persistent detective 
work enabled him to go far beyond his 
subject’s substantial scientifi c achieve-
ments. In his book, we see the human 
being behind the technological achieve-
ments and we perceive the inventor as a 
person, not simply as a mind. 

Russian born, Emanuel Goldberg re-
ceived his early education at a Moscow 
gymnasium. Following completion of his 
secondary studies, in which he excelled in 
science and technology, Goldberg wanted 
to enroll at the Imperial Technical School 
of Moscow. However, despite outstand-
ing grades, he was denied acceptance 
because a quota system allocated only