Book Reviews 553

doi:10.5860/crl.77.4.553

The following four chapters each highlight a specific avenue for collaboration and 
innovation: information literacy and instruction, the digital humanities and MOOCs, 
digital media, and the learning management system (LMS), respectively. These four 
chapters are well written, although the sixth chapter does include two case studies with 
their own references that make the structural organization of the chapter slightly confus-
ing to the reader. Nonetheless, the case studies provided by Joe Eshleman and Kristen 
Eshleman in this chapter, about a long-term partnership on a digital humanities course 
over several iterations and the development of a MOOC at Davidson College, are well 
worth reading. Karen Mann’s two chapters, “Digital Media in the Modern University” 
and “Integrating the Library and the LMS,” both stand out for their presentation and 
practicality. Many of us may be hearing terms like “multimodal learning” and “digital 
literacy,” but Mann does an excellent job of concisely explaining what these ideas mean 
and how librarians can take action based on them. She also provides informative data 
on LMS usage in higher education and offers examples and ideas for how libraries can 
integrate themselves into their institution’s LMS. 

This book is a valuable tool for academic librarians in any position that could po-
tentially be open to collaboration, as well as librarians involved in information literacy 
instruction, librarians interested in or already working with instructional designers, 
and librarians in a leadership role looking for new ways of advocating for the library 
and further integrating the library into the student learning experience and the class-
room, whether it be physical or digital. As the authors note, collaboration is not new 
to librarians, but this book should help move the conversation forward regarding the 
ways in which we collaborate on campus. —Kristen Cardoso, Middlebury Institute of 
International Studies at Monterey

Managing Digital Cultural Objects: Analysis, Discovery and Retrieval. Eds. Allen 
Foster and Pauline Rafferty. Chicago: ALA Neal-Schuman, 2016. 256p. Paper $88.00 
(ISBN 978-0-8389-1343-7).

The title of Managing Digital Cultural Objects carries some risk of misleading the reader 
into thinking that it’s a how-to manual. It is not. This work is less an overview of the 
nuts and bolts of its subject (although it is that at times), and more an exploration of 
the theory and issues related to digital objects and collections: how we conceive of 
and create them, how we preserve them, how we share them, how users interact with 
them. As digital objects become critically important in libraries and collections of all 
kinds, this book serves as a welcome view across the landscape of digital collections, 
considering both current practice and future possibilities. It was originally published 
in the United Kingdom and was written primarily, though not exclusively, by expert 
authors based in the United Kingdom. 

The book is divided into three sections, loosely organized around different ways of 
thinking about digital objects. Part 1 presents some of the philosophical and theoretical 
underpinnings of digital collections; part 2 presents three case studies of cultural digital 
collections and a special issue related to each; part 3 focuses on Web 2.0 platforms, social 
media, and other spaces where the user might both access and create digital objects.

With chapter 1, Pauline Rafferty begins to sketch an outline of the themes and 
ideas of the book with a brief review of relevant background literature, before visit-
ing some rather avant-garde approaches to organization, like emotional indexing and 
“storytelling as indexing,” that make for compelling alternative models. Chapter 2, 
by Sarah Higgins, discusses the use of data modeling as a foundational process for all 
subsequent choices made in the creation of a digital collection. The chapter assumes 
that the reader is already conversant with basic concepts in digital collections; but, 
for a moderately knowledgeable reader, it offers a ground-up approach to designing 



554 College & Research Libraries May 2017

a digital collection, with an eye toward maximizing the opportunities of the digital 
object itself and ensuring the potential for interoperability with other platforms (such 
as collection aggregators like the DPLA). In chapter 3, Katrin Weller discusses social 
media as a future historical resource in an accessible review of how platforms like 
Twitter and Wikipedia’s edit logs might one day inform the work of scholars. 

The second section of the book presents case studies of digitization projects. In 
chapter 4, a group of CS scholars based at Aberystwyth University and the University 
of Glasgow describe a project that seeks to date the works of a single artist using 
computational analysis of original paintings. It assumes a level of mathematical 
and analytical sophistication on the part of the reader that may be overambitious 
for many, yet it stands out as a practical example of how digital objects can be used 
for original research in the arts and humanities. In chapter 5, Maureen Pennock 
and Michael Day of the British Library offer an insightful and useful account of 
the structures and systems used to support digital collections at the British Library, 
with an emphasis on the critical steps involved in digital preservation. This chapter 
is as close as the volume gets to a “how to” manual for digital collections, and it 
provides a sturdy foundation for thinking about managing digital collections in the 
broad sense, despite arriving in the middle of the book. Chapter 6 is not truly a “case 
study” in the traditional sense; instead, it offers a short albeit thorough review of 
issues in the preservation of digital audio. This chapter feels like one of the more 
immediately applicable chapters, providing a lot of useful information about both 
principles and methods. 

The final section is ostensibly about social media and Web 2.0 platforms, including 
the ways in which the influence of users can create both issues and opportunities, and 
each chapter focuses on social platforms first and foremost. But they can also work 
as a discussion of object types—specifically images, music files, and videos—and the 
specific issues related to each. Chapter 7, by Corinne Jörgensen, provides an excellent 
overview of user-generated tags as an organizational tool and as a strategy for recall 
in digital collections, focusing on image tagging in Flickr and Facebook specifically. 
Chapter 8, by Nicola Orio, is a highly technical discussion of methods for identifying 
“affinities” (in this sense, duplicate or near-duplicate objects) within a collection of 
audio files; as with chapter 4, the reader will need to be conversant with computational 
analysis techniques to fully understand all the information presented, although an 
approximate understanding comes more easily. And, in chapter 9, Kathryn La Barre 
and Rosa Inês de Novais Cordeiro present an excellent overview of the issues involved 
in organizing and sharing digital video files, including the complexities of effectively 
representing film in metadata for discoverability. The chapter takes a broad view 
across a spectrum of digital environments from the catalogs of British Film Institute, 
to YouTube and Netflix. 

The volume, taken as a whole, suffers a bit for being made of disparate parts: each 
chapter can feel as though it was written for a different audience—some for librarians 
and archivists, some for digital humanitarians, and some for computer and information 
scientists. Even so, each chapter does touch upon concepts and ideas presented in other 
chapters, which makes it worthwhile to read the entire work to get the fullest possible 
understanding of the subjects it covers. The book is made much richer by the expertise 
of its deeply knowledgeable authors, and even casual professional readers, provided 
they’re reasonably intrepid, will find a great deal of interest in its pages. And perhaps 
best of all are the extensive lists of “further reading,” in addition to references, which 
accompany some chapters. This volume aims to be a gateway into the work of digital 
collections; as such, it can prove valuable to students and experienced professionals 
alike. —Amy Frazier, Middlebury College


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