294 College & Research Libraries March 2018 doi:10.5860/crl.79.2.294 Leading in the New Academic Library. Becky Albitz, Christine Avery, and Diane Za- bel, eds. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Libraries Unlimited. 2017. 195p. Paper, $55.00 (ISBN 978-1-4408-5113-1). Leading in the New Academic Library, edited by Becky Albitz, Christine Avery, and Diane Zabel, provides a good entry- level primer on the state and types of leadership facing the contemporary academic library. The book is divided into two large sections. The first section is entitled “Challenges and Opportunities.” Within this section are ten chapters that deal with a variety of issues loosely related to new challenges and opportunities. Some of these opportunities include the changing nature of the library and both its physical and organizational structures. One of the more intriguing chapters in this section, written by Joseph Fen- newald, is entitled “Academic Libraries Reimagined: How Facilities Are Changing to Support New Services.” This chapter is an interesting elucidation of the ways in which the academic library’s physical structure has changed over time. The author does a good job of connecting the evolution of the academic mission to the changes that have occurred within the library over this evolutionary period. The other chapters in this section follow the themes of challenge and opportunities and deal with topics including new roles for staff and librarians in the changing academic library. The section closes with two chapters that discuss the importance of collaborative work environments. The second section is called “Leadership in the Face of Transition.” This section has a similar organizational structure of six chapters authored by a number of different librarians. Some of the chapters include discussions of promoting leadership develop- ment and promoting and recruiting underrepresented groups in libraries. Two of the more intriguing chapters from this section come at the end. The first of these chapters deals with leading from the middle management position. The authors discuss how librarians who are mid-career can lead from the middle as part of the process for mov- ing up in libraries. What is interesting with this chapter is the discussion about the appropriate process for moving up and continuing to consider one’s ultimate goals and that sometimes those goals shouldn’t necessarily be set by others. The second interesting chapter from this section deals with succession planning and leading for one’s replacement. As the library profession continues to “grey,” this section becomes increasingly salient and important. It is critical for today’s leaders to train the leaders of tomorrow. What is unique about this chapter as it relates to other succession plan- ning is the recognition that succession may not be isolated to a specific organization; instead, it is succession planning for libraries in general. Leading in the New Academic Library is, as mentioned at the start, a good beginning to understanding the changing and dynamic roles of leadership in the new academic library. The different authors are well versed in their fields of librarianship and have offered unique perspectives of the face of the new academic library. Each chapter offers well-structured and reasoned arguments that touch on some of the more current issues in the academic library. The challenge sometimes with a book like this, as well as other edited volumes, is whether it has the ability to thread a consistent theme throughout the book. The editors here have done a good job in this respect. In looking at the or- ganization of the book, there may have been more opportunity for a more granular examination of leadership if there had been three or four sections rather than two. The first part of the book is about new challenges and seems to occupy a majority of the Book Reviews 295 book. The second section about leadership in the face of transformation is relatively short in comparison. It may have been advantageous if, for example, rethinking library space was addressed as a very important leadership challenge that is composed of the characteristics of managing change among others. The book is a good start for librarians interested in learning more about the is- sues current leaders face in the academic library. Even for existing leaders, there are interesting takes on the use of space and ways to encourage leadership development among existing managers. Books on leadership are difficult to quantify because they often boil down to a set of steps that are presented as universal truth for all to follow or as some kind of unique characteristics that people either have or they don’t. This book does a good job of illuminating some of the more nuts-and-bolts issues facing academic libraries currently and in the years to come.—Ryan Litsey, Texas Tech University A. Arro Smith. Capturing Our Stories: An Oral History of Librarianship in Transition, with preface by Loriene Roy. Chicago: Neal-Schuman, imprint of American Library As- sociation. 2017. 202p. Paper, $45.00 (ISBN 978-0-8389-1461-8). This work grew out of “Capturing Our Stories: Develop- ing a National Oral History Program for Retiring/Retired Librarians,” a project organized by 2007/2008 ALA President Loriene Roy, who also wrote the preface to this work. The aim of this oral history project, which can be viewed at https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~stories/, was to collect and record interviews from retired librar- ians in an effort to preserve their stories, experiences, and remembrances, all of which reflect the collective social memories of the library profession. A. Arro Smith, who was involved in organizing and implementing the project, continues supporting Roy’s mission through this book. In this work, which serves to supplement and analyze the oral history project, Smith offers a qualita- tive study that identifies trends and repeated themes addressed by the thirty-five interviewees, all of whom are retirees from the profession. Smith, through the use of oral history theories and methodologies, sets out to present and explore the “unique stories of the everyday lives of librarians” (ix) and “the story of librarianship in the last half of the twentieth century [as] told by thirty-five individuals” (xvii). Through doing so, Smith argues, a “‘social memory’ of librarianship” (2) can be constructed. Much like the oral history project itself, Smith argues that it is vital to capture and examine the stories and experiences of this now-retired generation of librarians, as their careers spanned an era of significant change within the library profession. From typewriter to computer, card catalog to OPAC, phone to chat reference, this generation of librarians lived through a defining transitional moment in librarianship. Rather than providing a detailed summary of the entire oral history project, Smith offers a companion text that identifies and discusses common themes that emerged through the interviews. The work also provides a short primer on oral history literature and methodology, which is written specifically for librarians. The work contains two parts, the first of which is significantly longer than the second. Part I, “Capturing our Stories” (chapters 1 through 6), contains Smith’s analysis and discussion of the oral history project. Part II, “How to Capture Stories” (chapters 7 and 8), discusses oral history methods and practices as they relate to librarianship. Part I discusses how reoccurring themes in the oral history project provide insight into doi:10.5860/crl.79.2.295