320  College & Research Libraries March 2020

Section 4 examines the partnerships libraries can build to serve graduate students better. 
This section might also have been named “Graduate Student Outreach.” It describes programs 
such as open houses, a library staff working group, a partnership with a graduate school, and 
a graduate student advisory board. The partnership focus in this chapter alludes to one of the 
main values of Transforming Libraries to Serve Graduate Students: the possibility for collaboration 
within a library, within a campus, or with librarians at other institutions. If you are unsure 
of how to serve a group of graduate students on your campus, the book has a contact list of 
librarians who have done it and have recommendations on how to do it. 

This volume would benefit from some reorganization. Some chapters include abstracts, 
but many do not. Since the book contains 34 chapters with very different topics, it would be 
useful for readers to have abstracts to rely on to decide which chapters are of the most use for 
their needs. The four sections of the book are unbalanced in length and could be more inter-
nally cohesive. Section 1 is much longer than the others and might have been limited to only 
chapters addressing discipline-specific needs. Discussions of how to support the transition 
from undergraduate to graduate and how to support graduate students online would have fit 
better in the middle chapters, which deal with cross-disciplinary topics. Several of the chapters 
in Section 2 are about information literacy instruction and therefore might more appropriately 
be placed in Section 3. For instance, the discussions of citation management instruction, GIS 
instruction, and helping scholars develop their online identities overlap with the content of 
Section 3. Given that there is some redundancy in the book, some chapters could have been 
edited and the two sections could have been combined for more efficient and intuitive cover-
age of graduate student services. 

Section 1 is the most useful portion of the book, since it offers librarians a view into one 
another’s subject expertises. While librarians of all specialties will be familiar with concepts 
surrounding patrons’ need for study space, citation management training, interlibrary loans, 
and information literacy instruction, the particular needs of advanced scholars in each disci-
pline are not obvious to those who haven’t worked closely with those scholars. Readers might 
have benefited if the credentials of the authors were listed with the chapters they contributed 
to, in order to provide a better sense of the subject expertise brought to bear on each topic. 
Because the book addresses differences in user needs across disciplines that are shared by un-
dergraduates and faculty, the book is relevant to librarians serving other populations beyond 
graduate students. This book will be of the greatest use to librarians or libraries transitioning 
from serving undergraduate populations to graduate populations. That is a common occur-
rence, as librarians move to more research-intensive institutions and more institutions add 
additional graduate programs.—Sarah Rose Fitzgerald, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

The Culture of Digital Scholarship in Academic Libraries. Robin Chin Roemer and Verletta 
Kern, eds. Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 2019. 240p. Paper, $71.99 (ISBN 978-
0-8389-1897-5). LC 2019943587.

The culture of an institution is often seen as an emergent property: something that arises 
naturally from the interactions of policies, processes, communications, and organizational 
behaviors. Robin Chin Roemer and Verletta Kern have embraced this idea as the editors of 
The Culture of Digital Scholarship in Academic Libraries, whose 10 chapters serve collectively 
as an extended reflective case study of the digital scholarship practices of the University of 
Washington (UW). The book brings readers into UW’s “shared institutional workspace” (xiv), 



Book Reviews  321

generating a dialogue among the needs of the library’s user community, the 
evolving relationship between academic libraries and their parent organiza-
tions, and the volume’s 13 authors. 

The book is divided into three sections. The first part, Values, interrogates 
some of the underlying beliefs and characteristics associated with digital 
scholarship. The Practices section presents more operational material relating 
to needs assessment, instructional programming, and digital preservation 
functions. The Environments section examines UW’s digital scholarship work 
through its interactions with students, faculty members, and the larger com-

munity. Though the introduction encourages readers to engage with the material in accordance 
with personal interest, a cover-to-cover reading of this uniquely framed volume provides more 
synergistic insights. Chapter authors’ perspectives are informed by their varied positions at 
the University of Washington library and a complex portrait of digital scholarship appears 
when their perspectives are taken together. No explicit definition of “digital scholarship” is 
presented in the book, and the implicit definitions used by contributors vary from chapter 
to chapter, mirroring the broad and subjective interpretations of the term in practice. This 
messiness is embraced by the book’s editors and is acknowledged by Jennifer Muilenberg in 
chapter 8 as a characteristic of digital scholarship itself (144).

Taken individually, the book’s chapters provide lessons on service design and implemen-
tation that may be of value to institutions looking to expand their existing digital scholarship 
offerings or to institutions that do not have a formalized digital scholarship practice. Content 
in the Values section reflects many of academic librarianship’s contemporary shifts and chal-
lenges: a focus on research impact that is not based on traditional citation metrics (3), forms 
of scholarship that embrace community engagement and alternative forms of scholarly pub-
lication (23), and a nuanced approach to complex scholarly communications challenges that 
Maryam Fakouri insists can be ably addressed with responses like “it depends because…” (48).

Chapters in the Practices section will ring familiarly for experienced digital scholarship 
practitioners and can provide guidance to institutions whose own work in this area is still 
nascent. Verletta Kern addresses needs assessment activity in chapter 4, supporting existing 
literature with lessons gained from general assessment work, the use of “Project Help Office 
Hours” (68), and the growing use of digital pedagogy approaches in campus classrooms (75). 
A digital storytelling project, designed to increase feelings of connectedness for part-time and 
online students, is the focus of chapter 5; here, Perry Yee and Elliott Stevens emphasize the 
importance of program outcomes and process over tool selection (92). The section closes with 
a gentle introduction to concepts of digital preservation (101).

The needs of specific user communities take focus in the Environments section of the book. 
UW’s range of digital humanities and digital scholarship workshops, consultation services, 
and office hours are addressed in chapter 7 (125), with particular emphasis on the needs of 
graduate students and the value of “reverse engineering” existing projects as a learning tech-
nique. The importance of a focused needs assessment in the area of data services is explored 
in the following chapter (143), which also provides guidance on library staff skills training 
and an overview of UW’s asynchronous, online research data management workshop series. 
John Vallier and Andrew Weaver trace the evolution of the library’s legacy media services into 
a modern “arcade” that combines media conversion and viewing stations with video game 
consoles and a space dedicated to media archiving and digitization (163). The section ends 



322  College & Research Libraries March 2020

with an examination of UW’s urban-serving Tacoma campus (181), whose downtown location 
animates a strategy to increase community engagement and reduce barriers to student access.

Authors have peppered some key lessons from UW’s experience throughout their 
contributions. A selection of activities, communications plans, and needs assessment instru-
ments are provided in seven appendices. In-chapter standouts for the reviewer include the 
recognition that “digital scholarship” is not a term used by students and faculty outside the 
library and that UW remains attentive to the terms their community uses to describe their 
own work (64); that an emphasis on partnerships over service can also create a reliance on 
the work of key individuals within the library (198); and that communications strategies must 
consciously avoid “filter bubbles” and reach out to new communities on campus (154). For 
the more casual reader, each chapter is capped with a set of key takeaways that summarize 
each author’s central findings.

The University of Washington’s digital scholarship librarian, Verletta Kern, synthesizes 
many of the challenges of digital scholarship as a set of “wicked problems” (78) that the insti-
tution continues to interrogate: the values, practices, and contexts of the modern scholarship 
are framed by questions of the library’s purpose, its priorities, its decisions about strategic 
infrastructure investment, ongoing funding challenges, and a desire to shift institutional poli-
cies in support of the recognition of digital scholarship outputs. This systemic view makes 
the book a good resource for administrators who wish to align new digital scholarship offer-
ings to evolving organizational plans. Experienced digital scholarship practitioners will see 
reflections of their existing practices in the UW experience, and librarians who are looking 
to establish or grow a digital scholarship culture will find individual chapters as a source of 
inspiration and further exploration during the planning and development of specific digital 
scholarship services.—Kris Joseph, York University

Gregory C. Thompson, Harish Maringanti, Rick Anderson, Catherine B. Soehner, and 
Alberta Comer. Strategic Planning for Academic Libraries: A Step-By-Step Guide. Chicago, IL: 
ALA Editions, 2019. 144p. Paper, $39.99 (ISBN: 978-0-8389-1893-7).

Strategic Planning for Academic Libraries: A Step-by-Step Guide provides, as 
the title would suggest, a step-by-step overview of the strategic planning 
process undertaken at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library. 
Each of the authors is well suited to discuss the strategic planning process 
for the University of Utah because each of them is either an associate dean 
or dean of the library. The main seven elements of the strategic plan that 
was derived at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library form the 
basic structure of the work. 

The book is organized into seven chapters, each of which represents a 
specific topic of the strategic planning process. Here are the topics of the seven chapters: preplan-
ning, facilitation, feedback, communication, implementation, assessment, and tying it all together. 
Each chapter is then further subdivided into three components. The first component of each 
chapter addresses some of the theoretical underpinnings of that topic. For example, in chapter 
5, “Implementation,” the authors discuss the literature that relates to restructuring organizations 
and the disruptive effects that restructuring can have. From the larger overarching discussion, 
the second third of each chapter addresses the specific work done within the University of Utah’s 
J. Willard Marriott Library. From that, the third component focuses on the lessons learned from