College and Research Libraries


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272 College & Research Libraries 

why should we do less in the next fifty 
years? 

Six chapters deal with varieties of 
technology: the physical environment of 
the library (lighting, ventilation, and the 
spread of disease); streamlining library 
processes (appliances, contrivances, and 
gadgets); photographic processes; new 
communications devices (telephone, 
phonograph, and typewriter); the li-
brary and radio; and motion pictures 
and television. Musmann concludes 
with a chapter on the future of the li-
brary and its technology. 

This book is indeed "an anecdotal his-
tory," much of it derived from library 
periodicals from the century under con-
sideration (186Q-1960). The book is full 
of quotations and comments, footnoted 
to a fare-thee-well. The style is suffi-
ciently informal to be readable, and 
Musmann does a good job of organiz-
ing and commenting on the array of 
sources. While most of the discussions 
lack in-depth statistics to place specific 
anecdotes in context, this weakness is 
almost certainly a realistic reflection of 
the library world's sketchy historical 
record. Do we really know how many 
libraries had in-house radio broad-
casts in 1936-and do we have any 
idea how many libraries currently circu-
late CD-ROMs? 

After reading this book, I have a much 
better sense of the field's technological 
concerns through the century before I 
began to work in libraries. It has been 
clear for some time that ongoing change 
and increasing complexity-the contin-
ued importance of print, but also an array 
of new media and access mechanisms-
are the only plausible future for librar-
ies. This book reminds us that libraries 
have never been the stable, unchanging 
institutions that some people assume, 
and that there have always been com-
mentators looking for a single, simpler 
future that was never in the cards. 

If you are concerned about the future 
of the book and the ability of libraries to 
cope with the onslaught of technology, 
you should read this book. Yes, it is library 
history-but it is history that provides a 
worthwhile perspective on today' s fash-

May1994 

ion for doom-crying and self-doubt 
among librarians.-Walt Crawford, The 
Research Libraries Group, Mountain View, 
California. 

Women, Information Technology and 
Scholarship. Ed. H. Jeanie Taylor, 
Cheris Kramarae, and Maureen Eb-
ben. Urbana, Ill.: Center for Advanced 
Study, 1993. 127p., $10 + $2 shipping 
and handling (ISBN 1-882875-00-1). 
Academic libraries have succumbed 

to a romance, indeed an obsession, with 
technology. Yet how often do we stop to 
contemplate the profound implications 
of this information "revolution"? Do we 
ever pause to ask what should be critical 
questions: "Revolution by and for 
whom"? Do we dare to link this brave 
new library and information world with 
our professed commitment to "diver-
sity" and equity? As we welcome the 
potential of powerful new information 
technologies and the resulting changes 
in the nature of scholarly research and 
practice, we must also pay close atten-
tion to the power relations embedded in 
their development, deployment, and 
use. All the more welcome, then, is this 
volume which tackles head on the pro-
foundly political nature of information 
technologies and the implications for 
university policy. 

In September 1991, at the University 
of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, an inter-
disciplinary group of thirty-three fac-
ulty and academic professionals, 
including five librarians, gathered 
around a common goal to "help insure 
that new communications technologies 
will be structured and used in ways 
beneficial and equitable for all." Women, 
Information Technology, and Scholarship, 
sponsored by the Center for Advanced 
Study, draws from the first year (1991-
92) of their ongoing colloquium. 

Four articles by colloquium partici-
pants or collaborators anchor the vol-
ume, followed by six colloquium digests 
and an extensive bibliography. In the 
first article, Maureen Ebben and Cheris 
Kramarae offer an overview highlight-
ing issues of particular concern for 
women in four key areas: difficulties en-



countered by women working in the 
various electronic forums; training 
methods; disappointed promises of in-
formation technology in education; and 
electronic publishing. Dale Spender, 
whose previous work documents the ab-
sence of women in dominant culture 
and recorded knowledge, here com-
pellingly extends her arguments about 
the politics of knowledge production 
and distribution to electronic media. 
Throughout the print era what has 
been considered legitimate knowledge 
and scholarship has always been gen-
dered. How will the determinations be 
made about what knowledge gets en-
coded and distributed in electronic form 
and by whom? It is only in the past three 
decades, the very time that print is giv-
ing way as the primary medium of infor-
mation, that women have assumed 
positions of power and influence in al-
ternative and mainstream publishing. 
While listservs of particular interest to 
women and minorities proliferate, in the 
ascendent electronic media generally 
(database producers, software and hard-
ware companies, television, radio), 
women and members of other subordi-
nated groups exert limited if any control 
over the means of information/knowledge 
production and dissemination. Despite 
the utopian predictions about democrati-
zation of information through electronic 
communication across space, time, and so-
cial categories, computer technology in 
many ways remains one of the last male 
(read white, educated) bastions. 

In the article most obviously tied to 
libraries, Ann Okerson (Association of 
Research Libraries), addresses the cur-
rent "crisis" in academic publishing 
(high prices, high volume, and slow dis-
tribution) and its attendant dilemmas 
and challenges. Arguing that "the fun-
damental issue in regard to holding and 
sharing information resources in the 
electronic environment, as it turns out, 
may be one not so much of technology 
as of ownership," she offers cogent, con-
crete suggestions for mechanisms to en-
sure that ownership is retained by 
scholars. This will preserve, she main-
tains, the central role of colleges, univer-

Book Reviews 273 

sities, and libraries in knowledge produc-
tion and distribution. While Okerson re-
grettably ignores the gender implications 
here, reading her piece against the first two 
articles in the volume elicits thought-pro-
voking questions about how information 
paradigms, practices, and technologies 
are shaped by prevailing values and 
power relations. 

The last article, by Cheris Kramarae 
and H. Jeanie Taylor, takes up the hotly 
debated question of women's and men's 
participation on electronic networks, fo-
cusing on the problems often encoun-
tered by women: marginalization and 
monopolization by men, sexual harass-
ment, pornography or technotitillation. 
The "chilly climate" for women and mi-
norities at most universities has been 
well documented. Now blowing 
through cyberspace, this silencing chill 
has serious consequences not only for 
interaction on nets but also for scholar-
ship and the academy in general. If elec-
tronic technologies often "replicate or 
intensify previous problems," universi-
ties, the authors argue, are uniquely po-
sitioned to "institute change at 'home' 
and thus to influence change in the 
larger world." Much of the article out-
lines specific suggestions for policy and 
behavior changes to ensure that net-
works provide a forum for open debate 
for everyone, including women and 
other marginalized groups, and that uni-
versity rhetoric about diversity and 
equality extend to equity in practice-
even in cyberspace. 

The six "digests" provide snapshots of 
additional key issues raised in the collo-
quium, ranging from concepts of 
agency, privacy, and ownership in the 
information age, to feminist computer 
networks, to a vision of the ideal infor-
mation technology. The volume con-
cludes with an impressive annotated 
bibliography on women and informa-
tion technology, covering the all-too-
few feminist works but also a range of 
current discussions and arguments in 
the field. Indeed, this forty-page bibliog-
raphy would provide an excellent point 
of departure for a full course or seminar on 
this topic-one way academic librarians 



274 College & Research Libraries 

might take the lead in mapping these 
new frontiers. 

If this volume represents a forceful 
. social critique of the current state of in-

formation technologies in academia, it is 
no Luddite call for return to an idealized 
pretechnological past. In fact, it is their 
clear recognition of the powerful poten-
tial of new information technologies that 
motivates colloquium participants to 
demand that these be fully realized for 
women and other marginalized social 
groups. In the contested terrain of infor-
mation technology, it is only by address-
ing the embedded social relations that 
this technolandscape of enticing prom-
ises will prove more than an exclusive 
preserve.-Joan Ariel, University of Cali-
fornia, Irvine. 

White, Howard D., Marcia J. B.ates, and 
Patrick Wilson. For Information Spe-
cialists: Interpretations of Reference and 
Bibliographic Work. Norwood, N.J.: 
Ablex, 1992. 310 p. $24.50 (ISBN Q.. 
89391-983-7). 
This collection of articles by three li-

brary school faculty focuses on three as-
pects of information work. Each is the 
topic of one of the book's three main 
sections: reference work, bibliographic 
writing, and literature searching. In the 
short fourth and final section, Howard 
White sets out to provide an integrated 
view of what information specialists do. 

In his introduction White says that the 
authors "offer ... insights into human 
aspects of the profession [i.e., informa-
tion work] that are seldom treated else-
where." With a few exceptions his 
promise, however, goes largely unful-
ffiled. While some interesting notions 
emerge, it is difficult on the whole to say 
to whom his book would appeal. It lacks 
a solid focus, and the reader moves 
through a somewhat bewildering array of 
topics with quite different approaches. 

Five of the book's eleven chapters are 
rewrites of articles that appeared over 
the years in journals. There is a short 
article on the nature of a reference book, 
replete with charts and empirical data, a 
speculative treatise on the uniqueness of 
librarians and information specialists, 

May1994 

and several articles about techniques for 
conducting online searches. At one point 
in the book we have a discussion of Karl 
Popper's "world 3" theory as it relates to 
information science, while at another we 
get a discussion of online versus manual 
database searching infused with neolo-
gisms such as BIBBLE: "To BIBBLE is to 
look for a bibliography already pre-
pared, before launching into the effort of 
preparing one." 

What theme or themes unite these dis-
parate pieces is far from clear despite 
White's claim that "there is a great deal of 
theme-passing from author to author." 
The articles on literature searching seem 
to have a specialized pedagogical pur-
pose that little serves the general inter-
pretive ambitions of the book. Many of 
the book's observations seem to be com-
monsense notions recast in an academic 
parlance sufficiently ponderous so as to 
make them sound insightful. ''Libraries, as 
guarantors of 'permanent publication,' 
ratify the choices of publishers generally, 
but of some much more than others." 

In the final chapter, however, White 
makes some observations that raise im-
portant questions about librarianship. 
He writes that most librarians, once fin-
ished with school, do not read library 
and information science research litera-
ture because "they do not need to; or, as 
they would claim, because it does not 
tell them what they need to know." A 
remarkable admission! If it so, why, we 
might ask, should librarians read this 
book? What does White's observation 
suggest about the relevance of profes-
sional research to professional practice? 
If a librarian, upon completing formal 
training in the library and information 
science, has little need for the research of 
library and information science, then what 
is its purpose? What is it about the whole 
professional educational endeavor that 
makes library and information science rele-
vant to formal education but irrelevant after-
ward? Nevertheless, White's observation is, 
in my view, the most important of the book 
and raises far-reaching questions. 

White then immediately adds some-
thing that makes the above an even more 
interesting and pressing issue. ''The