College and Research Libraries mation and the role of advertising in the changing information environment. He concludes by challenging librarians to convince those paying for the construc- tion of our technological future that we librarians "can add value by furthering the objectives of the financiers." ยท James Love couples real-world activ- ism aimed at changing the penurious dissemination of public domain infor- mation by the U.S. federal government with a comprehensive exposition of cur- rent legislation, policy, and bureaucracy as they relate to federal information policy. His synopsis of the Security and Exchange Commission's EDGAR pro- ject, the Department of Justice JURIS system, and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-130 makes this a contribution that should be used in all graduate-level courses dealing with government information for at least the next twelve months-a shelf life typical of any work dealing with the existing technological and economic environment. A cursory exami- nation of one element of the published OCLC data in this collection (the cur- rent size and number of files at the FTP site wuarchive.wustl.edu) shows an unsur- prising steep increase in both figures since the very recent publication of OCLC's study. Although the overall quality of this compilation will also make it a valuable item for historical purposes, some of the presentations are of the ubiquitous "look-what-we-did" genre. Such writ- ings are valuable in other contexts, but they tend to clash with the overall schol- arly nature of this book. As would be expected from one of the flagships of the profession, the Graduate School of Library and Information Sci- ence of the University of Illinois, these are high quality proceedings of a profes- sional conference with work of current and relevant information for academic librarians.-Raleigh Clayton Muns, Uni- versity of Missouri-St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri. The African-American Mosaic: A Li- brary of Congress Guide for the Study Book Reviews 87 of Black History and Culture. Wash- ington D.C.: Library of Congress, 1993. 300p. $24 (ISBN 0-8444-0800-X). As the first fully referenced, illus- trated, and indexed resource guide to the Library of Congress collections on Afri- can-American materials, this work is an essential reference tool for librarians and sophisticated library users. Its aims are to ease the work of researchers who visit the library and to increase public aware- ness of the full range of the library's resources for the study of African- American history and culture. The guide is chronologically arranged in three sections of nine chapters that span the years from the antebellum pe- riod to the Civil Rights era. Although the guide presents the initial story of African-American history and culture through the window of slavery, it ig- nores the history of the African Ameri- can before the slave trade. There is no mention of LC' s extensive African civili- zation collection or its works on African exploration of America before the slave 'trade, key components in the study of the African-American experience in the United States. African-American Mosaic is a logistical blessing for researchers faced with the prospect of visiting three different build- ings, secondary storage facilities, and many reading rooms to explore or access materials. Now researchers can identify and direct themselves to relevant LC ma- terials via number, date, name, or title, as well as to other libraries and archival holdings. The book reveals an impressive array of resources not generally known out- side the Library of Congress. Previously obscure resources include, for example, the House Un-American Activities Com- mittee collection of four thousand pam- phlets that document "the activities and thinking of militant or extremist African American groups"; the collection of Daniel Alexander Payne Murray, an Af- rican-American bibliophile who worked for the Library of Congress for fifty-two years; and the LC Carter G. Woodson collection papers on Hiram Revels, the first African-American U.S. senator. 88 College & Research Libraries This work, however, has a conservative slant. Its terminology fails to correct past biases; for example, the reference to writer David Walker (1785-1830) as a ''black mili- tant," whereas abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) is a "white radical." In addition, its representation of politics, science, and industry is weak; more should have been said about these impor- tant aspects of African-American history. Nevertheless, the African-American Mosaic is a tool all should consult who wish to explore the rich African-Ameri- can historical and cultural resources at the Library of Congress.,- Itibari M. Zulu, University of California, Los Angeles. Encyclopedia of Library History. Ed. Wayne A. Wiegand and Donald G. Davis,Jr.NewYork:Garland,l994. 707p. alk. paper, $95 (ISBN 0-8240-5787-2). In the Encyclopedia of Library History (EoLH) editors Wayne Wiegand and Donald Davis offer a handy, one-volume encyclopedia of library history. The word history in the title distinguishes it, at least in intention, from other library- limning lexica. In practice, however, some of the 275 articles have not much more historical content than entries in other encyclopedias, particularly the ALA World Encyclopedia of Library and In- formation Services (2d ed., 1993), with which the present title will inevitably be compared, and the Encyclopedia of Li- brary and Information Science (1968- ), which, indeed, it occasionally cites. Too many of the articles fail to provide new information or a different perspec- tive. Sometimes, however, a fresh per- spective is achieved. One of the editors' stated goals was to focus on the library as an institution. Thus we find entries on military libraries, prison libraries, serv- ices to labor groups, fiction in libraries- topics other encyclopedias have ignored or treated only fleetingly. Articles on the library as institution, exemplified by "Film Libraries and Librarianship," con- stitute one of the major achievements of this new reference work. The EoLH breaks subjects down into smaller units than some other reference works do, making it easier to find arti- January 1995 des about major libraries without hav- ing to wade through the entire entry on a particular country. One result of the focus on institutions is that separate bio- graphical entries are not included. Al- though some key figures in library history can be located with the thorough index, the EoLH is not the first place to look for biography of librarians. The in- dex is also necessary to find standard terms such as bookmobile (found under "Itinerating Libraries") and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (listed as "Ger- man Research Society"). Organizing the work of more than 220 contributors is a daunting task. Quite a few of the authors write about subjects in which they have established reputa- tions. Thus we have Paul N. Banks on conservation and preservation, Francis L. Miksa explaining classification, and E. Stewart Saunders writing on collection development. Most authors are drawn from the ranks of U.S. university librar- ies, although intemationallibrarianship is well represented. The editors write in the introduction about the difficulty in finding suitable contributors for each en- try, and, indeed, a few contributors seem to be writing entirely out of their field. The quality of .the contributions varies widely. A few entries are quite simplistic, offering very little substance, while oth- ers are extremely well written and infor- mative. The entries on classification and collection development, in particular, are very well done, the former because it so elegantly and lucidly explains how librarians have attempted to organize classification, the latter because it takes a truly international and diachronic per- spective on the subject. The editorial decision to group smaller countries into cultural or geo- graphic aggregate areas such as Franco- phone and Anglophone Africa probably saved some space. A side effect of this decision, however, is the large number of "see references" for country names (which are, of course, repeated in the index). The geographic grouping also leads to a disjunct and desultory quality in the articles, given the diverse library traditions within a geographic area. Some-