College and Research Libraries 290 College & Research Libraries review available sources on graphic ma- terials, electronic sources of information, and archives of unpublished materials such as dissertations. From an anthropologist's perspective, this book is impressive for the enormous amount of work and care that went into it, yet also disappointing in its relative inaccessibility to anthropologists. In a sense, this criticism is not fair to the author's intentions. Though ALA is mar- keting the book as a research tool for an- thropologists, the author makes it clear that the intended audience is really refer- ence librarians who need to advise stu- dents and scholars undertaking library research. The book's introduction contains extended technical discussions of classifi- cation principles used in the book-dis- cussions obviously meant for the librarian rather than the anthropologist. The frame- work of headings common to all chapters undoubtedly makes the book easier to use for reference librarians. However, this work will probably not end up finding a home on the bookshelves of many stu- dents of anthropology. The lack of a subject index in the book is inexplicable. Finding bibliographic sources on particular ethnographic areas is relatively painless, given the book's ethnographic area focus. But locating specific references on specific areas of any subfield (e.g., medical anthropol- ogy, psychological anthropology, dental anthropology or tomography) requires a careful reading through the relevant sub- field chapter in the hope of hitting upon a relevant reference. Yet it is precisely in terms of such specific subtopics that an- thropologists pursue their research. The author is more concerned with bibliog- raphers' categories than with those used by anthropologists themselves. A future edition of this book should certainly in- clude a carefully constructed subject in- dex, an addition that would make this book a truly invaluable resource for the professional anthropologist as well as the reference librarian. As it stands, Fieldwork in the Library contains an impressive array of refer- ences that are potentially of great utility for anthropology students at all levels of May 1995 sophistication. But this is a book de- signed to be read rather than consulted . It is written in a highly discursive style that makes it less of a ready reference book than a thoughtful treatise on doing research in anthropology. As such, any- one planning to use the book would be advised to read through the introduc- tion and the first two chapters to get a sense of how to use the book. Then the reader will be free to turn to relevant specific chapters, but these too should be read with some care rather than sim- ply consulted. Anthropologists have far more reference resources available to them than most of them realize. Those willing to learn the language and culture of the professional bibliog- rapher will be well rewarded by Wester- man's exhaustive and thoughtful compilation.-Bradd Shore, Emory Uni- versity, Atlanta, Georgia. McDonald, Joseph A., and Lynda Basney Micikas. Academic Libraries: The Dimen- sions of Their Effectiveness. Westport, Conn. : Greenwood, 1994. 188p., alk. pa- per, $49.95 (ISBN 0-313-27269-7). In this volume, which examines the construct of library effectiveness, the authors address three major questions: (1) Is it possible to establish criteria for assessing academic library organiza- tional effectiveness? (2) Can dimensions of academic library organizational effec- tiveness be identified? (3) Can groups of academic libraries be identified that show high effectiveness in contrast with others which show lower effectiveness? The data used to answer these ques- tions come from a questionnaire sent to all academic libraries in the 264 institu- tions without doctoral programs in six Middle Atlantic states and the District of Columbia. The response averaged three questionnaires per institution and rep- resented 131 institutions. The intent of the questionnaire was to measure the trait indicators of effectiveness as per- ceived by library decision makers at these institutions. This research builds on Kim S. Cameron's work, which has attempted to define a construct of organizational effectiveness. The book includes a useful review of the concept of the effective- ness of academic libraries and the meas- ures and models developed by earlier authors. It is fair to say that most library administrators, when confronted with the question of the effectiveness of their or- ganization, think in terms of a set of one or more criteria (e.g., document exposure, number of volumes in the collection or added within a given time, or reference transactions successfully completed). The value of McDonald and Micikas' research is the expansion of the concept of effectiveness into a multivariate and multidimensional construct. Acknowl- edging that "at its heart, effectiveness is an intensely practical matter," the authors state, "if a measuring device must be as complex as the phenomenon it is meas- uring, multiple indicators of effective- ness are essential." Following Cameron, McDonald and Micikas define effectiveness as success- ful organizational transactions and study it from the perspective of the "dominant coalition" (i.e., the library de- cision makers) because they are the ma- jor users of data relating to organizational effectiveness and ultimately determine an organization's effectiveness. By itself, the definition of effectiveness as success- ful organizational transactions is not meaningful or useful. To grasp the value of this research, one must understand the concept of effectiveness as a con- struct whose validity will always fall short of reality, but which may be devel- oped for each organization by careful attention to organizational goals. It re- quires visualizing the library as an entire organizational entity whose processes and products contribute holistically to the fulfillment of its unique and continu- ally changing mission. The research identified twenty-one factors, or groupings of variables, which in turn were subjected to factor analysis revealing four factors or domains: major resources, services, library I stakeholder interactions, and access. For example, the dimensions associated with major resources are staff size and diversity, col- lege support for the library, and library Book Reviews 291 collection adequacy. The dimensions as- sociated with services are access/use of outside libraries, cooperative associa- tions, and the availability of librarian professional services. The authors believe that they have identified libraries with high effective- ness by asking the respondents whether their libraries are effective. This assump- tion is questionable at best. While it is true that the "dominant coalition" may understand best the resource allocation and goals of the organization, to present a set of criteria as measuring organiza- tional success which include no attempt to directly determine the satisfaction of the customers of the organization is to ignore, at the organization's peril, the very focus of its efforts. It belies the sense of complexity which the methodology attempts to illuminate and diminishes the usefulness of the research. The volume is schizophrenic in its construction. The first seven chapters re- port on the survey research. The final two chapters, "The Grail of Library Goodness" and "Libraries and Informa- tion," seem to constitute a different work entirely. Both parts of the book are inter- esting, but the relationship between them seems tenuous at best and there is little real discussion of the application of the re- search to the questions raised in the final chapters. Instead, in these two chapters the authors struggle with the mission of the academic library and acknowledge the shift from the provision of information to the education of the user. The construction of the survey and the answers of the respondents reflect the conservative view of academic librarian- ship concerned with the provision of services, the flow of resources into the library, and the development of the col- lections. These concerns still constitute important elements of library effective- ness, but the organizations' goals are shifting in the information age. McDon- ald and Micikas believe that an institu- tion-specific dimensionalized model of effectiveness is "likely to be a much more successful one ... than the historic uni- variate or multivariate static models [because] it allows each information 292 College & Research Libraries organization to be seen as effective in relationship to the strategic choices it or its host institution may have made." They conclude, in contrast to their coali- tion, "the only effectiveness criterion that truly matters is the developed, educated student. Without successful students, successful libraries are mean- ingless." Such a conclusion raises the obvious question that the authors do not address-how to expand the criteria of academic library effectiveness to include measures of its contribution toward the education of the student. The book does not intend to be a hands- on volume to assist libraries in measuring May 1995 their performance. Measuring Academic Library Performance: A Practical Approach, by Nancy A. Van House, Beth T. Weil, and Charles R. McClure, with its focus on objective output measures and its ease of use, will continue to be the book of choice for academic libraries assess- ing their own performance. The value of McDonald and Micikas' research is in the development of the concept of li- brary effectiveness in the broader con- text of a mental construct that goes beyond the combination of scores on univariate performance measures.- Maxine H. Reneker, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California. Use INTERNET to U C n over ... UnCover UnCover UnCover UnCover SOS 6 million articles from Reveal Complete Order articles by fax, 20,000 multidisciplinary Electronic TOC Pre-1989 journals phone, e-mail or post periodicals delivered by service with can be ordered from UnCover's Single fax in 24 hours or less user profiling online Order Source service The UnCover Company E-mail: uncover@carl.org 380 I East Florida Avenue, Suite 200 o Denver, CO 80210, USA Phone: 1-800-787-7979 o Fax: 303-758-5946 Readmore, Inc. UnO:Ner . .. Articles 22 Cortl~ndt Street New York, NY I 0007 Phone: 1-800-221-3306 UnCover is a service of Readmore, Inc. Anytime, Anywhere