College and Research Libraries 464 College & Research Libraries scholarship and service that survive even in the age of the information engineer.- Mary fane Parrine, Stanford University, Stanford, California Wittig, Rob (for ln.S.Omnia). Invisible Rendezvous: Connection and Collabora- tion in the New Landscape of Electronic Writing. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan/ Univ. Pr. of New England, 1994. 187p. $18.95 (cloth). (ISBN 0-8195-5275-5.) Invisible Rendezvous has two main themes. One is a history of Invisible Seattle (ln.S.Omnia is an abbreviated form of Invisible Seattle Omnia), a performance art and computer bulletin board group, many of whose participants work in the publishing or printing trade. The other is a treatise on the effect of computer networks and group communication on writing and creative efforts in gen- eral. Between chapters group members pro- vide pictures of themselves in action, their projects, copies of e-mail messages, charts, and graphs to illustrate their phi- losophy. On several reprinted flyers they invite the participation of "artists, poets, actors, dancers, architects, idle men, fallen women, all persons of slender means, dubious antecedents, and questionable loyalties." Index to advertisers Blackwell EBSCO Greenwood Press Library Technologies Libraries Unlimited Minolta OCLC PAIS Personal Biblio. Software Readmore Todd cover 3 380 394 422 419 420-21 408,459 373 cover 2 374,466 cover 4 September 1995 Invisible Seattle is passionate in its quest to find and free the artist in every- one. Its project to write a novel of the city, with all the inhabitants contributing, is characteristic. "Literary workers" donned white coveralls and stopped people on the city streets, asking them to tell a story or complete unfinished sentences. There would not be one official version of the book, but a number of variations on the story. The protagonist and the love inter- est, Terry, were never identified by gen- der. The group also compiled an "atlas" of the city, composed of locations col- lected, again, from people on the street, and offered building permits for new or modified constructions (asking if an ad- dition to the structure would include ears, feet, or wings). Another Invisible Seattle project drew up a new, alternate consti- tution. Invisible Seattle also created a com- puter bulletin board through which mem- bers and others could communicate elec- tronically and write collaboratively. A considerable portion of the book is de- voted to discussing the way this medium affects the creative process. This analysis is tied into the works of Jacques Derrida (one of the sponsors of their Fulbright grant), and Michel de Certeau, Umberto Eco, and Georges Perec are among those listed in the bibliography. Alas, the organizers of ln.S.Omnia seem to think they have created some- . thing new. Writing and creating collaboratively, however, is certainly not a new development. One of the examples given in the book, wherein one computer group user starts a story and others join in and add sentences, is reminiscent of a child's party game in which each child adds a sentence in turn. Using this tech- nique in cyberspace is merely moving it to a new medium. While Invisible Seattle's passion is ad- mirable, and some of its ideas are thought-provoking, it falls prey to a com- mon fault of the passionate-that they alone have discovered the Promised Land and that everyone else would be im- proved by adopting their frame of mind.-Julie Still, Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey Short Notices The Economics of Information in the 1990s. Ed. Jana Varlejs Jefferson. N.C.: McFarland, 1995. 93p. $15.95, paper. (ISBN 0-7864-0130-3.) These proceedings of a 1994 symposium at Rutgers University contain five contri- butions, an introduction and conference discussion, and an annotated bibliogra- phy. Its central concern is to assess the impact of digital technology on the eco- nomics of information production, stor- age, and dissemination. The papers come from five very different perspectives: an economist (Malcolm Getz), a library school researcher (Paul Kantor), a pub- lisher (Janet Bailey), a public interest ad- vocate (James Love), and a library direc- tor (Arthur Curley). Although each is of some interest, they are all quite short- barely scratching the surface of such a complex (and crucial) topic. (BW) McDermott, Patrice. Politics and Scholar- ship: Feminist Academic Journals and the Production of Knowledge. Champaign, Ill.:Univ.oflllinoisPr.,1994.197p.,alk. paper, $13.95. (ISBN 0-252-02078-2.) Politics and Scholarship examines the his- tory of three feminist academic journals and traces their evolution and transfor- mation: Feminist Studies, Frontiers, and Signs. McDermott chooses journals af- filiated with major research universities in order to investigate the different ways they address both the feminist and the scholarly communities. She shows how, increasingly, feminist scholars choose to publish in feminist journals that replicate traditional aca- demic publishing standards because of the recognition afforded them by tenure and promotion review committees, as well as their wider audiences and more stable financing. (E W) Book Reviews 465 Journal of Electronic Publishing. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Pr. (ISSN 1081-2711.) URL: http:/ /www.press. umich.edu/ jep. As of June 1995 this "electronic archive" on electronic publishing included thirteen articles, divided into six categories: Copy- right Issues, Digital Issues, Economic Is- sues (with FAQs on "usage-based" pric- ing by two University of Michigan econo- mists), Imaging Issues, Policy Issues ("In- stitutional and Policy Issues in the Devel- opment of the Digital Library"), and Tech- nical Issues (e.g., a critique of HTML by Philip Greenspun). Some of the articles provide hypertext links. The phrase "a lawyer has at his touch" connects, aptly enough, to the homepage of Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute, and the terms "adze" and "diazo" to dictio- nary definitions. Unlike much of what one finds on the Web, however, this par- ticular publication is clearly more inter- ested in providing substance rather than flash. (SL) Haricombe, Lorraine J., and F. W. Lan- caster. Out in the Cold: Academic Boy- cotts and the Isolation of South Africa. Arlington, Va.: Information Resources Pr., 1995. 158p. $29.50. (ISBN 0-87815- 067-6.) Stemming from Haricombe' s dissertation at the University of Illinois, this study "was designed solely to determine to what extent scholarship in South Africa may have sufffered as a result of various manifestations of an academic boycott." These manifestations included the ban- ning of South African scholars from con- ferences, rejection of manuscripts by South African scholars for publication, nonrecognition of South African degrees, etc. Access to information played a key role in the boycott, and the authors de- vote some attention to the debate among librarians (especially at the 1987 ALA con- ference and its aftermath), and to the ac- _ tions they and publishers took to isolate South African scholarship. The bottom