College and Research Libraries Book Reviews Academic Libraries: Their Rationale and Role in American High er Education. Eds. Gerard B. McCabe and Ruth J. Person. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Pr., 1995. 230p. $55 (ISBN 0-313-28597-7). A more accurate subtitle for this book might have been "The Effect of Automa- tion on the Rationale and Role of Ameri- can Libraries." Intended primarily for ad- ministrators in higher education but also for librarians, a dozen essays describe the present state of the academic library in the United States and the manner in which its traditional operations-selec- tion, acquisition, organization, dissemi- nation-and its position within higher education have been altered by the rush of automation. The major units in the present-day li- brary would be unrecognizable to ·any- one who retired even five years ago: cata- loging now increasingly exports its tasks to outside contractors, selectors are as much concerned with access to invisible materials as with the purchase of print books and journals, nonlibrarians such as programmers and fundraisers have been added to the staff, and in an attempt to provide a rational support structure for academic functions, administrators are increasingly linking the library to computing and telecommunications cen- ters as we move from the "storehouse" to the "gateway" model of providing information. Meanwhile, librarians struggle with the "bimodal" library, pres- sured by faculty who continue to de- mand print materials and by library ad- ministrators who see the future of librari- anship as inexorably linked to automa- tion and the development of access modes to information. The authors address the issues as- signed to them with assurance and con- viction as they review where we have been and where we are going: the spe- 89 cial needs of the community college (although why not an essay on the special needs of the college as opposed to uni- versity library?), the basic as well as continuing education needs of the staff, organiza- tional and personnel issues, and the po- sition of the academic library in the edu- cational enterprise. They make clear that as libraries' mode of operations changes, so will the way librarians work. Jordan Scepanski states baldly, " ... the library will serve as a warehouse of book and journal col- lections that for one reason or another have not been digitized and are not avail- able in electronic form" and may become a book museum or a study hall. He be- lieves (hopes?) that in the future, librar- ians will have Ph.D.s and will be fully integrated into the faculty as teachers and researchers. (Will we finally have RE- SPECT? As one of my philosophy teach- ers used to say, "Maybe yes, maybe no.") Charles Newman asserts that "the posi- tion of academic library director as we know it today is quickly becoming ex- tinct," a fact borne out by the number of library deans and directors who have re- cently been appointed as heads of infor- mation units overseeing computing cen- ters, telecommunications, and even the university press, in addition to the library. Not much in this group of essays is new to the working academic librarian, though it is useful (and jolting) to be con- fronted with one's image in the mirror. Much, if not most, of it will be new to administrators in higher education who, as Chapin and Hardesty point out, usu- ally concern themselves with libraries primarily as a budget issue (a black hole, in their view) rather than with their in- ner workings or their role within the in- stitution. Because they are so busy, how- t 90 College & Research Libraries ever, I suspect that administrators will not take the time to read the entire book. Most useful to them will be Joanne Buster's essay, which describes the reori- entation of the library from the store- house to the gateway model, Carla Stoffle and Kathleen Weibel's essay which de- scribes possible avenues for funding and emphasizes the need to incorporate tech- nology into the budget rather than de- pend on donor support for automation; and Paul M . Gherman' s and Robert C. Heterick's concluding essay, which probes the increasingly intimate relation- ship between the library and the campus computing service The book concludes with a summary review of the literature concerning the current issues in academic librarianship and a very good annotated bibliography that mirrors the chapter headings.-Eva M . Sartori, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. International Book Publishing: An Encyclo- pedia. Eds. Philip G. Altbach and Edith S. Hoshino. New York: Garland, 1995. 736p. $95, alk. paper (ISBN 0-8153- 0786-1). This ambitious volume calls upon a cadre of international specialists, ranging from scholars to practitioners, to inform the reader about the past and future status of book publishing. Recognizing the dearth of research and analysis devoted to book publishing as both a commer- cial and cultural endeavor, editors Philip G. Altbach and Edith S. Hoshino have constructed a balanced and timely state- of-the-art review that is useful in not only library reference collections but also the offices of acquisitions librarians, collec- tion development managers, area stud- ies specialists, editors, publishers, book- sellers, and savvy suppliers. Equally important, the encyclopedia may also serve as a course of study for students of publishing, the book trade, librarianship, area studies, and comparative education. Virtually all the essays are well docu- mented, and frequently accompanied by January 1996 bibliographies for further research, and the excellent index facilitates access to complex subjects. Even the appendix is a valuable research tool-a major com- pilation of book production statistics by . region and country from the Unesco Sta- tistical Yearbook, 1970 to 1990. In his introductory essay, "Research on Publishing: Literature and Analysis," Philip Altbach, professor of higher edu- cation at the School of Education, Bos- ton College, and director of the Research and Information Center of the Bellagio Publishing Network, sets the philosophi- cal and scholarly context for the encyclo- pedia, discussing why book publishing has received so little analytic attention and recommending ways "to expand the network of research and analysis con- cerning publishing and book develop- ment." This well-tempered advocacy piece lends coherence and strength to the main body of the encyclopedia, which is organized into two parts. The first part, "Topics in Publishing," consists of thirty-four essays on types of publishing (e.g., college textbook, elec- tronic, reference, university press); sociopolitical aspects of publishing (e.g., copyright, freedom of the press, publish- ing in the Third World); and the econom- ics of publishing (e.g., book marketing, bookselling, international book produc- tion statistics). There is a refreshing ar- ray of "voices" among these essays, rang- ing from the personal conviction of Bill Henderson, founder and publisher of Pushcart Press, in "The Small Press To- day and Yesterday," to the factual elo- quence of WilliamS. Lofquist, commod- ity /industry specialist with the U.S. De- partment of Commerce, in "A Statistical Perspective on U.S. Book Publishing," to the theoretical insights of Shigeo Minowa, dean of the School of Interna- tional Business and Management of Kanazawa University, Japan, in "The Societal Context of Book Publishing." The range of individual perspectives proffered on the future of publishing-