reviews Book Reviews 191 teenth century, with Bude flanked by Mercury and Philology; a book on the rivers of Europe, written and printed by the young Louis XV, presented as a gift to his paramour, Mme. de Pompadour; Appolinaire’s copy of Sonia Delaunay’s striking refiguration of Blaise Cendrars’s La Prose du transsiberian . . . from earlier in this century; and so on. If there is power in this catalogue, it surely resides in the artifacts it records. Whatever one thinks of the spin of the authors, the books, manuscripts, and commentary of Creating French Culture are well worth a tour.—Michael Ryan, University of Penn- sylvania, Philadelphia Hernon, Peter, and Ellen Altman. Service Quality in Academic Libraries. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1996. 187p. $24.50, paper. ISBN 1-56750-210-5. LC 95-42989. The original work in this book is included in chapters 4 through 7 and three ap- pendices, a mere eighty pages or so. Based on focus group and personal in- terviews with librarians, and focus group interviews with students in library and information science, two question- naires relating to quality of service were developed for use with patrons of aca- demic libraries. After pretesting and modification, these instruments were applied in three academic libraries, with 220 participants (almost exclusively un- dergraduate or graduate students) completing one or another of the sur- veys. The development of the instru- ments and the results of the surveys are presented in chapter 4 (eighteen pages). The final instruments them- selves are given in two appendices (four pages). Chapter 5, in eight pages, dis- cusses how libraries can survey their customers, including the administering of survey instruments and sampling as- pects. The first questionnaire (appendix A) asks patrons, mostly through bipolar scales, for their opinions about the li- brary they use. The second (appendix B) gives users twenty-five statements about the library and its services, to which they are to respond on a 1–5 scale of importance. There is nothing really new in such customer satisfaction surveys and, frankly, this reviewer feels they have been done better elsewhere (Chapter 11 of Baker and Lancaster’s 1991 Mea- surement and Evaluation of Library Services gives several examples). Moreover, how can one take too seriously a sur- vey that ranges from the content of in- formation obtained from the library to the cleanliness of the drinking foun- tains? It is also doubtful that library us- ers can really respond meaningfully to some of the points (e.g., “The informa- tion you get from library books and pe- riodicals is accurate”) and at least one of the questions is completely ambigu- ous: “Library staff understand the in- formation for which you are looking” presumably means “Library staff un- derstand what you are looking for,” which is quite different from the point as stated. Chapters 1, 2, 3, 8, and 9 are mostly “fluff.” Chapter 1 takes fourteen pages to tell us that evaluation should be cus- tomer oriented. Probably few librarians would disagree with this, although they may not put their agreement into prac- tice. Chapter 2 is a general discussion of evaluation principles and perfor- mance measures. In this, the authors attempt to clarify terminology but, in the opinion of this reviewer, only muddy the waters. For example, they try to make a distinction between “outcomes” and “impacts” but fail to do so clearly (it is doubtful that a meaningful distinction exists), and they are completely wrong in their attempt to distinguish cost-effectiveness from cost-benefit approaches. Chapter 3 is a discussion on service quality “as reflected in the literature.” The authors draw examples from other fields, mostly government and busi- 192 College & Research Libraries March 1997 ness, the implication being that these sectors are more service oriented than are libraries. Because this reviewer be- lieves strongly that the service ethic has declined precipitously in all segments of society (including libraries) over the past forty years (try to reach any hu- man being by telephone today; try to get a reply to any business correspon- dence), he finds this almost entirely platitudinous. A statement of commit- ment to excellence does not, in itself, guarantee even adequacy. Chapter 8 gives us a few pages on what “leadership” means in libraries and chapter 9 tells us that service qual- ity is a critical issue in academic librar- ies and in higher education in general. None of this is new or inspiring. Chapter 7 presents a hodgepodge of methods that libraries could use to ex- amine quality of service, everything from reshelving surveys to OPAC trans- action logs; and chapter 6 (which seems out of place logically) discusses how data collected could form the basis for a Service Quality Information System. Although not stated explicitly, the au- thors seem to draw their inspiration from Total Quality Management. They prefer the subjective impressions of li- brary users to more objective and quan- tifiable measures of user success (e.g., shelf availability). They also are prone to wild asser- tions that they fail to substantiate, such as “thinking of library users as custom- ers is a new concept for many librar- ians.” As someone who has worked in or around libraries for more than forty years, this reviewer believes that librar- ians once thought of users as custom- ers (see, for example, S. L. Wallace’s 1956 Patrons Are People) but forgot this important principle as they fell in love with technology and saw “automation” as an end in itself—compare the num- ber of books written today about library users with the number written about li- brary technology! Finally, a book published in 1996 should surely give great emphasis to networked information and the digital library, because one can reasonably ex- pect that users will exploit such re- sources in ways different from the ways they exploit print resources and, thus, criteria relating to “service quality” could be different. Although some rather oblique references occur in the text, the topic is never really addressed head-on and the terms digital library, elec- tronic information, Internet, or even net- work do not appear in the index (which, in any case, is rather pathetic). This is not a book I can recommend to either library managers or students of library science. Both the theoretical discussion and the survey instruments have been done better before. A hardbound version (ISBN 1-56750-209-1) is also available at an almost unbeliev- able price of $52.50 for fewer than 200 pages.—F. W. Lancaster, University of Illi- nois, Urbana-Champaign Olson, Michael P. The Odyssey of a Ger- man National Library: A Short History of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the Deutsche Buecherei, and the Deutsche Bibliothek. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz (Beitraege zum Buch- und Bibliothekswesen, Bd. 36), 1996. vii, 122p. DM78. ISBN 3-447-03648-6. No previous book has been published addressing the subject treated in this volume. For a German reviewer, it is surprising to see that a book about the German library system was published in English in a well-known German publisher’s series. At the outset, this re- viewer should acknowledge his respect for the author for tackling this subject. It must be difficult for someone from outside Germany and its specific (li- brary) history to understand that this idea is one that is influencing librarians’ work today. 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