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Book Reviews  483

 

Book Reviews 

Budd, John M. The Academic Library: Its 
Context, Its Purpose, and Its Operation. 
Englewood, Colo.: Libraries Unlim­
ited, 1998. 372p. $58 cloth (ISBN 
156308614X); $35 paper (ISBN 
1563084570). LC 97-35962. 

The percentage of the total university 
budget allocated to the library has been 
dropping in recent years. At its highest 
level, the library’s share at most schools 
never exceeded five or six percent. In the 
late 1990s, it is closer to three percent. In 
The Academic Library, John Budd devotes 
an entire chapter to “Libraries and 
Money.” He does an excellent job in 
couching this discussion of library fund­
ing in its larger institutional context. 
Budd does the profession, and particu­
larly SLIS students, a distinct service by 
presenting the academic library in this 
perspective—one that is not often ex­
pressed, much less emphasized. 

The various “cultures” of higher edu­
cation, including those of students, ad­
ministrators, faculty, and trustees, are 
each examined by Budd. He explores 
their impact on each other and their ef­
fects on the library. In addition, he dis­
cusses the various forces currently shap­
ing the university within the context of 
the forces that have changed higher edu­
cation in the past. Using a familiar ex­
ample, he reflects on the arguments of 
Allan Bloom in The Closing of the Ameri­
can Mind: What in the academy prompts 
this kind of work? What effect does such 
thinking have on the academic library 
and the role of the library in shaping the 
canon in higher education? 

A number of pages are devoted to the 
manner in which decisions, at all levels 
of the university and which affect the li­
brary, are made. Budd first addresses the 
culture of complex organizations and the 
principles of their management. The uni­
versity, of which the library is a functional 

unit, is composed of multiple 
unequal “subcultures.” Natu­
rally, the faculty and the admin­
istration are major players here 
and Budd looks at the interplay 
of these parties in his analysis. 
The library—structurally analo­
gous to a department or college—is itself 
a subculture affected by the interactions 
of the various parts within the institution. 

This work scrutinizes the evolution of 
management and governance of the uni­
versity and the library. In attempting to 
understand the structure of decision-
making, Budd is able to add detail to the 
models he discusses in the preceding 
chapter on organizational structure. He 
considers the respective roles of the presi­
dent, board, and faculty, and how cam­
pus finances influence their interrelations. 
Budd lays open, for the student, the pro­
cesses of policy-making in the university 
and explains how they affect the library. 

There follow chapters on the collection 
itself, electronic resources, library instruc­
tion, and the roles librarians play. The 
Academic Library is designed to be a text­
book, with potential discussion questions 
included at the end of each chapter. Also 
included with each chapter are extensive 
bibliographies, facilitating further explo­
ration of the topics presented. The sole 
appendix is the LSU Library Faculty 
Policy Statement.

 Budd does a superb job of walking the 
line between theory and practice; the 
reader who worries that a library school 
professor would have difficulty describ­
ing the way things are done in the field 
will be comforted by this book. He has 
produced a work seemingly without 
prejudice toward a particular type of aca­
demic library, for he considers issues af­
fecting the full spectrum of academic li­
braries from those at community colleges 
to those of research institutions. In fact, it 

483 



484 College & Research Libraries September 1998 

is difficult to identify his personal biases 
on many difficult and controversial top­
ics. Budd has a good command of his sub­
ject matter and presents it in a cohesive 
manner. He is to be commended and his 
book recommended.—Clay Williams, 
Ferris State University, Big Rapids, Michi­
gan. 

Electronic Information Environment and 
Academic Libraries: Proceedings of Japan– 
U.S. Library Conference 1996=Denshika 
Sareru Joho to Toshokan. Ed. Matsushita 
Hitoshi. Tokyo: Kinokuniya Co. Ltd., 
1997. 252p. Unpriced. 

This is an odd book. It consists of the pa­
pers delivered, in English, at the 1996 
conference in Tokyo and the discussions 
following the two all-day sessions. The 
conference was organized by the staff of 
Kunitachi College of Music, the publish­
ing company Kinokuniya, and OCLC 
Online Computer Library Center, with 
financial support from The Japan Foun­
dation Center for Global Partnership. The 
first 117 pages of the book consist of trans­
lations into Japanese of both the papers and 
the discussions, making them available to 
both Japanese and English readers. 

Several names well known to Ameri­
can librarians are among the presenters, 
including Andrew Wang and Phyllis B. 
Spies, OCLC; Steven Hall, Chadwyick-
Healey; and Mary Kay Duggan, U.C.­
Berkeley’s School of Information Manage­
ment. Less well known to Americans are 
the editor of this work, Matsushita 
Hitoshi, acting librarian of the Kunitachi 
College of Music Library; presenter Min­
min Chang, director of the Library of 
Hong Kong University of Science and 
Technology; and discussant Abe 
Shin’ichi, head of the Medical Informa­
tion Center for Education and Research 
at Jikei University’s School of Medicine. 

Papers delivered at the conference 
cover a wide range of issues relating to 
the theme of the conference and present 
a great deal of useful information in one 
place. Spies’s paper, “International Li­

brary Cooperation in the Age of Elec­
tronic Information: Recent Trends and 
OCLC’s Role,” illustrates how develop­
ments in electronic information reflect 
changes in the global market and how 
OCLC reacts to those changes as they 
impact the “emerging global library com­
munity.” She states that “[f]urthering ac­
cess to the world’s information and re­
ducing the cost of that information re­
main OCLC’s major public purposes.” 

The University of Pittsburgh’s Arlene 
G. Taylor’s paper, “The Electronic Infor­
mation Environment and Academic Li­
braries in the U.S.,” focuses on such con­
cerns as what is to be included in a library 
catalog, what should be in a catalog 
record, the international coding of records 
for machine manipulation, new concepts 
in authority control, and challenges of 
multiple-language subject approaches. 
She addresses the efforts of the Interna­
tional Federation of Library Associations 
(IFLA) in the transnational exchange of 
authority data and the progress multilin­
gual nations, such as Singapore and 
Canada, have made in multiple-language 
subject control, and notes that some pub­
lic libraries in the United States provide 
both English and Spanish access to their 
subject catalogs. A recurring theme in 
Taylor’s paper is disappearing bound­
aries, a gradual removal of the limitations 
librarians have confronted in catalogs, 
authority control, subject access, etc. She 
concludes with the view that: “Disap­
pearing boundaries are and always have 
been a challenge. Too often we’ve dealt 
with them in the past by building fences 
to delineate the perceived positions of the 
boundaries. In the libraries and catalog­
ing it is time to take down the fences.” 

In his paper, “The Future of Electronic 
Information Services in Libraries,” 
OCLC’s Rick Noble outlines the recent 
history of electronic information services, 
which “began to appear in North Ameri­
can libraries about twenty-five years 
ago.” He goes on to show how develop­
ments in the Internet and the World Wide