bkrvssep Book Reviews 491 whatever they are; just how much is high­ lighted in Joy Thomas’s survey/article on the attitudes of people who have served recently as president of a state or local association. Many of these people had no clerical support and sacrificed valuable personal and financial resources to serve, out of a pure sense of duty. This speaks well for the profession. Another well- written article is Cindy Mediavilla’s piece on the role of the California Library As­ sociation in fighting anti-Communist cen­ sorship between 1946 and 1956. Also noteworthy is Sue Kamm’s survey of why librarians choose to join associations (for networking, receipt of publications, op­ portunity to contribute to the profession, and so on). Other pieces march though topics such as the role of staff versus vol­ unteer in associations and the value that associations have in individuals’ careers. William Fisher’s “The Value of Profes­ sional Associations” comes to the remark­ able conclusion that “without such asso­ ciations of which they become officers, without professional association confer­ ences at which they attend and/or deliver papers and go to meetings, and without professional association publications of which they become editors, reviewers, and/or authors, library directors would have to devote more of their time to the day-to-day running of their libraries. If they exist for no better reason than to keep library directors busy, our profes­ sional associations play an important role.” If this flippant and outrageous in­ sult to the altruistic sacrifices of so many people constitutes a valid conclusion to one of the volume’s think pieces, one can only wonder where Library Trends is headed.—William Miller, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton. Edward R. Tufte. Visual Explanations: Im­ ages and Quantities, Evidence and Nar­ rative. Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Pr., 1997. 156p. $45 (postpaid from au­ thor/publisher) (ISBN 0-9613921-2-6). LC 97-127584. This is Edward Rolf Tufte’s third self- published, self-distributed, and self-pro­ moted book on representing information. Whatever one thinks of this trilogy, it is, collectively, one of the more interesting footnotes in the history of late twentieth- century publishing. As venerable old houses increasingly find themselves in the bellies of much larger beasts, as mega- media groups form and reform like giant protoplasma, there remains Edward Tufte. A professor of engineering at Yale, he is a publishing phenomenon of his own. I am unaware of any other academic who has been as successful as Tufte in putting out his own corpus. I will not pretend to account for Tufte’s popularity; it perplexes me as much as Umberto Eco’s. To be sure, each of his books is handsomely designed and lov­ ingly made, illustrative of the principles it communicates. But packaging goes only so far. I first encountered Tufte years ago in a smart-looking ad in the New Yorker. The fact that the ad was (a) handsome and (b) in the New Yorker was (for me, any­ way) persuasive. I ordered a copy of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, even though I did not have the remotest interest in the topic. Whatever the reasons, one thing is cer­ tain: In this current age of the interface, where everyone is his or her own Web master, Tufte’s work is timely and rel­ evant. Like most everyone else, librarians spend large chunks of time huddled be­ fore screens filled with words, numbers, icons, bars, colors, and anything else that can be made to fit the space. We admire their occasional elegance, and we scream at their all-too-frequent indifference to design. Moreover, librarians are not only information specialists and managers, they also are information designers. Al­ though trained to manage information, librarians are not trained to present it vi­ sually. This is why Tufte is worth con­ sulting. He is clear, straightforward, witty, and opinionated. He will give some context and guidelines for thinking about 492 College & Research Libraries September 1998 the ways in which screens should be or­ ganized. All OPAC committees should be required to read him. The present book is about ways to rep­ resent change effectively: “design strate­ gies—the proper arrangement in space and time of images, words, and num­ bers—for presenting information about motion, process, mechanism, cause and effect.” If anyone balks at the prescrip­ tive tone of this, Tufte quickly provides examples of how the presentation of in­ formation can be a matter of life and death. It was, he argues, the effective rep­ resentation of data that allowed Dr. John Snow to halt an outbreak of deadly chol­ era in mid-nineteenth-century London. And it was the artless representation of data that contributed decisively to the NASA Challenger disaster in 1986. “There are displays that reveal the truth and displays that do not.” Happily, most of the book is not nearly so portentous. Indeed, Tufte, like God and the devil, lives amidst the details. From that perspective, visual clutter is one of his favorite targets. Clutter results from a democratic approach to text and context, information and background. Fine as a political ideal, democracy has no place in effective design, which de­ mands hierarchy and unequal emphases. But those emphases need not be glaring. Often the smallest and subtlest variations will yield the most satisfying results. Index to advertisers AIAA cover 3, cover 4 Archival Products 480 BIOSIS 403 Blackwell’s Book Srvcs 482 EBSCO cover 2 Endocrine Society 457 Greenwood Publishing 421 Library Technologies 399 Minolta 446-447 OCLC 400 PNAS 433 Primary Source Media 466 Tufte ranges widely for insight and example, from weather charts to Humphrey Repton’s landscapes and the art of Ad Reinhardt. After a while, it be­ comes difficult to distinguish art from science. Thus, my favorite “display” in the book is the extraordinary “cyclo­ gram” concocted by two Russian cosmo­ nauts to record a continuous narrative of the flight of their Salyut 6 space mission. Mounted on any museum wall, it would seem a perfectly obvious piece of twenti­ eth-century book art! A chapter on magic focuses on the contradiction within the practice of magic. The magician deceives; he is the master of disinformation. On the other hand, the magician also must be the master of clarity in presenting informa­ tion about the craft to apprentices. There is much to be learned from the strategies of disinformation. Librarians may find the final chapter the most helpful to their own work. It considers “confectionery designs,” that is, representations that seek to capture com­ plex processes and narrative within the frame of a single constellation of images. Examples of confectionery designs in­ clude frontispieces to seventeenth-cen­ tury books, twentieth-century collage art, and contemporary computer screens. “Like perspective, confections give the mind an eye. Confections place selected, diverse images into the narrative context of a coherent argument. And, by virtue of the coherence of their arguments, con­ fections make reading and seeing and thinking identical.” This collapsing of cognitive processes in response to a single representation strikes me as a sensible goal for computer interfaces. It also nods appropriately to the potential of the com­ puter for altering modes of perception and patterns of attention. Tufte is an engineer, not an artist. His aesthetic preferences can at times be dull, at other times idiosyncratic. But it was one the century’s greatest architects, Le Corbusier, who urged his colleagues to pay attention to the ways in which engi­ Book Reviews 493 neers worked. The clarity, simplicity, and economy of their designs would be the signal characteristics of twentieth-century design. After this, my third excursion into the worlds of Edward Tufte, I am pre­ pared to concede Le Corbusier his point.—Michael Ryan, University of Penn­ sylvania. Information Imagineering: Meeting at the Interface. Eds. Milton T. Wolf, Pat Ensor, and Mary Augusta Thomas, for the Library and Information Technol­ ogy Association and the Library Ad­ ministration and Management Asso­ ciation. Chicago and London: ALA, 1998. 255p. $36, alk. paper (ISBN 0­ 8389-0729-6). LC 97-44296. Librarians should not let the title of this book fool them: There are no Disneyesque flights of fancy here. There is no attempt “to promote the imaginative forecasting and planning for future information sys­ tems and technologies by the examina­ tion and analysis of science fiction themes and works,” as the LITA interest group was charged to do. What is here is a book with both feet f i g u r a t i v e l y o n t h e ground. So, readers beware: Anyone seeking a pragmatic introduction to some of the issues and challenges he or she is and will be facing on the road to the digital/virtual library will find this book useful. However, anyone seek­ ing a grandiose vision of what that fu­ ture will look like and what his or her daily routines will be like will find this book of little value. The editors sought to compile a collec­ tion of essays from a variety of perspec­ tives (library, museum, academic depart­ ment, archives, information specialist) to find out what the latest technologies “were doing to us and for us.” These es­ says are arranged into six sections: (1) Retooling for the Future; (2) Technology Serves; (3) From Print to Pixels; (4) Rede­ fining Our Information Institutions; (5) Visioning the New Organization; and (6) A Mirror Held Up to Tomorrow. Indeed, the subjects are varied, if pre­ dictable and conservatively argued. (In forecasting, one contributor warned, cau­ tion is in order.) We have the “how we do it good in my library” article, which is actually an excellent chronicle document­ ing the introduction of a NT client-server library network. We have the entry that reminds us that people are the key, not technology. There is the shared vision thing. There are essays that discuss how team learning is the key to the future. Another entry talks about the major mis­ conception that computer people and book people are antagonists. We read why digital collections and print collec­ tions will coexist. Though varied, the predominant theme is collections, be they journal, book, or artifact. One writer takes this to the point of questioning the past massive retrospective conversion projects. Per­ haps they were ill-advised and should have been done gradually because our time, efforts, and dollars could have been better spent in other ways, specifically, to create local collections or access to jour­ nal indexes. Maybe so, but any librarian who has worked with split local catalogs will attest to the fact that a single catalog is ideal for users. Because of the focus on collections, and the administrative and intellectual issues attached to them, it is the library user who is barely visible in these pages. Sue Myburgh does have a subheading in her chapter, “Pity the Poor End User,” and it is not surprising that her solution to the woes of the current searcher is a return to the librarian as an intermediary. (I say “not surprising” because the terms in­ struction, bibliographic instruction, library instruction, or user instruction do not appear in the book’s index.) The other missing ele­ ment is the public library. Only Howard Besser reflects on the issues facing public li­ braries in the midst of his fascinating analy­ sis on how current commercial and market­ ing trends and transformations need to be considered in our planning.