bookreviews


Book Reviews 295 

gument. She describes the emergence of 
bibliographic instruction as a distinct pro­
fessional activity that has transformed the 
way that college and university librarians 
define their roles. Despite the large num­
ber of students and librarians who are in­
volved in BI, school administrations often 
fail to understand the role of the librarian 
in instruction. The author ’s argument, 
that libraries do not function as the “heart 
of the university,” also involves the roles 
played by library directors. Most directors 
are not involved in campus decisions on 
information technology; no do they par­
ticipate at the highest levels of the 
university’s administration. 

Grimes presents concepts of centrality 
through an examination of organizational 
theory and through studies on resource 
allocation and retrenchment. In an at­
tempt to find out what chief academic and 
executive officers think of library central­
ity, the author conducted a survey of five 
universities. She describes the universities 
and discusses their leaders’ responses. 
The results of the survey show that most 
administrators believe that the metaphor 
of the library as the “the heart of the uni­
versity ” is an exaggeration. They empha­
sized that library centrality can only be 
based on the library’s contributions to the 
university’s mission of teaching and re­
search, as well as its national recognition 
or ranking. 

The strength of Grimes’s analysis is in 
her use of powerful theoretical and his­
torical models to analyze higher educa­
tion. Although she admits that there are 
weaknesses in the use of grounded theory 
methodology, she uses it successfully to 
generate conceptual categories from facts. 
Grimes has been very successful in iden­
tifying concepts and theories that reflect 
views of academic library centrality in ac­
tual library experience. Academic Library 
Centrality contains a wealth of references 
for those interested in pursuing this topic 
in greater detail. It is highly recommended 
to library administrators who hope to 
achieve library centrality at their own in-
stitutions.—Constantia Constantinou, Iona 
College, New Rochelle, NY. 

Kilgour, Frederick G. The Evolution of the 
Book. New York and Oxford: Oxford 
Univ. Pr., 1998. 180p. $35, alk. paper 
(ISBN: 0-19-511859-6). LC 97-14430. 

The advent of electronic communication 
has triggered a boom in studies on the his­
tory and future of “the book.” For much 
of the 1990s, it has been one of the major 
growth areas in humanities scholarship, 
invading disciplines and posing new 
questions of old material. “The book” has 
become code for anything and everything 
involved in the creation, production, dis­
semination, and reception of texts: au­
thors authoring, scribes scribbling, print­
ers printing, booksellers selling, readers 
reading. We have a veritable armada of 
monographs and articles on “the book” 
confronting us, much of it sensitive to new 
types of evidence appropriate for new 
questions and issues. 

That being said, the appearance of a 
new monograph on “the evolution of the 
book” would seem to require some com­
pelling justification. Professor Kilgour be­
lieves he has precisely that: “Through his­
torical analysis of the societal needs that 
have invoked the transformations of the 
book, and the technologies that have 
shaped them, The Evolution of the Book aims 
to shed light on the present emergence of 
the electronic book.” He finds his light in 
technology, and his monograph is a com­
pact summary of successive technologies 
of nonverbal communication from the 
Sumerians to the present. His argument 
is, baldly put, that every improvement in 
the technology of the book has resulted 
in the speedier production and dissemi­
nation of knowledge and information. 
The problem is that neither the focus nor 
the argument has anything especially 
helpful to offer by way of a compass for 
the present. 

Reducing the history of the book to a 
history of technology conveniently ig­
nores the wealth of social, cultural, and 
economic evidence we now have avail­
able on the topic. Moreover, Kilgour ’s 
“bullet train” approach to the history of 
book technologies is an odd reprise of a 
style of history writing that I had thought 



296 College & Research Libraries May 1999 

long gone. If anyone is anxious about the 
demise of the idea of progress, relief may 
be found in this volume, which enthusi­
astically catalogues the march of techno­
logical progress across the millennia. In 
Kilgour ’s narrative, the past ineluctably 
results in the present and points confi­
dently to the future. This is an engineer ’s 
view of history—neat, clear, and linear, the 
story of successive successes. 

Kilgour divides his story into seven 
“punctuations”—seven moments of 
“punctuated equilibria” when the status 
quo is suddenly interrupted and reori­
ented, when longue durée meets the spasm 
of innovation. These punctuations begin 
with the introduction of the clay tablets of 
remote antiquity and culminate in the 
“electronic book.” Although he does not tell 
us how he arrived at seven such periods (a 
number beloved of cabalists, apocalyptics, 
and developmental psychologists), Kilgour 
does refer us to Niles Eldredge and 
Stephan Jay Gould for the notion of punc­
tuated equilibria. This is an important ref­
erence for understanding how Kilgour con­
ceives of the historical process. Eldredge 
and Gould are, of course, scientists, and 
their frame of reference is geology—the his­
tory of the earth. Although Kilgour is not 
doing a history of nature, he writes as if he 
were. Thus, when he uses the word evolu­
tion, he does so in ways that suggest a natu­
ral rather than cultural process. “By the sec­
ond century A.D. the clay tablet was the 

Index to advertisers 
AIAA 210 
Assoc. Research Libraries 204 
BIOSIS 260 
Blackwell’s Book Srvcs 274 
CHOICE 298 
EBSCO cover 4 
Greenwood Publishing 223 
ISI 244 
Library Technologies 207 
Library Technology Alliance cover 2 
M. Moleiro Editor 259 
North Waterloo Academic cover 3 
OCLC 203, 231 
Primary Source Media 290 

first form of the book to have become ex­
tinct.” He really seems to believe that he 
has hit on some immutable process that 
regulates the course of technological cre­
ativity over time. 

What is this process? Like the idea of 
progress, it undergirds, it is straight out of 
the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. 
Man encounters problem, man solves prob­
lem; man discovers need, man satisfies 
need. Some examples: “A century and a half 
after Gutenberg the need for timely infor­
mation became sufficiently intense to bring 
newspapers into being.” “The need to 
record and transfer information, a need 
created largely by the growth of trade, ad­
ministration, and government in the city-
states, gave rise to the invention of writing 
and the development of the clay tablet.” 
The codex displaced the scroll because of 
“the obvious savings of money in using 
both sides of the papyrus, the increased 
speed in production, and the greater ease 
in retrieving information from text.” This 
simple utilitarian model of historical pro­
cess does not differ significantly from that 
encountered in any number of eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century accounts of the 
progress of mankind. 

Ascending through the punctuations, 
Kilgour gives us potted histories of peoples 
and civilizations, duly noting their particu­
lar “contributions” to the forward move­
ment of history. Thus, the Greeks contrib­
ute an alphabet with vowels, parchment, 
pens, and ink; Islam introduces paper from 
China; the Middle Ages adds silent read­
ing, subject indexes, and eyeglasses; and 
so forth, through Gutenberg, the industrial 
revolution, and the advent of the computer. 
The evolution of the book turns out to be a 
catalog of contributions, each of which 
builds on and improves its predecessors. 

Kilgour has had a distinguished career 
and has contributed much to the evolution 
of research libraries in the later twentieth 
century. The problem is that in this book 
he is not on his own turf. He is not a histo­
rian, and the past he offers us is not really 
history at all (which is messy and defies 
simple models of rational utility) but, rather, 
teleology. And like much teleology, this one 



is grounded in a particular theology: the 
religion of progress. You have to be a mem­
ber of this particular sect to appreciate 
whatever light it casts on the present. In 
the meanwhile, sceptics and agnostics will 
want to turn elsewhere for history and 
analysis.—Michael Ryan, University of Penn­
sylvania, Philadelphia, PA. 

Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into 
Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge. Ed. 
Laura Nader. New York: Routledge, 
1996. 318p. $69.95 cloth, alk. paper (ISBN 
0415914647); $22.95 paper (ISBN 
0415914655). LC 95-23650. 

Nader, professor of anthropology at the 
University of California, Berkeley, con­
vened a four-part symposium at the Ameri­
can Association for the Advancement of 
Science (AAAS) meetings in 1991 when she 
was head of Section H for anthropology. 
The papers in this edited volume stem from 
that multidisciplinary symposium, “An­
thropology of Science and Scientists,” and 
reflect its concerns: (1) “Is Science Univer­
sal?” (2) “The Study of Knowledge Forma­
tion and Its Use,” (3) “The Behavior of Sci­
entists,” and (4) “Science Traditions across 
Cultures.” Nader carefully sets the scene 
in the introduction, “Anthropological In­
quiry into Boundaries, Power and Knowl­
edge,” and gracefully closes it with her epi­
logue, “The Three-Cornered Constellation: 
Magic, Science and Religion Revisited.” The 
grounding in anthropological history is 
clear and present, but it does not intrude 
upon the accessibility of the intervening 
fourteen chapters, which read equally well 
as a whole or sampled here and there 
within the three parts. “Discovering Sci­
ence” is devoted to ethnoscience. It is fol­
lowed by “Culture, Power, and Context,” 
whose chapters deal with technoscience. 
The final part, “Conflicting Knowledge Sys­
tems,” explores areas in which ethno­
science and technoscience overlap. 

Many conclusions could be drawn from 
the selections included, but Nader is clear 
that this is not the intent. Instead, she en­
courages us to open our “minds to other 
ways of looking and questioning to change 
attitudes about knowledge, to reframe the 

Book Reviews 297 

organization of science—to formulate ways 
of thinking globally about science tradi­
tions.” We are given ample opportunities 
to do this. 

The ethnoscience articles explore the 
idea of what constitutes science, from navi­
gation systems in Micronesia to highland 
Maya ethnomedicine for gastrointestinal 
diseases, from Canadian James Bay Cree 
hunting practices to everyday mathemati­
cal procedures and concepts about im­
mune systems in this country. The worlds 
of high-energy physicists, nuclear scien­
tists, and molecular biologists are analyzed 
in the technoscience portion of the book, 
providing fascinating glimpses of the Hu­
man Genome Project, nuclear tests as ritual, 
and the position of the various branches of 
physics in the academic and economic 
structure of Japan. 

Boundaries become more explicit in the 
third part of the collection where research 
on local knowledge is brought into juxta­
position with other knowledge systems. 
Chapters deal with fisheries management 
in New England, Inuit indigenous knowl­
edge versus Arctic science, and the U.S. sur­
veillance system developed to anticipate 
Soviet development of an atomic bomb. 
The last chapter in this section provides an 
illuminating comparison of the develop­
ment of the field of primatology in Japan 
and the West, with implications far beyond 
the subject matter of the discussion. It is 
here that we are reminded again of how 
easy it is to fall into the trap of finding that 
which we are seeking. 

This is a book for which table of contents 
indexing in library catalogs is so important 
because each of the chapters is complete 
unto itself and at a level of specificity quite 
distinct from “Knowledge, Sociology of ” or 
“Science —Philosophy” or “Power (Social 
Sciences).” Obviously, these are the realms 
being considered: it is the generation of 
knowledge, uncolored by the vestments of 
science, which we are invited to explore. 
The usefulness of this lens is that it might 
enable us to view more clearly the issues 
involved in the management of knowl-
edge.—Joan Berman, Humboldt State Univer­
sity, Arcata, CA.