reviews


  

500 College & Research Libraries 

“value” of hatred, racism, genocide, and 
sexism. Such a counterargument, how­
ever, would place Kors and Silverglate in 
the uncomfortable, but honest, position 
of arguing publicly in support of the very 
real “benefits” of hatred-based ideologies. 
For example, managers have long found 
racism very useful in playing off one 
group of ill-treated workers against an­
other group in order to maintain exploit­
ative (and profit-enhancing) working 
conditions. Class-based elitism has long 
sustained power and wealth in the hands 
of the few. National and religious chau­
vinism has long supported war indus­
tries. Sexism has long relegated women 
to low-worth positions that benefit men 
economically and psychologically. Rather 
than attempt a reasoned, rigorous, or his­
torically based counterargument to 
Marcuse and the others, Kors and 
Silverglate merely propound and repeat 
ad nauseam their simple belief in the in­
fallibility of the absolutist approach to 
freedom of speech. 

Perhaps the most disturbing thing 
about this book is the bald disdain the 
authors express toward those who recog­
nize the injustice of racism, sexism, and 
so on. For example, in the chapter “‘Shut 
Up,’ They Reasoned: Silencing Students,” 
the sexual harassment policy dealing with 
speech and nonverbal expression at the 
University of Maryland-College Park is 
described. Kors and Silverglate quote 
from a list of the nonverbal behaviors pro­
hibited: “leering and ogling with sugges­
tive overtones; licking lips or teeth; hold­
ing food provocatively; [and] lewd ges­
tures, such as hand or sign language to 
denote sexual activity.” This is followed 
immediately by a remark characteristic of 
the authors: “As if dry lips or American 
Sign Language were not trouble 
enough…” It is almost incomprehensible 
that two grown men seem incapable of 
recognizing the difference between the 
licking of lips as a sexually suggestive 
gesture and the licking of lips that are dry. 
And it is terribly disturbing that these two 
grown men should be either so ignorant 
or so insensitive to equate the richness of 

September 1999 

American Sign Language with the crudity 
of juvenile gestures. 

Kors and Silverglate would do well to 
recall that their hero John Stuart Mill re­
stricted the granting of liberty to children, 
minors, and barbarians, for these have not 
attained the maturity of mind required for 
the exercise of liberty. 

This is a disappointing book. It belongs 
in academic library collections only be­
cause it is about the college community. 
Public libraries need not bother acquir­
ing a copy; instead, they should use in­
terlibrary loan. —Elaine Harger, W. 
Haywood Burns School, New York. 

Meadow, Charles T. Ink into Bits: A Web 
of Converging Media. Landham, Md.: 
Scarecrow Pr., 1998. 292p. $45, alk. pa­
per, cloth (ISBN 0-8108-3507-X); $24.50, 
paper (ISBN: 0-8108-3508-8). LC 98­
16854. 

Ink into Bits is a very readable, survey-style, 
lightly documented introduction to the 
communication and media issues result­
ing from the shift from print to electronic 
publishing. It is one person’s viewpoint 
and one person’s priorities, about which 
the author is very straightforward. 
Meadow, Professor Emeritus of the Uni­
versity of Toronto’s Faculty of Information 
Studies, has written extensively in the field 
of information science. The breadth and di­
versity of topics he has addressed is evi­
dent in the list of essays included in this 
volume: “Changing Media in a Changing 
World”; “Media and Information”; “Some 
Media History”; “Special Place of Books 
and Writing in Our Culture”; “Represent­
ing and Presenting Information”; “Linear 
Text and Hypertext”; “Interacting with In­
formation Machines”; “Multimedia”; 
“ModernTelecommunications: The Infor­
mation Highway”; “Distribution”; “Com­
prehension”; “Adoption of New Technol­
ogy”; “Markets”; “Protecting the 
Customer”; “Thinking about Change”; and 
“Thinking about the Future.” 
This book is a bit of a hybrid. On the one 
hand, it is extremely basic and 
textbooklike, often presenting fascinating 
tidbits of information such as the fact that 



Book Reviews 501 

one experiment showed that the smell of 
cinnamon buns is more of a sexual attrac­
tion for men than perfume (that would 
explain those long lines at the airport 
Cinnabun counters); on the other hand, 
it goes into ponderous detail about top­
ics that do not seem relevant to contem­
porary issues. At times, there is just too 
much history. Why do we need such de­
tail on the use of the electromagnetic spec­
trum and how computers read letters? Do 
we need to know how the phone works? 
Do we need a history of radio in the twen­
tieth century? Sure, all this is typical of 
the genre, but it just seems to me that this 
history is presented in lieu of information 
that I would rather see here. 

For a book on contemporary trends, it 
is strangely disconnected from the opin­
ions and activities of contemporary seek­
ers of information. For example, there is 
little discussion of how people actually 
use information systems and even less on 
how people read books. Yet, there is con­
siderable hand-wringing over the loss of 
reading discipline that comes from the 
reading of hypertext books. Although 
Meadow recognizes that there have al­
ways been differences in the way people 
read fiction and nonfiction, he only seems 
to be concerned with the reading of fic­
tion and encyclopedias. But what about 
other nonfiction? Surely social scientists 
have been selectively reading books in 
their disciplines for ages. Meadow does 
not come right out and say—though the 
reader may easily get the impression— 
that he views hypertext as the text equiva­
lent of the sound bite. 

On the positive side, reading Meadow 
makes us constantly question our own 
assumptions. The chapter on the book 
makes a strong argument that the tech­
nology called the book has changed over 
the past five hundred years. The author 
writes coherently about the possibility of 
reading books on computers and of indi­
viduals being able to independently print 
copies of books they desire. He poses 
many excellent questions about multime­
dia: What do we make of the fact that it is 
more difficult to find errors in multime­

dia products? What effects will the use of 
multimedia products have on learning 
styles and education? He ponders the 
possible changes in book storage and dis­
tribution, and reviews the issues of port­
ability, durability, versatility, and accept­
ability as they concern electronic books. 
Meadow does all this while very wisely 
refusing to make definitive futuristic 
statements. 

As is the case with any book address­
ing current trends in information studies, 
this one runs the risk of quickly becom­
ing dated. There are already hints: 
Meadow states that the year 2000 prob­
lem is probably trivial, but it could be ex­
pensive to fix and he predicts the day 
when the Web will become more commer­
cial. Time does fly. This book is an opin­
ion piece, and it is safe to say that it is 
probably not a final word on anything 
but, rather, a beginning word on many 
issues. —Ed Tallent, Harvard University. 

Towards the Digital Library: The British 
Library’s Initiatives for Access 
Programme. Ed. Leona Carpenter, 
Simon Shaw, and Andrew Prescott. 
London: The British Library, 1998. 
256p. $45 (ISBN 0-7123-4540-X) LC98­
183175. 

This collection of articles on the British 
Library’s now-concluded Initiatives for 
Access Programme can be read at vari­
ous levels. On one level, it is a kind of 
Festschrift, actually a Selbstfestschrift, in 
that it places a monument to what, by all 
the accounts collected here, was an enor­
mously successful spurt of innovation in 
the field of library digitization. As such, 
the celebratory tone of many of the con­
tributions in this volume, the heavy 
coated paper used in its production, and 
the beautiful color plates reproducing the 
digital Sforza Hours or the library’s Por­
tico Web site all lend an uncommon air of 
weight and even permanence to the ac­
complishment—the notorious volatility 
of the digital scene notwithstanding. Un­
derlining the showcase function of both 
this book and the projects it describes, the 
British Library’s chief executive, Brian