reviews


74  College & Research Libraries January 2000

 

Book Reviews 

Bielefield, Arlene, and Lawrence 
Cheeseman. Interpreting and Negotiat­
ing Licensing Agreements: A Guidebook 
for the Library, Research, and Teaching 
Professions. New York: Neal-Schuman, 
1999. 162p. $55 (ISBN 1-55570-324-0). 
LC 98-55929. 

As libraries have increasingly added elec­
tronic product subscriptions to their hold­
ings, librarians have had to deal with li­
cense contracts filled with myriad 
provisions about ownership, access, li­
ability, warranty and governing law, of­
ten expressed in legal terms that are ar­
cane or deceptively straightforward 
sounding. As a measure of how complex 
the issues revolving around the licensing 
of electronic resources are, an editorial 
writer recently contrasted them to the 
“fairly clear” copyright rules governing 
traditional print materials! 

Arlene Bielefield and Lawrence 
Cheeseman offer a primer on reviewing 
and negotiating licenses that should help 
newcomers to this area avoid the worst 
potential mistakes, such as sacrificing fair 
use rights and committing one’s library 
to terms that governing authorities can­
not accept. Their primary aims are to help 
nonlawyers who deal with license con­
tracts to “(1) understand their intent and 
terminology, (2) realize that licenses can 
be adjusted or amended, and (3) recog­
nize the red flags they sometimes con­
tain.” This monograph is the latest in a 
series about legal issues in libraries that 
the authors have written since 1993 for 
Neal-Schuman; previous entries include 
Libraries and Copyright Law, Library Patrons 
and the Law, and Technology and Copyright 
Law: A Guidebook for the Library, Research, 
and Teaching Professions. Their credentials 
are strong: Bielefield, a faculty member 
at Southern Connecticut State 
University’s library school, holds a Juris 
Doctor; and Cheeseman has been a law 
librarian for three decades.

 The authors have divided 
the book into five chapters, with 
three appendices, an excellent 
glossary, and a thorough index. 
The first chapter introduces the 
reader to basic contract law 
terms and concepts, the second 
chapter classifies the various kinds of li­
censes, and the third chapter discusses the 
most common license clauses and their 
potential pitfalls. Chapter four reviews 
relevant copyright law and advises on 
means to avoid sacrificing user rights, and 
the final chapter offers suggestions for ne­
gotiating changes to the licenses drafted 
by vendors. Throughout their discus­
sions, Bielefield and Cheeseman do a 
good job of referring the reader to related 
information in other sections of the book. 
This practice, along with the index, table 
of contents, and an explanation of the 
book’s layout in the preface, makes the 
book a quick reference source.

 The third chapter, “What Do Licens­
ing Agreements Really Mean,” is the heart 
of the book. In it, the authors present in 
one column an example of a clause often 
found in standard vendor contracts, then 
analyze the meaning of the clause in the 
second column, and finally caution 
against possible consequences that would 
follow if the clauses are accepted as stated. 
This method of presentation works very 
well and is easy to follow.

 Moreover, the authors do an excellent 
job of explaining the issues in a clear and 
concise manner, and the sound advice they 
offer librarians is consistent with that given 
in recent workshops sponsored by the As­
sociation of Research Libraries and in ex­
changes found in the electronic discussion 
group LIBLICENSE-L. Although it would 
be very difficult to cover all possible clauses 
and terms that might be raised in a license, 
Bielefield and Cheeseman have dealt with 
the most common and, arguably, the most 
important. The only matter I consider an 

74 



 

Book Reviews 75 

oversight has to do with their failure to ex­
amine the legal distinction between “best 
effort” and “reasonable effort.” The former 
commits a library to meeting certain re­
quirements regardless of financial consid­
erations, whereas the latter may be am­
biguous as the authors claim but thus has 
the advantage of not having a strict legal 
definition with major budgetary implica­
tions.

 The appendices are especially useful. 
Appendix A is a list of questions that 
should be asked about every license 
agreement. Are the parties correctly iden­
tified? Are authorized users identified 
appropriately? Are fair use and copyright 
privileges intact? And so forth. Consid­
ered without the analyses offered in the 
book, the answers to these questions will 
not by themselves guide someone as to 
how to respond to the proposed terms. 
But armed with the knowledge gained in 
the first four chapters, the checklist en­
sures a thorough review of the most sa­
lient issues involved in a license agree­
ment. Appendix B provides excerpts from 
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 
1998 that apply to libraries and archives, 
and Appendix C offers a philosophical 
view: the International Coalition of Li­
brary Consortia’s “Statement of Current 
Perspective and Preferred Practices for 
the Selection and Purchase of Electronic 
Information.”

 Readers of this book will not be pre­
pared to understand every possible clause 
that might be found in a license agree-
ment—this is not the authors’ intention. 
But they will achieve the authors’ three 
goals as stated above. The book brings 
together the most relevant information, 
and organizes and explains it very well. 
The price seems a bit stiff for a slim pa­
perback, but it is a great place for a nov­
ice to begin navigating through the licens­
ing thickets.—W. Bede Mitchell, Georgia 
Southern University. 

Crawford, Walt. Being Analog: Creating 
Tomorrow’s Libraries. Chicago: ALA, 
1999. 245p. $35 (ISBN 0838907547). LC 
98-40764.

 Walt Crawford works at The Research 
Libraries Group Inc., and has published 
numerous books and articles on libraries, 
technology, and personal computing. Be­
ing Analog is an excellent addition to this 
corpus. In this book, Crawford continues 
his examination of favorite themes, in­
cluding the future library, the role tech­
nology will play in that future, and why 
we will still need to be aware of our pa­
trons’ needs, both analog and digital. The 
book is arranged in four sections: Being 
Analog, Libraries and Librarians, Re­
sources and Users, and Creating 
Tomorrow’s Libraries. Each chapter in the 
book is designed to make library profes­
sionals think about libraries, the types of 
materials libraries house, and how the 
materials affect the ways we serve our 
patrons. 

Crawford critically examines the as­
sumption that, in the future, all print 
media will be replaced by digital prod­
ucts. (He points to the current growth of 
the print industry as one reason why this 
all-digital future will not happen.) The 
libraries of the future will most likely be 
composed not only of bits, bytes, and data 
streams, but also of a combination of digi­
tal and analog media. Crawford’s words 
of advice to those who see an all-digital 
future as the end of librarianship are: 
“Calm Down. Plan your future. The revo­
lution has either been postponed or aban­
doned.” It is important to point out that 
Crawford is not antitechnology but, 
rather, believes that technology as well as 
many other types of media will have their 
place in the library of the future. 

A key player in the library of the fu­
ture, as in the past, will be the user. As 
Crawford puts it: “Tomorrow’s librarians 
must continue to pay attention to the most 
important aspect of library service: 
people.” Without the user, there would 
be no reason for the library’s continued 
existence. And users are unique individu­
als who have different needs and differ­
ent preferences. 

Crawford wants us to be aware that the 
library of the future is a complex and in­
tricate place. Now more than ever before,