reviews


Book Reviews 279 

gies are to be understood on an analogy 
with the lamppost. The classification 
schemes we rely on or dispense with, the 
catalogs and database systems we use for 
storage of records, the shelf space and the 
servers where we house materials, and 
the vocabularies we use to retrieve 
them—all of these not only help bring the 
field into sharp focus, but they also pro­
vide innumerable places where items get 
lost. 

Using this as a point of departure, the 
remainder of the essay sketches a broad 
outline of library history that divides the 
field into seven great ages. Krummel ob­
serves that there is nothing special about 
the number seven, so perhaps his seven-
league-booted stride from 3000 B.C. to the 
present age is simple coincidence. If so, it 
is useful for it enables us to fly high, some­
thing not enough of us do very often. 
When we do, we see extinct volcanoes, the 
floors of ancient oceans, riverbeds dry for 
centuries, and immense fields of petrified 
wood where green forests once flourished. 
And all this has brought us here. 

In the earliest periods of recorded his­
tory, libraries and librarians in the agri­
cultural empires of the Fertile Crescent 
tended working archives housing the evi­
dence of the shared understandings of 
government. In the Greco-Roman period, 
the first academic institutions arose, and 
their libraries served to support them (not 
included in this necessarily truncated ac­
count, in the twilight of Roman domina­
tion, Greek-speaking grammarians devel­
oped the first systems of textual annota­
tion). By the early medieval period, Chris­
tian Europe had supplanted and yet pre­
served these both with libraries devoted 
to the glory of God. Renaissance human­
ism radically challenged this emphasis on 
the divine and produced materials and 
collections devoted to celebrating human 
virtue and courage. Writers such as 
Francis Bacon—in the Age of Science, 
which began in the later medieval period 
under the Franciscan and other orders— 
substituted for this the idea that knowl­
edge must benefit people, that learning 
must advance and improve the human 

estate. By the beginning of the eighteenth 
century, the spread of literacy had created 
a larger and more diverse reading pub­
lic, and by the middle of the following 
century, that public was a mass audience, 
reading for many different and some­
times incompatible reasons. And a cen­
tury after this, which brings us very close 
to the present, the Baconian ideal was 
transformed by very rapid technological 
development, which produced the array 
of record and material formats and me­
dia we all use today. 

Krummel concludes with some recom­
mendations for further reading. Unfortu­
nately absent from this list is the book he 
once hoped to make from this essay, origi­
nally given as a lecture back in 1983. Spe­
cialists will poke holes—they always 
do—in the large, overarching framework, 
but most other readers will, I think, very 
much enjoy the informal and global treat­
ment. As the author himself admits, much 
is missing, especially the essential story 
of libraries in the Islamic world. In the 
end, Fiat Lux, Fiat Latebra creates a blind 
spot of its own, for there is another fruit­
ful opposition that remains latent, the 
contrast between lux and tenebra. The 
search for knowledge actually creates ig­
norance: the more we know, the more we 
do not know. What role do libraries and 
librarians play in the creation of igno­
rance? Obviously, this is a subject for an­
other essay.—Michael F. Winter, University 
of California, Davis. 

Librarians as Learners, Librarians as Teach­
ers: The Diffusion of Internet Expertise in 
the Academic Library. Ed. Patricia 
O’Brien Libutti. Chicago: ALA, 1999. 
296p. $27 (ISBN 0-8389-8003-1). LC 99­
13042. 

As early as 1994, members of ACRL’s 
New York chapter planned a book docu­
menting their experiences learning and 
teaching the Internet. The resulting col­
lection of more than twenty articles by 
librarians, MLS students and faculty, and 
administrators should strike a chord with 
anyone who lived through the techno­
logical changes of the past five years. 



 280 College & Research Libraries 

The book is organized into four 
roughly chronological sections:

 “Foundations of Internet Expertise in 
the Academic Library”; “Enlarging the 
Internet Literature: Early Training and 
Learning Experiences”; “The Present 
Tense: The Diffusion of the Internet into 
the Workflow of Academic Librarians”; 
and “Preparing Librarians to Teach the 
Internet.” Contributions range from per­
sonal accounts to research articles and 
resource lists. The articles vary in qual­
ity, style, and methodology; and there is 
much overlap in content, perhaps reflect­
ing the light editorial hand of a demo­
cratic editor. It would be impossible to do 
justice to individual articles, so this re­
view focuses on themes that recur 
throughout the book. 

The relationship between learning and 
teaching has taken some unexpected 
turns over the years. Rapid technological 
change forced librarians to learn so that 
they could teach. At the same time, they 
found that they had to teach in order to 
learn. New attitudes had to develop, as 
technology forced librarians into a learn­
ing mode driven by need and (some­
times) curiosity rather than tradition or 
formal credentialing. Ideally, the result 
was a new sense of competence for both 
teacher and learner (if the two can be dis­
tinguished), and a diminished fear of both 
technology and change. Several authors 
make the point that library school stu­
dents and practicing librarians experience 
many of the same frustrations and re­
wards as other adult learners. David W. 
Carr’s opening essay, “The Situation of 
the Adult Learner in the Library,” pro­
vides a thoughtful, humane reflection on 
this theme. 

Several authors describe their experi­
ences with the Internet over time. Early 
learning was unstructured, and early 
teaching stressed the use of tools. Since 
the arrival of the Web and other user-
friendly tools, it has become possible to 
use the Internet without any understand­
ing of computers, networking, or infor­
mation storage and retrieval. Whether 
this is a blessing or a curse depends on 

May 2000

your point of view. David J. Franz, in his 
engaging memoir, “Between Gutenberg 
and Gigabytes: A New Librarian Makes 
the Leap,” laments that kids today “are 
raised on AOL. Spoon fed. They are not 
learning as I did.” Others are relieved that 
the pioneering days are over and they can 
concentrate on conceptual issues rather 
than techniques and tools. Anne 
Woodsworth states in her foreword that 
“No matter what work arena graduates 
wish to enter, the core curricula they take 
will have to incorporate areas such as in­
troduction to information science, infor­
mation storage and retrieval, database 
searching, metadata management, knowl­
edge management, information process­
ing, human–computer interaction, elec­
tronic records management, indexing, 
and information systems management, to 
name a few.” The hyperbole here does the 
cause no good, in my opinion. 

Another common thread is the recog­
nition that the Internet is not only some­
thing to teach, but also a new medium for 
teaching and learning.

 Heather Blenkinsopp’s piece on using 
the Internet as a teaching tool to connect 
MLS students with cataloging practitio­
ners is a good illustration. The Internet 
has made it easier to simulate the work­
place, blurring the lines between “school” 
and “work” in a way that mirrors wider 
trends in academia. 

This collection might serve best as a 
reference repository of practical advice 
and Internet teaching resources. Reading 
it from cover to cover, I became frustrated 
by the absence of an overarching intellec­
tual framework, as well as periodic lapses 
in coherence, clarity, and analytic rigor. 
The bibliographies and resource lists 
seemed in danger of trying to include 
everything on or about the Internet, rather 
than concentrating specifically on teach­
ing and learning. I felt a little the way I 
do when using the Internet itself: over­
whelmed by information overload and an 
inability to synthesize or even make sense 
of all the information. The quantity of 
Web sites, listservs, online tutorials, syl­
labi, program statements, and other re­



 
 

Book Reviews 281 

sources is mind-boggling. How is a per­
son to choose? 

Anne Woodsworth and Theresa M. 
Maylone do a good job of pulling together 
some of these diverse, contradictory ele­
ments in their foreword and afterword. 
But the collection remains no more than 
the sum of its parts. It never really fulfills 
the promise of its subtitle, “The Diffusion 
of Internet Expertise in the Academic Li­
brary.” I doubt that the fault lies with the 
authors, or even the editors. It may be that 
the topic itself is too amorphous or would 
be better addressed in a monograph. De­
spite some disappointments, this book is 
well worth adding to library collections 
for the practical ideas and tools that it 
makes available on a topic of importance 
to all librarians.—Jean M. Alexander, 
Carnegie Mellon University. 

Rhodes, Barbara, and William Wells 
Streeter. Before Photocopying: The Art & 
History of Mechanical Copying, 1780– 
1938. New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Pr., 
1999. 494p. $95 (ISBN 1-884718-61-2). 
LC 98-8045. 

The ubiquity and speed of modern com­
munication—computers, photocopiers, e-
mail, cellular phones, and scanners—tend 
to obscure the technological achievements 
of the preelectronic age when, for the ef­
fective conduct of business and govern­
ment, it also was necessary to make rapid 
copies of letters, contracts, inventories, 
shipping manifests, invoices, receipts—the 
entire galaxy of documents upon which 
contemporary, transaction-oriented civili­
zation rests. Today’s scholars and students 
take for granted the ready, cheap availabil­
ity of copies. But how did their predeces­
sors, long before electric power and pho­
tography became practical realities, make 
record copies of data except by laboriously, 
and sometimes inaccurately, hand-copying 
everything? How did they efficiently copy 
their letters and papers? 

The surprising answer lies in a forgot­
ten mechanical copying device that origi­
nated more than two centuries ago: the 
copying press, an apparatus that enabled 
almost anyone in the Western world to 

make, with considerable dispatch, iden­
tical multiple copies of vital documents. 
In fact, Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, 
and Madison all used the copying press 
to generate file copies of their correspon­
dence. The copying press encouraged the 
rapid growth of scientific communication 
and publishing, accelerated the expansion 
of industry, and, ultimately, led to the 
early establishment of institutions such 
as the United States National Archives. It 
was not the Xerox process or the laser 
printer that first threatened to drown us 
in a sea of paper. Rather, it was the copy­
ing press, invented in 1780 by James Watt, 
the Scottish-born engineer who perfected 
the steam engine. Why Watt? Watt was a 
businessman as well as an inventor. In the 
course of England’s rapid industrializa­
tion, he traveled widely to promote his 
engines and needed to have with him 
copies of designs and specifications, con­
tracts, and correspondence. Thus, he was 
powerfully motivated to develop a copy­
ing apparatus. 

Watt’s device, which was to have many 
imitators, relied on the simple principle 
of offset, the same principle that led Alois 
Senefelder in 1796 to invent offset lithog­
raphy, the printing method that produces 
virtually all modern newspapers, books, 
and other mass ink-printed publications. 
But each exploited offset in a quite differ­
ent way. Senefelder’s use of offset relied 
on the natural repulsion of water and 
oil-based inks. But Watt’s process relied 
on inks capable of producing several ad­
ditional copies onto special paper from 
an original, handwritten document. In the 
Watt process, a recently written ink origi­
nal is squeezed against a fresh piece of 
unsized paper in a press whose force 
transfers some of the ink from the origi­
nal to the carefully dampened copy pa­
per. 

After the Watt process was perfected, it 
spread with incredible speed. “Inventors” 
brazenly infringed his patents; chemists 
formulated new inks; manufacturers im­
proved the device and developed me­
chanical variations; and salespeople 
flooded the market. The copying press