reviews


568 College & Research Libraries 

me?” The exercise has students choose the 
more useful item from pairings of cita­
tions from search results—for instance, 
popular and scholarly; appropriate length 
and too short; dated and current; off tar­
get due to keyword searching and on tar­
get due to controlled vocabulary search­
ing. An interesting extension would be to 
have students take notes on the criteria 
they use in choosing from each pair, then 
rework the notes into an evaluation 
checklist to use with database searches. 

Now the bad news. This collection’s 
usefulness is marred by the editors’ insuf­
ficient attention to conceptualizing the 
volume and, in some cases, to readying the 
essays for publication. The essays show a 
good deal of repetition of content. Seven 
of the fifteen include discussions and/or 
checklists of (very similar) criteria for 
evaluating Web sites. Several duplicate 
discussion of how the publishing process 
and library selection practices ensure that 
library users find high-quality information 
sources, whereas the Web generally leaves 
judgments of quality entirely to the user. 
The space taken up by this repetition could 
have been better used by selecting articles 
with more varied approaches to the topic 
or by asking the authors to replace the rep­
etitious content. 

Also disconcerting is the fact that four 
articles either read like transcripts of in­
struction sessions (explaining, for in­
stance, how search engines work and 
how Web pages are constructed) or shift 
points of view, confusingly and without 
warning, between “talking to librarians” 
and “talking to students.” One transcript/ 
essay would have been enough to serve 
as a model of the tone, examples, and 
analogies that could be used in an instruc­
tion session on evaluating Web sources. 

Two essays contain stylistic flaws, nu­
merous grammatical errors, and ram­
bling, unfocused prose. They simply were 
not ready for print. One example of the 
errors the editors allowed to creep in is 
this sentence fragment: “Librarians 
Crawford and Gorman, Oberman, and 
Stoll, though not a librarian but one of the 
pioneers in the online world who has 

November 2000 

joined the librarians in concern about the 
Internet.” Another lapse is the editors’ 
description of the book’s final section as 
“exercises used by librarians in teaching 
Web evaluation in various settings.” Sur­
prisingly, only one of the five exercises 
deals directly with teaching about Web 
resources. The first one, in fact, deals al­
most exclusively with printed maps and 
atlases. The problems mentioned above 
are so numerous and noticeable that this 
volume, especially at the price of $82.50, 
cannot be recommended as a first-order 
purchase.—Glenn Ellen Starr Stilling, Ap-
palachian State University. 

The Digital Library: Challenges and Solutions 
for the New Millennium; Proceedings of 
an International Conference Held in Bo-
logna, Italy, June 1999. Eds. Pauline 
Connolly and Denis Reidy. Wetherby, 
Eng.: IFLA, 1999. 201p. £20 (ISBN 
0953243974). 

The Digital Library: Challenges and Solutions 
for the New Millennium includes most of 
the papers presented at an international 
conference in Bologna, Italy, in 1999. The 
conference was organized by the British 
Library, the British Council, and the Ital­
ian associations of librarians and 
documentalists. The table of contents and 
the abstract for each paper are presented 
in both English and Italian. The proceed­
ings are divided into six sections: copy­
right, electronic publishing, practical case 
studies, standards and protocols, projects, 
and electronic document delivery. 

Brian Lang, chief executive of the Brit­
ish Library, points out that “there has been 
an enormous increase in the demand for 
documents and information to be supplied 
in electronic format generally and in digi­
tal format in particular. The digital library 
holds challenges …” The first challenge 
addressed was copyright. An Italian legal 
consultant addresses the new problems 
raised by electronic works and provides 
several guidelines for negotiating agree­
ments for information provided via tech­
nology; a British librarian describes the 
new opportunities that copyright of elec­
tronic documents offers for finding balance 



Book Reviews 569 

between users and creators of information; 
a British professor describes the develop­
ment of copyright guidelines by the Joint 
Information Systems Committees (JISC) in 
British higher education; and a British 
publishing consultant stresses the need for 
librarians and information providers to 
work together to create agreements rather 
than rely on copyright as it is created by 
the software and entertainment industries. 

The electronic publishing section 
opens with a description of the creation 
and development of the electronic publi­
cation Journal of High Energy Physics. It 
concludes with an essay emphasizing the 
need for authors, readers, libraries, and 
referees to all be involved in marketing 
strategies for electronic publications in 
order to find “the right model for jour­
nals publishing in the 21st century.”

 The first practical case study describes 
the development of the British National 
Electronic Library for Health (NeLH) de­
signed to provide information to both 
health professionals and their patients. A 
chapter on the Lombard Interuniversity 
Consortium for Automated Processing 
(CILEA) explains how the group shares 
subscription costs by loading electronic 
journals on a shared server. “The Italian 
Digital Library Project (Biblioteca Telematica 
Italiana)” describes how a digital library 
will be built “of texts highly representa­
tive of the Italian cultural tradition from 
the Middle Ages to the 19th century.“

 The need for standards and protocols 
to ensure accurate, accessible resources is 
addressed in the fourth section with an 
essay that examines the use of two inter­
national standards—the Search and Re­
trieve Protocol (ISO 29350) and the Inter­
library Loan Protocol (ISO 10160/1). 
“Metadata and Metatag: The Indexer be­
tween Author and Reader” is about im­
portant metadata projects in progress and 
the role of the cataloger as a “third party” 
between author and reader. “A Standard 
for the Legal Deposit of On-Line Publica­
tions” is concerned with the need to en­
sure continued access to electronic publi­
cations as technology and format con­
tinue to change.

 “Projects” includes “Co-operation 
among University Library Organizations 
in Italy,” explaining the need for im­
proved cooperative efforts among Italian 
university libraries; a chapter on Sistema 
Biomedico Lombardo (SBBL), composed 
of sixteen libraries that provide health 
information to at least eighty Lombard 
institutions through the Internet; and an 
abstract for a presentation on the use of 
ISSN-based identifiers.

  “Document Delivery as an Alterna­
tive to Subscription” begins the section 
on electronic document delivery. “The 
Digital Future—Realities and Fantasy— 
A View from Marketing” concludes that 
the transition from printed resources to 
the electronic library is not inevitable and, 
in fact, is progressing more slowly than 
has been predicted. “Electronic Document 
Delivery: New Tools and Opportunities” 
focuses on the importance of the use of 
standards for successful document deliv­
ery, and the final presentation, “Electronic 
Document Delivery—The Corporate 
Competitive Edge,” consists only of the 
slides used by the presenter; the text was 
not available for publication.

 This book is an interesting review of 
British and Italian library cooperation. It 
describes a number of digital library 
projects that are either under way or com­
pleted in both countries, as well as several 
projects in other parts of the world. Con­
ference presenters were reasonably bal­
anced between creators and disseminators 
of electronic information. The main draw­
back, as is true for most proceedings even 
in an increasingly digital age, is that those 
interested in particular projects under de­
velopment at the time of presentation will 
have to go elsewhere to find current infor­
mation on them. However, that caveat is 
minor compared to the overall advantage 
of expanding one’s familiarity with digi­
tal library development beyond one’s own 
region or even country.—Ann Hamilton, 
Georgia Southern University. 

The Future of Cataloging: Insights from the 
Lubetzky Symposium. Eds. Tschera 
Harkness Connell and Robert L. Max­