reviews.p65


168  College & Research Libraries March 2003

Index to advertisers
ACRL 133
Annual Reviews 110
AIAA 99
Archival Products 162
Biosis 100
CHOICE 123
Haworth Press cover 2
Library Technologies 103
R.R. Bowker cover 3
ScienceDirect cover 4

 By way of conclusion, it seemed only
appropriate to check WorldCat to look at
the subject headings assigned to this
work. A title search (done on August 9,
2002) retrieved five records, two for the
book and three for the preceding disser-
tation. The record for the book in hand
(OCLC: 48588266) had two subjects: �Sub-
ject cataloging� and �Subject cataloging�
United States�Case studies.� A second
record (OCLC: 50100464), which had an
identical bibliographic description except
for pagination being noted 192 (versus
173 for the copy in hand), gave the single
subject: �Subject cataloging.� The record
for the printed version of the dissertation
(OCLC: 42810541) had three subjects:
�Subject cataloging,� �Subject headings,�
and �Catalogers�United States�Atti-
tudes.� The final records were for micro-
form versions of the dissertation. The
records for both the microfilm
(OCLC:44492710) and the microfiche
(OCLC: 44161585) gave the two identical
headings: �Subject cataloging� and �Sub-
ject headings.� The subjects given all seem
appropriate, even if they are not entirely
consistent. This reviewer would suggest
adding another subject heading to bring
out the cognitive aspects of the study. But
that�s just a thought.�James W. Williams,
University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign.
Warner, Julian. Information, Knowledge,

Text. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2001.
150p. alk. paper, $49.50 (ISBN:
081083989X). LC: 00-067055.

How did humans make their way from an
oral tradition in Homeric or pre-Homeric
times to the language of computer pro-
grams today? That is exactly the question
that Julian Warner addresses in his 2001
book, Information, Knowledge, Text. On the
faculty of the School of Management and
Economics, The Queen�s University of
Belfast, Warner may seem an unlikely can-
didate to find his way to a topic steeped in
the academic study of information but, in
fact, he has written extensively in this area.
Library Literature and Information Science
lists forty-two citations for his work, in-
cluding many book reviews of related
studies. His approach is thorough, aca-
demic, credible, and quite interesting. The
bibliography at the back of the book is ex-
tensive and wide-ranging. The chapters
have, as Warner states in the preface, all
�previously undergone editorial and �
full peer review as either journal articles
or conference presentations.� Warner
made appropriate revisions to the origi-
nal articles to �avoid repetition and in-
crease coherence.� He has looked well af-
ter his new readers, as the chapters do
provide a coherent collection. Regarding
repetition, however, this reader could have
done with fewer references to Bacon�s fa-
mous statement, �Writing [maketh] an
exact man.� The book finishes with repub-
lished reviews written by Warner of books
that allow him to continue his exploration
of the symbology and significance of writ-
ing. There is no index included at the back
of this book, an omission this reviewer
found unfortunate.

 Taken individually, the chapters stand
on their own. In the first chapter, �Study-
ing Writing,� a careful analysis of Roy
Harris�s The Origin of Writing (1986) and
Signs of Writing (1995), Warner begins to
persuade the reader that the route from
spoken to written communication was sure
and inexorable. The chapters that follow
build on exactly this argument. The semiotic
approach to language and its relationship
to signs throughout human history is per-
suasive, if not always easy. By the third
chapter, �Not the Exact Words�: Writing,
Computing, and Exactness,� Warner has



Book Reviews  169
the reader prepared to see the evolution of
language from pictograph to the binary
code of computer programming. As he
moves through the history of language, the
development of writing, and the need to
replicate the written word, eventually
Warner brings the reader to copyright is-
sues. The path is obvious: As writing got to
be sophisticated and widespread, it became
necessary to be able to make copies of the
written word, through printing and so
forth, and to transform the writing into
other formats. In the fifth chapter, �Writing
and Literary Work in Copyright: A Bina-
tional and Historical Analysis,� Warner dis-
cusses telegraph codebooks that were as-
sembled to ensure better accuracy in teleg-
raphy, manuals of shorthand methods, and
transcribed punched piano rolls. All were
at the center of various copyright disputes,
as the question was brought to judgment
whether these works had literary and in-
tellectual content, were infringements of
ownership, and whether they were simply
mechanical representations of random ele-
ments. To librarians, this may be the most
fascinating chapter of Warner �s book, as
these questions bedevil the profession
equally in the twenty-first century as in the
nineteenth.

 In summary, academic librarians
should find this a fascinating, though
sometimes difficult, study of the evolu-
tion of the written word and its meaning;
the semiotic approach might sometimes
confuse the reader, being more in the
realm of �information science� than �li-
brary science.� Students of information
science should be enlightened and in-
trigued by it. Warner�s book is to be rec-
ommended for the value it brings to the
librarian�s intellectual life.�Tom Schneiter,
Harvard University Library.
Weinberger, David. Small Pieces Loosely

Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2002. 223p. $25
(ISBN 0738205435). LC 2002-102643.

Some years ago, Woody Allen told a story
about a man who consulted a psychiatrist
about a family member who was troubled
by a disorder causing him to act like a

chicken. The psychiatrist said that with-
out the patient present a diagnosis was
difficult, but assuming that the behavior
was not being feigned as a way of getting
quick attention, it was clear that he
needed to be hospitalized for observation.
At this point, the man became very wor-
ried and replied that they could not al-
low the man who thought he was a
chicken to be hospitalized because the
family desperately needed the eggs. Not
to editorialize excessively and ruin the
joke, one of its more interesting points is
that aberrations are often partly shared
by those who are able to recognize the
more obvious symptoms they cause in
others. If there ever was one, this was a
case for family therapy. Let me hasten to
point out that David Weinberger, author
of Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified
Theory of the Web, does not appear in any
sense to be mentally ill. A former vice-
president of strategic marketing at a soft-
ware company, he is more likely to be
described as refreshingly eccentric, as
marketing people often are. Nonetheless,
reading his book suggests that he shares
a certain kind of impairment with the
many who are transported and transfixed
by the coming of new technologies�in
this case, the Internet and the World Wide
Web.

 More recently, a significant publishing
event helps to frame what is going on in
books such as Small Pieces Loosely Joined
because it helps us to recognize the shared
impairment. David Brooks, a founding
editor of The Weekly Standard, noted a
couple of years ago that some big changes
have occurred in American culture in the
past few decades. One of these changes�
the one that helps us here�is the blur-
ring of an earlier distinction between
businessmen and intellectuals. Just as in-
tellectuals now, like businessmen, want
to be rich, so businessmen want very
much to intellectually justify their activi-
ties. (See Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper
Class and How They Got There [New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2000]). Having made
oceans of money, the next step in the pro-
cess is the discovery that the businessman