reviews


248  College & Research Libraries May 2003

 The book includes a fascinating chap-
ter on American music and the numer-
ous challenges it has posed for copyright
law. “Music more than any other vehicle
of culture, collapses the gap that separates
idea from expression.” Extensive essays
on the blues tradition and sampling prac-
tices in rap music provide informative
and entertaining histories of these art
forms, but through them Vaidhyanathan
also makes a lucid and compelling argu-
ment for loose, less ethnocentric interpre-
tations of copyright law. The blues art
form was built on a tradition of borrow-
ing and improvisation, an extension of the
oral traditions that passed stories and
songs from one generation to the next.
Rap, as it developed in the 1970s and
1980s, was composed of two layers—vo-
calizations laid over a mosaic of fused
sample rhythms and melodies lifted from
many different records. Thus, both blues
and rap, by definition, borrow from and
build upon previous work. Rap was trans-
formed by legal decisions against artists
in the early 1990s, changing sampling
practices. The author argues that the aes-
thetic tradition of African-based cultures
is ignored by American copyright law, just
one more example of racial and cultural
biases inherent in our system of laws.

 The final chapter examines a diverse
range of copyright issues that have
sprouted in the digital age, including the
software wars of the late 1990s, develop-
ment of database protection measures, and
the rise and fall of Napster. The chapter
includes an erudite explanation of what
Vaidhyanathan calls “legislative reckless-
ness”—the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act of 1998. He credits the DMCA with
“upending more than 200 years of copy-
right law” by taking decision-making
power away from Congress, courts, librar-
ians, writers, artists, and researchers, and
putting it in the hands of engineers and
companies who employ them.” Techno-
logical innovations, rather than democra-
tizing information, have been used, with
the sanction and authority of copyright
law interpretation and new legislation, to
further limit public access.

 Copyrights and Copywrongs is remark-
ably readable, free of legal jargon, and en-
tertaining. It is thoroughly researched and
includes extensive notes. Vaidhyanathan,
a professor in the School of Information
Studies at the University of Wisconsin,
makes a persuasive argument for looser,
thinner copyright protections that would
benefit both users and creators of cul-
tural goods. The original intent of copy-
right is lost as it becomes increasingly a
vehicle of property law rather than cre-
ativity. The current punitive system fa-
vors established rather than emerging
artists and hinders new creative produc-
tion. Librarians and scientists are losing
the battle to Microsoft and Disney, result-
ing in a steady centralization and
corporatization of access to the cultural
and information goods of our society.
The author ’s arguments are cogent, en-
lightening, and important to all informa-
tion professionals.—Janita Jobe, Univer-
sity of Nevada, Reno.

Carpenter, Kenneth E., Wayne A.
Wiegand, and Jane Aikin. Winsor,
Dewey, and Putnam: The Boston Experi-
ence: Papers from the Round Table on Li-
brary History Session at the Sixty-Seventh
Council and General Conference of the
International Federation of Library Asso-
ciations and Institutions, Boston, Massa-
chusetts. August 1–25, 2001. Ed. Donald
G. Davis Jr. Urbana-Champaign: Univ.
of Illinois, Graduate School of Library
and Information Science. (Occasional
Papers, no. 212), 2002. 37p. $8 (ISBN:
0878451218). ISSN 0276-1769.

Through the nineteenth century, New En-
gland was the capital of American intel-
lectual activity and Boston was its uncon-
tested center. It is no great wonder that
three of the principal figures in the shap-
ing of modern librarianship had careers
in Boston at the end of the century. The
association of these three major American
librarians with the city in which IFLA hap-
pened to meet in 2001 provides a tenuous
rationale for the presentation and publi-
cation of these three papers in this pam-
phlet, but in reality, these three essays need



Book Reviews  249

no rationale. These essays are each excel-
lent, provocative, and readable works that
reflect the deserved stature of their authors
in the field of American library history.
Kenneth Carpenter, recently retired from
Harvard University Library writes on Jus-
tin Winsor, librarian of the Boston Public
Library (1868–1877) and then Harvard
(1877–1897). Wayne Wiegand’s essay on
Melvil Dewey covers the years from 1876
to 1883 when Dewey operated his various
enterprises from Boston. Jane Aikin, who
has written an excellent monograph on
Herbert Putnam’s career at the Library of
Congress, has taken the opportunity to
write on his work at the Boston Public Li-
brary from 1895 to 1899, prior to his move
to the Library of Congress.

 It has long been a major problem in
American library history that the only com-
petent biographical treatment of Justin
Winsor has been that of Joseph A. Boromé
completed as a doctoral dissertation at Co-
lumbia in 1950. Winsor, as the first presi-
dent of the ALA, the founding president of
the American Historical Association, and
the archetype of the nineteenth-century
scholar-librarian, has been largely ignored
by potential biographers. The academic li-
brarians have for the most part been ig-
nored in favor of men (and women) con-
sidered to be more central to the public li-
brary focus of the library movement in
America in the latter part of the nineteenth
century. The ALA from the beginning has
focused American librarianship on the ide-
als, development, and needs of a general
library in support of a general population
rather than the peculiar needs of academic
or special libraries. Even so, Winsor lurked
behind the curtains prompting others in
promotion of the public library in America.
Boromé’s excellent, but unpublished, biog-
raphy of Winsor has been useful over the
years but has been in need of serious re-
consideration.

 Carpenter’s brief contribution here is
not designed to fill this vacuum. He of-
fers a rather sketchy account of Winsor’s
career at the Boston Public Library and
Harvard with little fanfare. He does, how-
ever, present one of those remarkably pro-

vocative “holes” in the fabric of narrative
history that may well provide some doc-
toral student with a dissertation in his too-
brief paragraph on Winsor’s relation to
the governing forces at Harvard. Winsor
held little power to act on any policy or
even procedural matter in the library. It
is, perhaps, this situation that led to
Winsor’s establishing strict rules of con-
duct and rigid work regulations for the
library staff at Harvard. At least, he could
have some control over his employees, if
not his library.

 Dewey spent only a short time in Bos-
ton from 1876 to 1883, but these were years
in which he set his career and, to a great
extent, changed the face of American
librarianship. Wiegand’s offering here re-
treads some of the ground he covered in
his masterful biography of Dewey. In Bos-
ton, Dewey embarked on numerous en-
terprises—the founding of the ALA, pub-
lication of Library Journal, as well as other
enthusiasms—spelling reform, the metric
system, and the standardization of library
furnishings and supplies. It was in Boston
that Dewey began the course that would
make him the prime mover in the Ameri-
can library world. And it was from Boston
that he set the stage for many of the diffi-
culties that would discredit and disgrace
him in the library world. Wiegand’s con-
tribution does not add much to his biog-
raphy of Dewey, but it does make acces-
sible to a wider range of readers this cru-
cial period in Dewey’s life and the evolu-
tion of American librarianship in a form
that is readable and captures well the spirit
of Melvil Dewey.

 Of the three men treated in this pam-
phlet, Herbert Putnam is the one only
known solely for his career as a librarian
and is, perhaps consequently, the least
known in the wider world. Putnam’s term
at the Boston Public Library from 1895 to
1899 was only a way station in a career
that culminated in forty years as Librar-
ian of Congress. Unlike Winsor at
Harvard, Putnam at the Boston Public
Library was given wide-ranging author-
ity by the trustees and used that power
to modernize the administration, services,



250  College & Research Libraries May 2003

and operations of the library. It was his
prominence in the profession and his
achievements in Boston that led to his
appointment as the first professional librar-
ian to head the Library of Congress,
which he transformed over his four de-
cades there into a modern national insti-
tution.

 This pamphlet represents the contri-
butions of three outstanding scholars on
topics on which they are each uniquely

qualified to write. The Occasional Papers
is a series that librarians have found, over
the years, produces good value for the
price and this contribution is recom-
mended to any collection of librariana or
American history. For eight dollars, you
get three insightful, provocative, infor-
mative, and well-written articles, which
is more than most scholarly journals will
give you in a year’s subscription.—Lee
Shiflett, University of North Carolina



















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