reviews.indd


Book Reviews 189 

A hoped-for sequel will perhaps profile 
the experience of Marine Staff Sergeant 
Jimmy Massey, transferred from Iraq to 
the U.S. for psychiatric evaluation aft er he 
questioned the indiscriminate killing of 
Iraqi civilians. 

To conclude, these are some choice 
Levinson quotes: 
 “Censorship aims to stop discus-

sion and disagreement by punishing 
those who have the nerve to answer back 
to authority or fashion.” 
 “Censorship has two main thrusts: 

efforts to keep people from saying things 
deemed dangerous or disturbing, and ef-
forts to keep information secret.” 
 “People seldom thank you for expos-

ing their shortcomings, and punishment 
for breaking rank is often harsh; those who 
blow the whistle are routinely ostracized, 
silenced, and stripped of power.” 
 “It is easier to laud dissidents 

somewhere else, harder to champion 
those who challenge home truths, but 
protection of unpopular beliefs is what 
the First Amendment is all about.” 
 “We can defeat ideas only if we know 

about them, and the more we know, the 
bett er prepared we are to address the cir-
cumstances that make them appealing.” 
 “Arbitrarily applied rules are a 

method of control and a popular one in 
a democracy where it is preferable for 
people to police themselves.” 
 “Ironically, as our tolerance of va-

riety in sexual conduct increases, so does 
our punishment of sexual expression.” 

Index to advertisers 
Annual Reviews 94 
Archival Products 148 
Choice 97 
East View Information Services 183 
EBSCO cover 4 
Idea Group Publishing 93 
Iimage Retrieval cover 2 
Libraries Unlimited cover 3 

 “Art may not change us, but it 
can show us a way to change our mind. 
It allows us to muck about in the un-
imaginable, no small gift, and to do 
that requires license in all senses of the 
word—permission, liberation, boldness, 
immoderation, unruliness, any of which 
can be alarming.” 
 “For fundamentalists, dissenting 

words and ideas are not just dangerous 
but Satan’s playthings.” 
 “It’s easier to ban books than to 

ensure that everyone knows how to read 
them, or to arrest parents for photograph-
ing naked kids than to stop domestic 
brutality.” 
 “Thoughtful adults regularly equate 

distastefulness of expression with danger 
and warn of contagion, as if adolescent 
attitudes were a communicable disease.” 
 “Research institutions worry that 

if they get a reputation as unfriendly to 
industrial research, corporations will take 
their projects—and money—elsewhere.” 

Honesty, decency, candor, fairness are … 
familiar refrains in this book—along with 
the sickening realization that they will not 
necessarily be honored.— Sanford Berman, 
ALA Honorary Member, Edina, Minnesota. 

Knowledge Organization and Classifi-
cation in International Information 
Retrieval. Ed. Nancy J. Williamson 
and Clare Beghtol. Binghamton, N.Y.: 
Haworth, 2003. 244p. alk. paper, paper 
$22.46 (ISBN 0789023555); cloth $37.46 
(ISBN 0789023547). LC 2003-27498. 

This book is a collection of fourteen 
articles simultaneously copublished as 
Cataloging & Classifi cation Quarterly, vol. 
37, no. 1/2 (2003). These articles address 
various issues related to the linking of 
the world to information resources via 
the Internet, multinational intranets, and 
domain portals and gateways. 

Editors Nancy J. Williamson and Clare 
Beghtol, two prominent authors in the 



190 College & Research Libraries 

field, have compiled an excellent set of 
papers addressing knowledge organiza-
tion. Presented in four sections by nine-
teen authors from six countries, Knowledge 
Organization covers a broad range of issues 
from general classification schemes to 
the organization of knowledge, resource 
management, knowledge discovery, the 
linguistic and mathematical foundations 
of the architecture of knowledge to issues 
related to cross-cultural and cross-lan-
guage system applications. A common 
theme throughout the book addresses the 
problem of information retrieval for spe-
cific linguistic and cultural communities. 

The authors of the papers in section I 
discuss the adaptation of general biblio-
graphic classification to specifi c subject 
contexts, and they compare and suggest 
modification of classificatory schemes as 
they are applied to the specificity of con-
cepts expressed in different languages. In 
“The Future of General Classification,” 
Jens-Erik Mai addresses the goal of being 
able to access multiple collections with a 
single retrieval language. Libraries and 
information organizations could save 
more money and better facilitate the ex-
change of knowledge “if documents in 
different collections were organized and 
represented with a common classification 
system, the access to the material would 
be enhanced since the documents on the 
same subject matter would be classified 
under the same entry across all collec-
tions.” According to the author, “the 
future task for classification research is 
to explore the theoretical foundation and 
principles for the construction and use of 
general classification systems that serve 
a worldwide audience for the purpose of 
organizing knowledge and the sciences.” 
Additional articles in this section focus on 
the process of adapting a classifi cation to 
a particular culture or context, the diffi-
culties of translating classification from a 
source language to another language, and 

March 2005 

the impact of classifi cation specifi city on 
information retrieval. 

The articles of section II examine or-
ganization of information resources. In 
“Knowledge Organization from Libraries 
to the Web: Strong Demands on the Weak-
est Side of International Librarianship,” 
Maria Inês Cordeiro outlines some major 
themes concerning the use of library subject 
access systems in the area of networked 
information. Michèle Hudon, author of “Ex-
panding Audiences for Education-related 
Information and Resources: Classificatory 
Structures on the World Wide Web,” looks 
at the organization of education-related 
resources by addressing two major ques-
tions: (1) in a context of global exchange, 
are education-related resources on the Web 
organized in such a way as to maximize 
effi  ciency in identification and retrieval? 
and (2) in virtual libraries with specialized 
collections on education, do classification 
schemes and terminology refl ect anything 
other than local perspectives and systems? 
Findings show that education-related re-
sources on the Web appear to be equally 
accessible (or inaccessible) to international 
as to local audiences. In “Text Mining and 
Data Mining in Knowledge Organization 
and Discovery: The Making of Knowl-
edge-based Products,” L. J. Haravu and 
A. Neelameghan present two important 
approaches to the creation of informa-
tion products. The approaches are: (1) the 
planning, designing, and development of 
a composite multilingual, multimedia CD 
product, with the potential international, 
intercultural end users in view; and (2) the 
application of natural language processing 
software in text mining. The authors use 
text-mining software to link concept terms 
from a processed text to a related thesaurus, 
glossary, classification schedule, and facet 
classification. They believe that “the prod-
ucts of text mining and data mining could 
be made more useful if the features of a 
faceted scheme for subject classifi cation are 



incorporated into text mining techniques 
and products.” 

Section III is focused on the role of 
human language technologies in the in-
formation society, the potential of lexical 
patterns to help terminologists retrieve 
knowledge-rich contexts, and the deter-
mination of the potential usefulness of 
common language terminology. 

Section IV addresses the ontological 
foundation of knowledge organization, 
points of view on knowledge in organi-
zation, and the impact of bibliographic 
and statistical studies on knowledge 
organization and classifi cation systems. 
In “The IFF Foundation for Ontological 
Knowledge Organization,” Robert E. Kent 
explains how ontologies and the process 
of semantic integration are represented 
with the concepts and terminology of the 
Information Flow Framework (IFF). Com-
paring knowledge management models, 
Chu Wei Choo, in “Global Perspectives on 
Managing Knowledge in Organizations,” 
uses the Social Science Citation Index 
database to identify influential works on 
knowledge management. Choo implores 
researchers to explore “the infl uence of 
cultures in different countries on the orga-
nizational process of knowledge creation 
and transfer.” D. Grant Campbell’s study 
compares the classification of national 
and international economic data in the 
North American Industry Classification 
System (NAICS) with that of Library of 
Congress Classifi cation (LCC). 

This book highlights recent contribu-
tions to knowledge organization and 
classification at the international level 
and offers its readers recommendations 
concerning the application of various 
systems and soft ware. Knowledge Orga-
nization and Classification in International 
Information Retrieval is a fi rst-class col-
lection for system developers, research-
ers, practitioners, and people having an 
interest in theories of knowledge.—Kaba 

Book Reviews 191 

Abdoulaye, International Islamic University, 
Malaysia. 

The Film Preservation Guide: The Basics 
for Archives, Libraries, and Museums. 
San Francisco: National Film Preserva-
tion Foundation, 2004. 121p. alk. paper, 
$8 (ISBN 0974709905). [Also available 
online at htt p://www.fi lmpreservation. 
org]. LC 2003-24032 
Most librarians and archivists look on 

film collections with a certain amount of 
trepidation. Compared to print publica-
tions, manuscripts, and even photographs 
and sound recordings, film seems par-
ticularly complex in terms of its format, 
specifications, and conservation or pres-
ervation needs. Those who know only 
a litt le about film have visions of rusty 
cans of nitrate-based fi lm spontaneously 
combusting or the multiple reels of mix-
and-match elements that mysteriously 
combine to make a complete item. This 
guide goes a long way toward dispelling 
any fear and loathing of this medium. 

In her preface, Annette Melville, di-
rector of the National Film Preservation 
Foundation, explains the collaborative 
nature of the guide. With the Image Per-
manence Institute at the Rochester Insti-
tute of Technology, the L. Jeff rey Selznick 
School of Film Preservation at George 
Eastman House, the Council on Library 
and Information Resources, and members 
of the Association of Moving Image Ar-
chivists, the National Film Preservation 
Foundation assembled a group of profes-
sionals to plan, write, and edit the guide. 
The work of putting this guide together 
included needs assessment workshops, 
where other professionals expressed their 
concerns about film and what they’d like 
to see in a guide. Students at the Selznick 
School gave the guide a once-over, add-
ing another layer of collaboration to the 
project, and the draft went through a 
series of reviews by an editorial com-

http:p://www.fi