reviews.indd


Book Reviews 473 

In some ways it is and in some ways not. 
Goldberg is clearly attracted to the Stowe 
project because of his love for records, 
but, as noted above, the extra income also 
plays a part. When he learns that he is the 
target of a covert operation, it seems that 
self-preservation becomes his primary 
motive for seeking the information the 
conspirators are trying to hide. But his 
librarian skills clearly contribute to his 
climactic uncovering of the conspiracy. 
Although his role as a librarian is impor-
tant, it is clearly not, in my opinion, the 
glue that holds the plot together. 

Will academic librarians who read this 
book find any special insights into their 
profession? In my opinion, academic 
librarians will learn very little about their 
profession from reading this thriller, 
except that we have a long way to go 
to educate the general public on what 
academic librarianship is all about. I was 
especially disappointed in Beinhart’s 
failure to mention, except in passing, the 
reference and instruction roles of today’s 
academic librarians. At least Goldberg 
is characterized as proactive and even 
a bit heroic, which raises his character 
to a somewhat higher level than most 
other fictional librarians. But I believe 
it’s likely that the unflatt ering stereotypes 
employed by Beinhart will bear greater 
weight in the public eye. 

For academic librarians who like a good 
political thriller and are willing to put up 
with plenty of sex, violence, and profanity, 
Beinhart’s novel will likely be an entertain-
ing read. But they should be aware that 
the depiction of conservative Republicans 
is very negative. Also, they should not 
expect to gain any special insights into the 
nature of academic librarianship.—Wade 
Kotter, Weber State University. 

Frohmann, Bernd Peter. Defl ating Infor-
mation: From Science Studies to Docu-
mentation. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto 
Pr., 2004. 311p. alk. paper, $65 (ISBN 
0802088392). LC 2004-276469. 

Bernd Frohmann, an associate professor 
of information and media studies at the 

University of Western Ontario, has writ-
ten a number of articles and reviews lead-
ing up to this volume. In it, he tackles the 
“paradox of scientifi c documentation”: 
the question of why science’s “most im-
portant medium”—its writt en record—is 
somehow both “essential to science, 
indeed, thought itself to be ‘a form of 
science,’ [and simultaneously] marginal 
to work at the research front, …pos[ing] 
grave threats to the eff ective communica-
tion of the very information required for 
scientific knowledge production” via the 
unwieldy mass of scientifi c documenta-
tion. This particular field is so important, 
he argues, because it is held up as the 
most important, most developed, and 
most effective of information systems. His 
response is to deconstruct and “deflate” 
the term information as it appears in the 
literature, and the result is a useful book 
in some respects, but one with a number 
of flaws. 

In order to deflate information, Frohm-
ann sets the stage with a précis of Witt-
genstein’s deconstruction of words and 
language, exposing the lack of concrete 
Aristotelian meaning (language is a 
“game” and words signifiers). He then 
rhetorically connects three other think-
ers who have written about science: the 
seventeenth-century English philosopher 
Francis Bacon, the nineteenth- and early 
twentieth-century Belgian meta-bibli-
ographer and documentalist Paul Otlet, 
and the distinguished twentieth-cen-
tury American sociologist Robert Mer-
ton. From Bacon, he derives a socially 
organized system of scientifi c knowledge 
production, with documented advances 
at its core. From Otlet, he derives a focus 
on useful original content (information), 
as distinct from the surrounding dross 
in scientific writing, which is to be ex-
tracted and cumulated into a “universal 
book” of organized scientifi c knowledge. 
From Merton, he derives a set of mores 
and norms within modern science that 
increasingly rely on rhetorical reward 
systems of citation, recognition, and 
eponymy (a major discovery named af-



474 College & Research Libraries 

ter oneself). Frohmann then proceeds to 
identify the contradictory uses of “infor-
mation” and the epistemological assump-
tions built on that basis in the study of 
scientific information systems. By “epis-
temological,” Frohmann refers “solely to 
a conception of scientific knowledge as a 
theoretical representation of the world,” 
and by “epistemic content” (a stand-in for 
information), the “abstract, immaterial, 
conceptual substance” of a work. 

Thus theoretically and linguistically 
armed, Frohmann marches through the 
literature of information studies and 
systems (those in science and generally). 
Along the way, he teases out a priori as-
sumptions, not surprisingly fi nding un-
critical or already deconstructed notions 
of information at their core. Frohmann 
provides good guides through the various 
schools of information study (i.e., studies 
of communication channels, information-
seeking behaviors, user studies, the social 
constructions of science, etc.). A word of 
caution: these précis are often so tightly 
interwoven with his theoretical decon-
structions that they can be diffi  cult to ex-
tract. To wit: “The analytical resources for 
understanding the documentary practices 
and circuits that have been extracted from 
this body of work emphasize their consti-
tutive effects, rather than interpretations 
in terms of conduits for communication of 
epistemic content thought to be required 
by research science.” Abstruse language 
often obscures core ideas. 

Even so, the underlying guide to the 
relationships among the various informa-
tion theories and the historical sociology 
of science are of value. The other reason 
to plow through it is because the book is 
“intended to challenge epistemological 
presuppositions of information studies 
generally, not simply assumptions guid-
ing studies of scholarly communication 
among scientists.” This seems to contra-
dict the stated narrower focus on science 
documentation, information, systems, 
and their epistemological assumptions. 
Indeed, the book concludes with a Fou-
cauldian analysis of “fantasia” wherein 

September 2005 

“the library objectifi es by fi xing places 
for documents on library shelves, and 
through the operation and maintenance 
of a subject analysis system that maps de-
contextualized epistemic content to arrays 
of documents in a highly privileged and 
culturally respected institutional space.” 
In other words, this book represents a 
broad new derivative theory about the 
field. 

I will briefly review three of the flaws 
mentioned earlier. First, Frohmann’s con-
necting the work of Merton with Otlet 
and Bacon is a stretch and not necessarily 
representative of his main contributions 
to the sociology of science. For instance, 
it is a textbook staple to report Merton’s 
early investigations of economic factors 
in science and his method to measure the 
impact of economic needs and incentives 
on the content and amount of scientific 
research. Further, when he wrote about 
Bacon (he seemed not to refer to Otlet at 
all), Merton predominantly characterized 
him as a “propagandist” of science and 
did not focus primarily on his documen-
tary or scientific production schemes (see 
Science, Technology & Society in Seventeenth 
Century England and Sociology of Science, 
which Frohmann utilizes). To the extent 
that Merton wrote on Bacon in Sociology of 
Science at any length, he tackled his ques-
tion of whether geniuses drive science 
forward or whether scientifi c discoveries 
are accomplished by “multiples” (i.e., 
a community of scientists). Merton is a 
sociologist of science; his theory explains 
the social system of science in place, not 
how scientific information should theoretically 
best be organized and produced like Bacon 
and Otlet. This is a crucial difference, 
and the rhetorical-theoretical connections 
Frohmann forges to Merton to extrapolate 
the basis of the language game of scientific 
recognition are tenuous. 

Second, in reading Frohmann’s decon-
structive account, one could easily forget 
that science and scientifi c information 
systems are intimately tied to economics 
and business concerns. That Western soci-
eties invest immense amounts in scientific 



research to fuel their economies—and 
then want the results documented and 
a system to preserve and access it after 
that level of investment—should come 
as no surprise. The old story of the 
delayed introduction of fax machines 
has been well learned. The research 
information has been bought and paid 
for and should be at the ready in case it 
has an eventual economic benefi t. This 
has as much explanatory power to ad-
dress the paradox with which Frohmann 
begins the book as the shifting sands of 
epistemic content shot through scientific 
documentation and its retrieval systems 
and theories. The work of Frank Webster 
(e.g., “Information: A Skeptical Account,” 
Advances in Librarianship, vol. 24, 2000) 
demonstrates the power of an analysis 
that follows the money, noting the dif-
ferent uses of the word information and 
its connection to economic trends. It is an 
abiding irony that deconstructive theories 
take a linguistic turn to att ack dominating 
universalisms and meta-narratives (in 
science, in social theory, etc.), bypassing 
the universal cultural and epistemological 
claims currently made on behalf of market 
economics. 

Last, Frohmann’s characterization and 
comparison of information studies and 
theories skitters around. For instance, 
reviewing the study of science informa-
tion systems and theories, he relies on 
the “best research” represented in the 
Annual Review of Information Science and 
Technology (ARIST). He doesn’t explain or 

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Book Reviews 475 

document why ARIST articles hold this 
status, and he found only eight such stud-
ies in nine years (1966–1974), then one 
more four years later. Later, he shift s to 
nonscientific information studies, noting 
that “little of the work reviewed in ARIST 
pertaining directly to science information 
systems is recent because … interest in 
other kinds of information users caught 
the discipline’s attention from the mid-
1980’s.” But the later studies reviewed 
were not published in ARIST, and it is 
unclear how they relate to problems 
in scientific information systems and 
documentation. Frohmann’s bibliogra-
phy is rich with more recent books on 
the rhetoric, practice, and documenta-
tion of science, but often as not these are 
outside library and information science 
research, so they cannot be said to be 
typical of the field Frohmann seeks to 
redirect. Again, the connections seem 
primarily rhetorical. The authority of 
science information systems and studies 
is invoked to validate the importance of 
the task of deflating information, but the 
book shifts between general and scientific 
information studies to validate critiques 
from one arena to the other. 

In sum, the book does have value in its 
pieces. To give another example, I think 
Frohmann’s explication of Otlet easily 
provides the basis to argue that Vannevar 
Bush doesn’t deserve the hallowed place 
he holds in our field. But the book is not 
likely to have the theoretical impact that 
was its main purpose. It is well indexed 
and edited. The combination of in-text 
citation, content notes at the back of the 
book with in-text citations, and a separate 
bibliography at the end serves to make 
that material difficult to track.—John 
Buschman, Rider University. 

Shaw, W. David. Babel and the Ivory Tower: 
The Scholar in the Age of Science. To-
ronto: Univ. of Toronto Pr., 2005. 288p. 
$60 (ISBN 0802079989). 

The literature about the proper role of 
academia boasts many passionate and 
eloquent contributors, including Abra-