reviews.indd


280 College & Research Libraries May 2006 

are available in academic libraries across 
the country. Course management soft-
ware, such as WebCT and Blackboard, are 
becoming widespread. Ferullo’s chapter 
clearly delineates TEACH Act require-
ments for exemptions by institution, 
instructor, type of material, and technol-
ogy. It is an outstanding, easy-to-use 
summary of the act for universities that 
wish to employ it. 

Among other notable contributions are 
two proposals for solutions to scholarly 
publishing problems. One is an innova-
tive proposal by James Howison and 
Abby Goodrum to manage academic 
papers. “Why Can’t I Manage Academic 
Papers Like MP3s?” outlines a plan for 
managing academic papers by creating 
and applying metadata to scholarly pa-
pers, primarily in PDF files. The paper 
discusses the challenges to this process, 
both technological and cooperative, and 
makes a proposal for further development 
of the idea. 

Authors of the nine papers included 
in these conference proceedings gener-
ally support DRM. In its purest form, 
the technology facilitates the protection 
of copyrights and wider dissemination of 
creative works to achieve the purpose of 
the copyright and intellectual property 
protections in the U.S. Constitution “to 
promote the progress of science and the 
useful arts.” None of them challenges 
the validity or common good served by 
copyright laws. Objections are raised 
when DRM is used to limit lawful use 
and infringe upon trade competition. 
So, despite promotions that the Colleges, 
Code and Copyright symposium brought 
together “diverse voices,” the published 
papers present a library-friendly mes-
sage. 

The conference proceedings are suc-
cessful in raising awareness about the 
power of DRM, providing practical ad-
vice about how to manage digital objects 
legally, and inspiring librarians and the 
higher education community to address 
the problems posed by DRM.—Janita Jobe, 
University of Nevada, Reno. 

Martha L. Brogan, with the assistance 
of Daphnée Rentfrow. A Kaleidoscope 
of Digital American Literature. Wash-
ington, D.C.: Council on Library 
and Information Resources and the 
Digital Library Federation (Strategies 
and Tools for the Digital Library), 
2005. 176p. alk. paper, $30 (ISBN 
1932326170). LC 2005-22693. 

Of the making of Web sites, there appears 
to be no end. Except, cautions Martha 
Brogan, in the case of those dealing with 
American literature. Of this ilk, she con-
tends, there are too few and fewer still 
of substantial quality. The problem, she 
argues, is pervasive. Disciplinary prac-
titioners tend to be highly conservative 
and resistant to change. And those who 
may be interested in Web-based learning 
don’t seem to know what they want in 
the way of digital tools and resources. 
Key professional groups remain curiously 
oblivious to the call of the Web. And copy-
right restrictions close the door tightly on 
much twentieth-century literature. The 
picture Brogan presents is not a happy 
one. Cruelest of all, perhaps, is Brogan’s 
observation that although American his-
torians have gotten their act together, the 
AmLit crowd remains in disarray. And 
yet, after reading this thoughtful and 
searching report, it is possible to draw 
a different set of conclusions. In fact, the 
landscape Brogan describes seems alive, 
quirky, inventive, and individualistic. 
In short, it seems typically humanistic: 
messy, ill organized, and resistant to 
easy solutions from the top or the center. 
Perhaps the picture is not so bleak after 
all. A kaleidoscope, after all, is a thing of 
beauty, not something to rue. 

Prepared for the Digital Library Fed-
eration and the Council on Library and 
Information Resources, this report will 
be of interest to every academic librarian 
whose portfolio includes the humanities 
and, by extension, humanities computing. 
Moreover, it will also be of interest to any-
one—faculty, student, librarian—who is 
thinking of launching a Web site that has 
anything to do with American Studies. 



Despite its title, the scope of the report is 
much broader than American literature. 
Its terrain spans an enormous chunk of 
humanities computing, including multi-
disciplinary content sites, metadata, file 
types and formats, preservation issues, 
encoding schemes, Open Archives Initia-
tive, digital editing, classroom applica-
tions, e-publishing, finding aids, and the 
like. It is a marvelously thorough envi-
ronmental scan that yields a robust con-
spectus of information about commercial 
and noncommercial Web resources in the 
humanities. As such, it has a significant 
reference value above and beyond its 
function as a formal report. 

Brogan’s survey is based on both a 
thorough review of the currently opera-
tional sites and resources and a series of 
interviews with dozens of leading pro-
fessionals from the academy, libraries, 
and IT communities. She has packaged 
her conspectus in six categories, each 
of which includes a generous harvest 
of digital resources: subject gateways; 
author studies (including digital editing 
projects); electronic books (facsimile, 
encoded, and born digital); reference 
sources and primary text collections 
(chiefly commercial); subject and genre 
collections (e.g., poetry); and teaching 
applications. Within these categories, 
Brogan compacts finely honed capsule 
reviews of sites and resources along with 
discussions of technical requirements, 
best practices, and the like. Though nec-
essarily brief, Brogan’s reviews are quite 
useful because they are critical and evalu-
ative, not just descriptions of what’s on the 
screen. They reflect her own judgments 

Index to advertisers 
ACRL 229 
Annual Reviews cover 2 
Choice 204 
EBSCO cover 4 
Haworth cover 3 
Idea Group 199 
Library Technology Alliance 239 
Modern Language Assoc. 200-201 

Book Reviews 281 

and those of the experts she has tapped 
along the way. 

From within this forest of reviews, 
some exemplars emerge. Any number 
of initiatives from the University of 
Virginia receive consistently high marks 
for creativity, content, and sustainability. 
These are typically faculty-driven projects 
that transcend their specific origins and 
become bridges to larger, community-
based approaches. Also receiving just 
acclaim is an assortment of Web projects 
launched by the American Historical As-
sociation, the Organization of American 
Historians, and the American Council 
of Learned Societies. Then there are the 
underachievers, chief of which seems to 
be the Modern Language Association 
(MLA), about which no one seems to have 
a good word except the leadership of the 
organization. The MLA is the great white 
elephant of the report: Brogan gently, but 
firmly, admonishes it for its general slug-
gishness toward digital information and 
publishing options. Given the size of its 
disciplinary footprint, the MLA should be 
playing a much more prominent role in 
facilitating the incorporation of electronic 
options into the research and learning 
strategies of its membership. Alas, after 
reading Brogan’s report, I am not encour-
aged by the response of the MLA to the 
challenge. 

The thrust of Brogan’s recommenda-
tions predictably calls for greater coor-
dination, collaboration, articulation, and 
calibration among disciplinary communi-
ties. No one would seriously dispute the 
need for these and more. The editorial sta-
tus of e-texts, to take one chronically seri-
ous problem area, would benefi t hugely 
from common standards and transpar-
ent practices so that users would know 
exactly what they are consulting. So, too, 
greater coordination among sibling hu-
manities disciplines might yield greater 
leverage with commercial vendors and 
software developers to develop bett er, 
more affordable products and a more 
generous suite of tools. At the same time, 
the struggle for interoperable systems and 



282 College & Research Libraries 

federated manipulation of digital objects 
must be of the highest priority for all 
scholars and librarians. 

That said, the ill-coordinated reality 
of the present state of AmLit on the Web 
does seem an appropriate match for the 
intensely individualistic nature of the 
humanities as practiced today. Orga-
nized research has not been a defining 
characteristic of humanistic scholarship, 
and probably for good reason. Attempts 
to rationalize the Web—the dream of 
many—would thus not come without 
costs and losses. No one involved in 
humanities computing on college and 
university campuses today is unaware of, 
or unaffected by, the increasingly central-
ized nature of academic IT. The needs for 
standardization, control, scalability, and 
cost-effectiveness are real, but so, too, is 
the creative freedom they tend to drive 
out. One of the reasons why humanities 
computing may not be so robust as it 
could be is that campus IT initiatives are 
almost always top-down and generic and 
thus antithetical to traditional humanistic 
practices. After all, if the new fi rst com-
mandment on campus is “Thou shall use 
Blackboard.” What are the incentives for 
innovation? Keep your pencils sharp and 
at the ready. I raise the issues of hierarchy 
and creativity not out of any false nostal-
gia for the “good old ‘90s” but, rather, 
out of a perceived concern that in build-
ing a more stable, durable, and usable 
Web future, we keep in view the need to 
sustain the vibrancy and creativity of the 
humanities at the same time. We need 
not be careful of what we wish for, if we 
wish for the right things.—Michael Ryan, 
University of Pennsylvania. 

O’Meara, KerryAnn, and R. Eugene Rice. 
Faculty Priorities Reconsidered: Reward-
ing Multiple Forms of Scholarship. San 
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005. 340p. 
alk. paper, $36 (ISBN: 0787979201). 
LC 2005-6483. 

Some fifteen years ago, a very small book 
made a very big noise. In Scholarship 
Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate 

May 2006 

(1990), Ernest L. Boyer articulated the 
revolutionary idea that traditional re-
search (i.e., original research aimed at 
the discovery of new information and 
grounded in recognized methods of quan-
titative or qualitative inquiry), which he 
called the “scholarship of discovery,” was 
only one of four dimensions of scholar-
ship in which faculty members might 
fruitfully engage during their careers. 
Although the scholarship of discovery 
was the model most often rewarded in 
the annual review, tenure, and promotion 
process, he argued, there were ways in 
which other professional responsibilities 
might be framed as valuable types of 
scholarship for which faculty also might 
be recognized. Joining the scholarship of 
discovery in Boyer’s model were what 
have since been discussed in the literature 
as the scholarship of teaching, the scholar-
ship of engagement (originally referred 
to as the scholarship of application), and 
the scholarship of integration. Although 
studies of these “multiple forms of schol-
arship” were sponsored throughout the 
past decade by organizations such as the 
American Association for Higher Educa-
tion (AAHE) and the Carnegie Founda-
tion for the Advancement of Teaching, 
and although a number of monographs 
have focused on how to evaluate distinct 
dimensions of scholarly activity (e.g., 
Driscoll and Lynton’s Making Outreach 
Visible: A Guide to Documenting Professional 
Service and Outreach [1999]), the literature 
was still lacking an overview of the impact 
of reform initiatives, inspired by what is 
often referred to as “the Boyer Report,” 
on national discourses on evaluation of 
faculty performance and on the guide-
lines for faculty evaluation developed by 
individual campuses. Bringing together 
leaders of national reform programs with 
the leaders of reform from individual 
campuses representing a wide range of 
institutional types, the current volume 
aims to fill that gap. 

In part one of this collection, Rice, 
who served as a leader of AAHE efforts 
to promote new forms of scholarship and