reviews.indd


Book Reviews 

Carson, Bryan M. The Law of Libraries and 
Archives. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 
2007. 395p. alk. paper, $65 (ISBN 
081085189). LC 2006-20318. 

Picture this scenario: your library has 
been offered the chance to buy a valuable 
first edition from the collection of another 
library. The sale price is $100,000. You de-
cline—graciously, of course. A week later, 
however, you learn from a confidential 
source that the book’s actual worth is 
$1.5 million—much more than the seller 
was asking of you. On the basis of this 
new information, you call up the other 
library and say that you’ve changed your 
mind and have now decided to buy the 
aforesaid book. Is that library obliged to 
sell it to you? Or, what if, hypothetically, 
you had accepted the original off er and 
then the other library, discovering the true 
value of the edition, had refused to go 
through with the agreed-upon sale? Does 
your library have a legal claim? What are 
the other library’s legal obligations? 

Chances are, not many librarians will 
encounter this kind of problem. The sce-
narios that are likely to occur in libraries 
where the majority of us work are of 
a much more mundane sort. Take, for 
example, the roofing company that tells 
you, on the day they are to begin replac-
ing the leaky roof of your library, that 
they will be too busy to do the work, as 
promised. Your library is forced to find 
another contractor who can’t begin work 
until February. Sadly, in January, the roof 
leaks worse than ever and water runs into 
the shelves, ruining a particular collection 
of books. Are you entitled to sue the first 
roofing company that refused to do the 
work? If so, what kind of money could 
you expect to collect if you won? 

The above examples, from Bryan M. 
Carson’s The Law of Library and Archives, 
illustrate the types of issues that have legal 
consequences for a library. This book, in 
addition to making splendid reading, is 

an important reminder that 
there is so much more to the 
legal universe surrounding 
libraries and archives than 
we imagine. Some of our col-
leagues, for example, seem 
to be under the illusion that 
matters of copyright law are the only ones 
a librarian needs to be familiar with: they 
take courses to find out how they and their 
patrons stand with respect to photocopi-
ers, interlibrary loans, Web sites, and so 
on. Yet these same professional librarians 
know virtually nothing about the rest of 
the legal landscape within which libraries 
operate on a day-to-day basis. Contract 
law applies to our interactions with ven-
dors as well as builders. We formally sign 
many contracts in the course of a given 
period—but we may also be forming other 
contracts verbally whether we know it or 
not. So, what exactly are the basic elements 
of a contract? How easy is it to actually 
form a contract? And, just as important, 
how easy is it to get out of one? 

But our legal involvement doesn’t stop 
there. Employment law, for instance, 
covers the various issues that arise in our 
interactions with the people who work in 
our institutions. Most of us have a vague 
knowledge of the rights and obligations 
of employees and employers within a 
unionized or a nonunionized setting. 
Rules governing hiring and firing are 
certainly complex. But we tend to know 
little or nothing about what constitutes 
an agency relationship. In a court of law, 
how we act or don’t act may spell the 
diff erence between an employee’s being 
viewed as a full-blown employee, rather 
than someone toward whom we may 
have different obligations (for example, 
an independent contractor). 

Much has been written in the news 
lately about the laws governing Internet 
usage, search warrants, and other potential 
threats to library records and privacy, as 

83 



84 College & Research Libraries 

well as issues of information malpractice. 
These are all areas in which librarians, ide-
ally, ought to be well versed. In the best of 
all possible worlds, library schools would 
teach these subjects and we would turn to 
such volumes as The Law of Libraries and 
Archives as a refresher rather than our pri-
mary resource. Since, however, they gener-
ally don’t, reading a book like this should 
be mandatory for anyone who works in a 
library and who wishes to avoid the legal 
catastrophes that may strike a library and 
its well-meaning staff, simply because we 
didn’t know any bett er. 

A final comment on Bryan Carson, the 
author of The Law of Libraries and Archives: 
he is, not surprisingly, a lawyer as well 
as a librarian. As a member of both the 
Ohio and Kentucky bars, he has written 
extensively on the law as it pertains to 
libraries. His subject matter, however, is 
American law, which doesn’t always ap-
ply to institutions located outside of the 
United States. That said, the law in most 
Commonwealth countries is oft en similar 
enough that non-American libraries really 
ought to obtain a copy. As the old adage 
goes, “ignorance of the law is no excuse”; 
that saying surely applies doubly to a 
profession that claims all knowledge for 
its stock-in-trade.—Nancy McCormack, 
Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. 

Huvila, Isto. The Ecology of Information 
Work: A Case Study of Bridging Archaeo-
logical Work and Virtual Reality Based 
Knowledge Organization. Åbo, Finland: 
Åbo Akademi University Press, 2006. 
385p. alk. paper (ISBN: 9517653360). 

As both an archaeologist and a librarian, I 
was very excited when asked to consider 
writing a review of this book; detailed 
analyses of information behaviors among 
archaeologists are few and far between. 
The inclusion of virtual realities in the 
title also attracted my att ention. However, 
I soon discovered that writing a useful 
review of this book would be a significant 
challenge. The first sign of diffi  culty arose 
when I learned from the preface that this 
study originated as Huvila’s 2006 doctoral 

January 2008 

dissertation at Åbo Akademi University 
in Finland. Dissertations are seldom, if 
ever, appropriate for a broader audience 
without significant reworking. Unfortu-
nately, it appears that this book is merely a 
repackaging of the dissertation in its origi-
nal form; there is no indication that it was 
revised with a broader audience in mind. 
Readers are forced to deal with the typical 
“tell them what you’re going to tell them, 
then tell them, and then tell them what you 
told them” approach that might turn off
even the most sophisticated reader. 

This difficulty is compounded by sig-
nificant semantic and syntactic problems 
on nearly every page. The language is of-
ten only superficially recognizable as Eng-
lish. These problems include awkward 
sentence structure; inappropriate use of 
commas; lack of agreement between sub-
ject and object; excessive use of the direct 
article; and “creative” word use. At first, 
I suspected that these problems might 
be a result of translation from Finnish to 
English. However, a search of the Åbo 
Akademi library’s online catalog indicates 
that English was the original language of 
this dissertation. Apparently, the author 
and publisher either chose not to have 
the manuscript reviewed by an English-
speaking editor, or the English assistance 
they received was less than adequate. In 
its present form, the language difficulties 
make an already complex and difficult 
work sometimes nearly impossible to un-
derstand. Although it might be partially 
my fault, I found that in many cases I had 
to read many sections two or three times 
before becoming somewhat confi dent that 
I understood what Huvila was trying to 
say. In spite of these diffi  culties, I believe 
that there is enough valuable material 
in this book to justify a brief chapter-by-
chapter commentary. 

As with almost all dissertations, the 
first chapter summarizes the goals, meth-
odology, and structure of the study. Based 
on this summary, it seems that Huvila’s 
primary goal was to develop a qualitative 
theory of information work in archaeol-
ogy and explore how this theory might be