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Book Reviews 287 

the personal information on their patrons 
that is absolutely necessary; when librar-
ies collect data for the sake of collecting, 
it puts their patrons at risk. 

This book addresses many forms of 
privacy invasion and the parties who are 
responsible for them. It includes an index 
and glossary of terms and acronyms. 
Phishing, key loggers, and spyware are 
covered in a chapter on identity theft, 
while another chapter documents pri-
vacy threats from the business world. A 
chapter is devoted to the online threat to 
children and teens with a special focus 
on the online social networking scene. No 
treatment of electronic privacy would be 
complete without a study of government 
privacy intrusions; Woodward provides a 
critical analysis of the U.S. government’s 
track record on privacy invasion, noting 
how the government’s overdependence 
on technology has led to ineffi  cient and 
inadequate law enforcement. One chapter 
addresses complications with the PA-
TRIOT Act and how librarians fi nd them-
selves at odds trying to cooperate with 
law enforcement while also protecting 
their patrons’ privacy rights. RFID tags 
are discussed in a separate chapter. 

Woodward includes numerous real-
world examples. Some demonstrate what 
can actually happen when the system fails 
and information is accidentally exposed 
or lost. Other examples deal with sub-
poenas for library records and how some 
libraries deal with warrants. Librarians 
will find the last two chapters particularly 
helpful for establishing procedures and 
programs of education for library users 
and employees and for determining ways 
to keep our patrons’ information safe. 

Every library should have a copy of 
this book. It is an excellent guide to the 
kinds of privacy intrusion that libraries 
and those who frequent them experience 
and how to avoid them. In the post 9/11 
environment, privacy has become a more 
precarious civil liberty, and librarians 
need to be more diligent than ever in 
ensuring its protection.—Brian J. Sherman, 
McNeese State University. 

Books on the Move: Tracking Copies 
through Collections and the Book 
Trade. Eds. Robin Myers, Michael 
Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote. New 
Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press (Publish-
ing Pathways); London: British Library, 
2007. 164p. alk. paper, $49.95 (ISBN 
1584562196;0712309861). LC2007-
41192. 

This latest volume in Oak Knoll Press’s 
Publishing Pathways series offers the pro-
ceedings of the twenty-seventh annual 
conference on book trade history spon-
sored by the Antiquarian Booksellers’ 
Association in London. While the title 
of the collection itself, and the editors’ 
introduction, make the conference theme 
clear, it is contributor Pierre Desaerdt who 
most clearly expresses the importance of 
provenance research: it is not simply a 
game for bibliophiles (or bibliomaniacs), 
but one way “to assess the representative 
quality of research based on collections 
of printed books.” Tracing the moves of 
collections, and individual items within 
those collections, tell us something about 
the number and genres of books pub-
lished in certain locales, the forces that 
shaped the preservation or destruction 
of books and how the transfers of books 
and manuscripts from individual owners 
to large public repositories occurred. Un-
less we understand how public collections 
came to be, says Desaerdt, we cannot 
judge the value of the research that builds 
upon these collections. 

The essays in this volume are, for the 
most part, case studies of particular titles 
or the collections of individual persons. 
Peter Beal, author of the monumental In-
dex of English Literary Manuscripts, opens 
the volume with his musings, entitled 
“Lost: The Destruction, Dispersal, and 
Rediscovery of Manuscripts.” He lays 
out several reasons for the loss of manu-
scripts: war, the dissolution of monaster-
ies (a theme that other contributors to 
the volume will elaborate on); intentional 
destruction (for example, the burning of 
the Earl of Rochester’s letters by his pi-
ous mother); theft; vandalism; and, most 



288 College & Research Libraries 

important for librarians and archivists, 
“custodial neglect.” Beal touches on 
the work of dealers and auction houses, 
whose work often leads to the dispersal of 
carefully gathered collections. But Beal, a 
consultant at Sotheby’s, notes that many 
manuscripts are saved from destruction 
by being consigned to auction houses, and 
it is frequently the case that only there 
are manuscripts most fully described 
and cataloged. Beal rounds out his essay 
with numerous examples of his personal 
experiences of tracing, and sometimes 
rediscovering, “lost” manuscripts. He 
closes with a suggestion that libraries and 
archives record not only what they own, 
but what has been lost, since “occasional 
resurrections can and will take place.” 

David Pearson, Director of the Univer-
sity of London Research Library Services, 
discusses the value of tracing the where-
abouts of multiple copies of particular 
books. Such censuses may be concerned 
with traditional methods of textual bib-
liography, but they can also contribute 
to the history of reading by recording 
details about decoration, binding, marks 
of ownership, annotation, and other 
marks of use. Because he is interested in 
“more ordinary” books, Pearson selected 
for his own research three editions of 
English translations of Julius Caesar ’s 
much-studied (and frequently owned) 
Commentaries on the Gallic and civil 
wars. Pearson examined multiple copies 
of each edition, looking for copy-specific 
characteristics. He speculates on the low 
survival rates of such a well-known 
work and concludes with a suggestion 
that analysis of individual titles at the 
copy level ought to be an important new 
direction for book history (though this 
reviewer notes that there will probably 
need to be significant numbers of such 
studies of ordinary books to draw sound 
conclusions about the tastes and habits of 
the common reader). 

Four essays in the volume share a 
similar methodology, with the authors 
focusing on the creation and travels of 
the libraries of individual collectors. 

May 2008 

Angela Nuovo describes the library 
(and the cultural milieu) of 16th-century 
collector Gian Vincenzo Pinelli. Astrid 
Balsem examines one particular book 
(the De perenni philosophia of theologian 
Agostino Steuco) over the course of 300 
years of ownership by humanist scholars, 
a 17th-century queen of Sweden, and 
finally the Leiden University Library. Jos 
van Heel traces the odyssey of the manu-
script collections of Gerard and Johann 
Meerman. The elder Meerman, born in 
Leiden in 1722, was a lawyer and scholar 
of Roman law and of the history of print-
ing. Meerman’s collection, later enlarged 
by his son Johan, had originally focused 
on Dutch history, legal sources, and pro-
hibited books but gained in importance 
when Meerman acquired the Greek and 
Latin manuscript collection of the library 
of the Collège de Clermont (closed when 
the Jesuit order was banned in France 
in 1762). Meerman’s library, through the 
course of various sales, eventually came to 
reside in Berlin, Brussels, Leiden, London, 
and several other cities in Europe and the 
United States. Delsaerdt’s research shows 
the contrasting fate of one collection, that 
of Gustave van Havre, a 19th-century 
Belgian public servant, offi  ceholder, and 
bibliophile. When van Havre’s library 
came up for auction in 1905, the desire to 
prevent Belgium’s patrimony from being 
exported to other European countries (or 
worse yet, the U.S.!) led to a public/pri-
vate partnership among a set of wealthy 
donors, the City Library of Antwerp, and 
the Plantin-Moretus Museum. The happy 
result was that van Havre’s locally signifi-
cant collection now resides in those two 
major libraries in Antwerp. 

Cristina Dondi takes a diff erent ap-
proach to individual books’ provenance 
by looking at the survival of 15th-century 
Italian books of hours. Much rarer than 
their French counterparts, they fell vic-
tim to war and to destruction due to the 
dissolution and suppression of religious 
orders. And, consonant with library 
practice almost everywhere, owners and 
curators of libraries discarded the 15th-



century editions of books of hours when 
the Council of Trent prescribed new con-
tent for these popular prayer books. 

Due to the specialized nature of these 
case studies, this volume is appropriate 
only for research collections and spe-
cial collections in the history of books. 
However, the themes that emerge from 
the essays taken as a whole should be of 
interest (and concern) to all librarians and 
archivists: nearly every essayist describes 
the unfortunate effects of war, revolution, 
and censorship on library collections. 
In a sort of prehistory of scholarly com-
munication, several of the contributors 
show how collectors shared their books 
and opened their libraries to local and 
itinerant scholars, creating communities 
of interest that led to the creation of new 
knowledge. In matters more pertinent to 
everyday library operations, the authors 
note the historical importance of catalogs 
and what they reflect about their owners’ 
collecting goals; they describe shelfmarks 
and shelving methods and show how 
these suited the needs of the reader/ 
owner; they provide physical details on 
individual books that give us hints on 
how particular readers used books and 
texts. The stories these researchers tell 
about individual books tell us what mat-
tered to those early scholars, writers, and 
collectors and perhaps can help inform 
contemporary guardians of libraries both 
great and small on how best to serve the 
people who use them.—Cecile M. Jagodz-
inski, Indiana University. 

Patriotic Information Systems. Eds. 
Todd G. Loendorf and David Garson. 
Hershey, Penn.: IGI, 2007. 258p. $99.95 
(ISBN: 159904594X). LC 2007-24490. 

On any given day how often do you log in 
to a social networking site, an e-commerce 
site, a search engine interface (such as 
iGoogle, or My Yahoo!), or your library’s 
ILS? What information are these sites 
gathering about you, and what conclu-
sions can be drawn from this information? 
Have you recently done searches for in-
formation on Islam and chemical warfare 

Book Reviews 289 

for two different students? Taken out of 
context, how would these searches look 
to outside eyes? How many electronic 
databases currently contain personal 
information about you? Are these data-
bases Web accessible? How diffi  cult is it 
for government agencies to gain access to 
these databases? 

Of the innovative Web technologies 
of the last few years, the inclusion of 
databases in the online environment will 
prove to have some of the longest-last-
ing impacts on how private information 
is gathered, stored, disseminated, and 
reused. The combination of social Web 
and semantic Web reaches deep into our 
society as people increasingly communi-
cate, shop, and gather information while 
being logged into Web sites that may or 
may not be gathering data related to their 
activities. 

In Patriotic Information Systems, editors 
Todd Loendorf and David Garson gather 
together a collection of essays that exam-
ine how state and federal government 
policies relating to information privacy 
have changed since the pivotal events of 
September 11, 2001. This book examines 
how the current administration’s view of 
citizens’ right to have access to govern-
ment information, combined with a dis-
regard for personal privacy in a data-rich 
environment, is leading us, as a country, 
toward a society where a citizen’s basic 
right to privacy is in jeopardy. 

In the first three chapters—“Bush 
Administration Information Policy and 
Democratic Values,” “Less Safe: The Dis-
mantling of Public Information Systems 
after September 11,” and “Expanding Pri-
vacy Rationales under the Federal Free-
dom of Information Act: Stigmatization as 
Talisman”—the authors examine how the 
Bush administration views information 
privacy and documents the government’s 
move backwards in its interpretation of 
the Freedom of Information Act. In the 
chapter “Expanding Privacy Rationales,” 
the author explains that, currently, a rea-
son for denying a Freedom of Informa-
tion request is the possible stigma that a