reviews.indd


Book Reviews 479 

duction to scientific management tools 
that Dougherty provides. It is simply to 
suggest that those tools no longer form 
the foundation of scientific study of the 
library as workplace, or the library as a 
feature of the campus and community, 
as they may once have. 

It is unusual to find a text focused on 
operational issues in library management 
returned to the shelves after a gap in revi-
sion of a quarter-century. Clearly, there 
are many features of this text that de-
serve renewed consideration, especially 
the author ’s call for embracing what, 
in another recent work, Susan Gibbons 
(2007)2 referred to an “R&D mind-set” 
in the library. The fundamental lesson of 
the current work is not that check sheets, 
time studies, and other tools of scientific 
management need be adopted, but that 
there are few decisions about the work we 
do that would not benefit from rigorous 
analysis and a commitment to improve 
that work based on the results of such 
analysis.—Scott Walter, University of Il-
linois at Urbana-Champaign. 

Notes 
1. Nancy Fried Foster and Susan Gib-

bons, Studying Students: The Undergraduate 
Research Project at the University of Roch-
ester (Chicago: Association of College & 
Research Libraries, 2007). 

2. Susan Gibbons, The Academic Library 
and the Net Gen Student: Making the Con-
nections (Chicago: Association of College 
& Research Libraries, 2007). 

Howard F. Greisdorf and Brian C. 
O’Connor. Structures of Image Collec-
tions from Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc to Flickr. 
Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlim-
ited, 2008. 192p. alk. paper, $45 (ISBN 
1591583752). LC 2007-33044. 

Based on the description of this book, 
readers would likely expect a theoretical, 
practical, or contemplative book on the 
history of image collections, digitization’s 
impact on image collections, methods of 
constructing image collections, or points 
of consideration in defining and building 

image collections. The book does not fully 
address any of these points; instead, it of-
fers an uneven mixture of broad strokes 
and detailed information that will be 
unlikely to appeal to scholars. General 
audience readers may find the book a 
useful prompt for discussions on the 
concept of image collections; however, the 
book’s description does not lend itself to 
interesting those readers. 

Even though the book’s contents do 
not match the description, the book still 
has ambitious goals. The book seems to 
be attempting to serve as a primer for 
the human element of image compre-
hension and usage as well as a primer to 
image collections as a whole, while also 
attempting to destabilize traditional no-
tions of high art by countering the idea of 
image collections as those designed and 
selected by experts. It succeeds and fails 
in these goals in different ways in each of 
its five sections. Part of the failure is due 
to readability problems from being writ-
ten by two writers with different styles, 
and this is even explained in the preface. 
Other problems stem from the sometimes 
disjointed structure of the book, with the 
final section adding material that would 
have been more appropriately covered 
earlier on, and from the occasional over-
simplification of concepts. Issues of struc-
ture and style should have been smoothed 
over with the editor, but perhaps the time-
sensitive nature of the material required 
an overly short editorial process. 

The book’s five sections are: “Seeing 
and Believing,” “The Language of Im-
age Structures,” “Image Collections,” 
“Groupthink, Deindividuation, and 
Desensitivity,” and “Lessons from the Fu-
ture.” The fi rst offers a broad discussion of 
human vision and methods of organizing 
collections. This section could be useful 
for a reading group discussion of image 
collections; and, indeed, the section states 
that it aims to raise questions and spark 
interest in the idea that the “structuring 
image collections is no longer a mundane 
issue but the basis for challenging philo-
sophical debate.” The first section also 



480 College & Research Libraries 

begins part of the book’s larger argument 
on the fundamental diff erences between 
text and image. The final chapter in the 
first section explores diff erent methods 
of organization through personal house-
hold collections, as with the spatial and 
content-based organizations found in 
everyday areas and objects like closets 
and refrigerators. 

The second section, “The Language of 
Image Structures,” touches on some of 
the difficulties in naming and classifying 
images and explores diff erent elements 
that could be added to aid the structuring 
of image collections for their develop-
ers and users. The section considers the 
viewer’s perception and use of individual 
images and collections as well as the im-
age creator’s intended purposes for the 
image as possible elements for structuring 
or defining collections. The criteria also 
include the subjective viewer as part of 
the classification hierarchy to ask how 
existing methods of image classification 
and description could be improved. For 
possible improvements, the section dis-
cusses ways of looking at and classifying 
images based on the intended usage of 
the image as with irony, metaphor, and 
other literary and aesthetic concepts. The 
section builds these criteria to destabilize 
traditional notions of artistic collections 
through the inclusion of subjective recep-
tion as a factor in defi ning images. 

The third section, “Image Collections,” 
follows closely by expanding the same 
questions of use, intent, and reception 
from the level of the image to methods 
for organizing collections. This section 
offers a basic overview of some of the im-
age collection structures in use from the 
vantage points of creating the structures 
and accessing the materials through the 
structures. 

The second and third sections illustrate 
the problems print writing oft en faces 
when dealing with digital media. Non-
digital texts on topics related to digital 
media must contend with being always 
outdated in some manner. While the 
writers acknowledge this, the second and 

September 2008 

third sections still suffer because they can-
not address some of the already current 
technologically enhanced methods of col-
lection structuring and searching. Com-
puter processing and large-scale human 
processing through the network effect 
of large-scale social networking applica-
tions have already shifted typical image 
and image collection classifi cation. The 
fourth section is similarly hindered by its 
inability to address ongoing changes from 
digitization and the Internet. The section 
“Groupthink, Deindividuation, and De-
sensitivity” continues the argument for 
including subjective perception and indi-
vidual use as components in structuring 
image collections. The section explains 
that traditional collection elements like 
descriptions, titles, and keywords can 
create and enforce standardized mean-
ings for viewers. The section elaborates 
that, while standardized meanings are 
useful in some cases, they can also prove 
problematic in others. This continues the 
argument against traditional notions of 
art and art collections, an argument that 
is rapidly evolving as more museum, 
library, and personal collections become 
accessible and are interconnected. How-
ever, this section could still prove useful 
for readers who are more familiar with 
traditional collection design. 

The final section, “Lessons from the 
Future,” closes the book with arguments 
on the fundamental diff erences between 
images and text, explanations of diff er-
ent image-collecting communities, and a 
call to continue the discussion of image 
collections further. The closing section’s 
call for further analysis is especially apt, 
given this book’s introductory level. Even 
though the book is intended for a general 
audience, I had expected to see greater at-
tention paid to either the history of image 
collections or the technologies laying the 
course for the future of image collections. 
Digital collections change not only the 
format of materials and methods of ac-
cess but also the viewing environment as 
screen sizes simultaneously expand and 
miniaturize. Like the expanding limits 



of film, television, and cell phone view-
ing screen sizes, the expanding limits of 
metadata for images and materials in im-
age collections—especially with personal 
collections tied to larger integrated data-
bases—all impact image collection design. 
As with other media evolutions, digital 
media alter existing media forms, and this 
could have been more fully addressed in 
the book regardless of audience. In par-
ticular, technological advancements have 
brought a corresponding reinvestment in 
the local and the personal from the global 
and networked, and the book could have 
explored this through the ever-growing 
interest in imaged memory collections 
with digital photo albums and physical 
scrapbooks. As an introductory text, this 
book offers several prompts that could 
be useful in moving readers toward a 
more detailed and critical discussion. 
Library professionals, scholars, and other 
advanced users would find this book of 
limited use because it does not address 
more complex issues or the complexity 
of the areas it does cover.—Laurie Taylor, 
University of Florida. 

Amy Knapp, Rush Miller, and Elizabeth 
J. Wood. Beyond Survival: Managing Ac-
ademic Libraries in Transition. Westport, 
Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2007. 220p. 
alk. paper, $45 (ISBN 1591583373). LC 
2006-27895. 

Index to advertisers 
Annual Reviews 396 
Archival Products 406 
Brill 395 
CHOICE 486 
EBSCO cover 2 
HW Wilson cover 4 
Litir Database 425 
Palgrave 446 
Perry Dean Architects 475 
Serial Solutions 400 
Springer cover 3 
University of West Indies 445 

Book Reviews 481 

As technology develops and user needs 
evolve, many academic libraries discover 
themselves in a position of either adapting 
and embracing new technology or remain-
ing unchanged and stagnant. This need for 
change, of course, provides great oppor-
tunities and great challenges for academic 
libraries. A welcome book, then, is Beyond 
Survival: Managing Academic Libraries in 
Transition, a companion guide for aca-
demic libraries in transition by Elizabeth 
Wood, Rush Miller, and Amy Knapp. In 
it, the authors detail why change is neces-
sary for libraries, stating that refusal by 
libraries to change will condemn them to 
marginalization. The authors also provide 
a theoretical foundation useful for transi-
tioning academic libraries and detailed, 
real-world examples of how certain aca-
demic libraries are evolving to meet new 
challenges in the 21st century. 

Miller and Knapp, both from the Uni-
versity of Pittsburgh’s University Library 
System, supply the substantial number of 
these real-world examples as they meticu-
lously examine a case study of the develop-
ment of their own university library. This 
description fills a significant portion of 
the book and works as an anchor for other 
discussions in the book, building on the 
theory provided in chapter two, “Theoreti-
cal Underpinnings of Change,” while set-
ting the stage for the discussions on library 
evaluation in chapter eight, “Standing up 
to Scrutiny,” and the forward-looking view 
on library transition in chapter nine, the 
final chapter, “Positioning the Academic 
Library for a Vibrant Future.” Three chap-
ters are devoted to this case study and 
cover everything from strategic planning 
to dealing with employees unwilling to 
change along with the library. (The appen-
dix at the end of the book provides the 2005 
Marketing Communications Strategy/Plan 
for the University Library System.) 

In another expansive discussion, the 
authors analyze a case study involving 
the University of Arizona libraries. While 
the detail in each real-world example is 
helpful, a key problem quickly arises. 
Virtually every example cited in the