reviews.indd


300 College & Research Libraries May 2009 

cultural information ethics. Each section 
begins with a contextualizing discussion 
of the particular issue, followed by a brief 
bibliography and a series of cases with 
questions to consider for discussion. 

This volume is meant as both a class-
room and a staffroom text. Buchanan 
and Henderson give both historical and 
contemporary context to their discussions 
of each issue, and this framing of ethical 
debate will prove particularly useful to 
LIS students. For example, the chapter 
concerning intellectual freedom discusses 
both historical approaches taken by 
professional associations in the United 
States and Canada as well as some of the 
more common contemporary measures, 
including the PATRIOT Act, the Digital 
Millennium Copyright Act, and efforts 
to make Internet filtering mandatory in 
public libraries. Those working in librar-
ies will already be familiar with many of 
these debates, but the clear and concise 
explanations will serve as quick and thor-
ough refreshers to those of us whose daily 
labor threatens to overwhelm our ability 
to think critically about the values that 
guide our actions. Each issue discussion 
is followed by 25 case studies that use 
imaginary situations to prompt concrete 
discussion of abstract ethical principles. 
The case studies, real strengths of the 
book, engage different angles or approach 
inherent ethical questions, demonstrating 
the enormous range of real-life situations 
that require professional librarians to 
grapple with ethical principles. Cases 
are set in public, special, and academic li-
brary settings, and many will be instantly 
recognizable to practitioners: the student 
photocopying reserve materials one 
chapter at a time, in potential violation 
of copyright; the suspiciously hovering 
older man in the children’s room whose 
right to privacy must be balanced with 
safety concerns; the demand by a faculty 
member to know who has checked out the 
video he needs for class right this very sec-
ond. For many of us, these situations are so 
common that we may not even consider 
the need to engage in debate about our 

responses. Buchanan and Henderson’s 
collection is both a cogent reminder and 
a practical workbook for taking up this 
professional demand anew. 

Most of this book is written by Bu-
chanan and Henderson, but they oddly 
chose to reprint a chapter on the emergent 
field of intercultural information ethics by 
Rafael Capurro, a German LIS theorist. 
His chapter on intercultural information 
ethics presumes a working knowledge 
of debates in contemporary East-West 
philosophy and is written in a dense 
prose style that will be unfamiliar to most 
library professionals. Capurro’s focus 
could not be more important or more 
relevant. He asks us to consider what 
professional ethics mean in an increas-
ingly globalized and globally connected 
world. For example, how does the U.S. 
professional commitment to intellectual 
property square with competing cultural 
commitments in China to free flow of in-
formation? Capurro invites us to engage 
in a conversation about our ethics that 
acknowledges cultural diff erences and 
encourages the formulation of a new kind 
of ethics produced through intercultural 
dialogue. It’s a worthy call, but one that is 
difficult to heed when it is this diffi  cult to 
understand. The reader wishes Buchanan 
and Henderson had taken up the task of 
translating this highly theoretical lan-
guage into the clear and direct approach 
that makes the rest of this volume such a 
compelling addition to our educational 
and professional collections.—Emily 
Drabinski, Long Island University, Brooklyn 
Campus. 

Kelty, Christopher M. Two Bits: The 
Cultural Significance of Free Soft ware. 
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 
2008. 378p. alk. paper, $23.95 (ISBN 
978-0-8223-4264-9). LC 2007-049447. 

Little did Christopher M. Kelty, an as-
sistant professor of anthropology at Rice 
University in Houston, Texas, expect to 
become an active member in the culture 
he set out to investigate—that of Free 
Software, or Open Source software. 



Kelty is an anthropologist, after all, not 
a coder. He struck out to research the 
phenomenon known as Free Soft ware but 
ended up studying those who participate 
in the culture and, more important, the 
cultural significance of Free Software. 
Part history, part anthropological study, 
and part ethnographic study, Two Bits: The 
Cultural Significance of Free Soft ware reveals 
the whys and wherefores of the Open 
Source culture and the geeks who inhabit 
and participate in it (and not necessarily 
by contributing computer programming 
skills and code). 

For Kelty, Open Source, also Free 
Software, is both an end product and 
a culture. As a product, it is computer 
software for which the source code used 
to compile the application is freely avail-
able for perusal, consumption, adoption, 
and reuse (and free in terms of cost). As 
a culture, it describes the organization 
and customs of those who participate in 
the creation of the software. Unifying the 
culture and its product, Kelty identifies 
Free Software as a “recursive public,” 
intentionally evoking the mathematical 
concept (recursion) commonly employed 
in computer programming. A recursive 
function is a programming routine that 
“calls” itself, the output of which is used 
by, or feeds, the calling routine, which, in 
a recursive function, is the same routine. 
Kelty desired to impart a sense of the 
profound depth of Open Source culture, 
which is far more than software code, and 
extends to legal and organizational issues, 
in addition to technology. 

“Public” denotes that Open Source 
culture exists beyond (but also within; 
it is not insular) political, economic, and 
ethnic boundaries and that many indi-
viduals (entrepreneur, programmer, edu-
cator, librarian) coexist within this public. 
Technology is an instrumental component 
of this recursive public, for it is through 
technology that geeks, those who consti-
tute this culture, express themselves. This 
is not to suggest that geeks are all one-
dimensional programmers, but that the 
technology enables geeks to realize and 

Book Reviews 301 

form this culture in the first place, which 
they continue to develop and expand, by 
creating new code, drafting legal licenses, 
or authoring software manuals. Develop-
ment and growth are vital elements in the 
Open Source culture. 

Two Bits is divided into three parts. 
The first part, “The Internet,” situates 
the people—the geeks—that constitute 
this culture. International in nature, 
Kelty demonstrates that geeks are gener-
ally very skilled, learned actors deeply 
engaged in Free Software who are not, 
as it might seem sometimes, blinded by 
ideology. Quite the opposite oft en; on 
average, geeks tend to be practical, uni-
fied by a common belief that technology 
is inescapable and malleable, to be put 
toward human uses. The second part, 
“Free Software,” is essentially a history 
of open source software culture, but Kelty 
convincingly relates the discussion to 
how Free Software is a recursive public 
and something that can be witnessed from 
the earliest days of soft ware collaboration 
(and the Internet). One aspect that reveals 
itself from the historiography is how Free 
Software is modular, intentionally flexible 
for future development and customiza-
tion. Indeed, “openness and modifiability 
are core values” to Open Source soft ware 
and geeks, and the third part, “Modifi-
ability,” addresses these values beyond 
soft ware. 

In it, Kelty expands the discussion 
to consider related endeavors: Creative 
Commons and Connexions, the latter is a 
project and community at Rice University 
to provide the space and means to col-
laboratively author textbooks for students 
of all ages. It can be related to the Open 
Access principle in scholarly publishing 
and MIT’s OpenCourseWare—both focus 
on sharing, at little or no cost, with the 
aim to further knowledge and learning. 
Connexions, though not strictly a soft-
ware project, is a recursive public, akin 
to the culture of Free Software. The proj-
ect shares many of the same issues that 
any software project might encounter: 
legal and licensing hurdles, collaboration 



302 College & Research Libraries 

challenges, and, of course, technological 
design issues. But the concept, like Free 
Software, calls upon the members of a 
community to engage and contribute, not 
only to sustain the endeavor but also to 
reach a point where it is self-sustaining 
by its community. 

But Two Bits is only partly about geeks, 
code, technology, or software. It’s also 
about the cultural significance of those 
elements and how they’ve infl uenced, and 
will continue to impact, the ways people 
work, organize, collaborate, and even 
think. The reader, however, must come 
to his own “policy prescriptions,” as such 
aims are beyond the scope of Two Bits, 
which Kelty acknowledges is more a work 
of history and anthropology “in the hopes 
that it is more lastingly usable.” Kelty’s 
fine book provides an anthropological 
basis to investigate our own practices and 
community. 

Not only do academic libraries, and 
their parent institutions, often rely on 
Open Source software solutions, but they 
also initiate and support a substantial 
number of Open Source projects, manag-
ing, therefore, the technological hurdles 
and legal pitfalls, and organizing and 
facilitating community collaboration 
and communication. Libraries are, if not 
historically, increasingly becoming recur-
sive publics, especially as more and more 
institutions (libraries) begin to tackle the 
technological needs of libraries today: 
VuFind and Scriblio in the field of OPACS; 
Koha and Evergreen in the Integrated 
Library System sector; digital library and 
institutional repository software; and 
numerous other smaller projects. These 
are software applications and tools de-
signed by libraries for libraries to be used 
in libraries, often by librarians, who then 
develop modifications, and so on. This is 
all very recursive, and infectious. 

Along his way, Kelty found himself 
embroiled in the very issues he was 
researching—a participant in the Open 
Source culture, a geek of sorts. Not only 
did Kelty participate early on with Con-
nexions, but also Two Bits, att ractively 

May 2009 

published by Duke University Press, is 
available under a Creative Commons 
license at twobits.net.—Kevin M. Ford, 
Columbia College Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. 

College and University Archives: Read-
ings in Theory and Practice. Eds. 
Christopher J. Prom and Ellen D. 
Swain. Chicago, Ill.: Society of Ameri-
can Archivists, 2008. 360p., $54.95 
(ISBN 1-931666-27-X). LC 2008-015631. 

This new collection of essays off ers an 
exceptionally clear, concise, and well-
organized overview of how certain higher 
education trends are affecting the archival 
profession, and how archivists might 
respond. Some of the trends include the 
need to assess and document institutional 
effectiveness (especially in the realm of 
student learning), new standards and 
training in digital technology, and in-
creasing user expectations for access to 
digital information. There are thirteen 
chapters in all, grouped into four cat-
egories: “Redefining the Role of College 
and University Archives,” “Capturing 
Campus Histories,” “Managing Efficient 
Programs,” and “Serving Our Users.” 
The editors and contributors tend to be 
archivists or special collections librarians 
at major research universities, as well 
as members of the Society of American 
Archivists (SAA). 

As the editors point out in their pref-
ace, there are three specific themes that 
run through most of these discussions 
of how archivists should address their 
challenges: the opportunities created by 
new technologies (which also bring new 
challenges), the need for collaboration 
with other campus units and throughout 
the profession, and the value of being pro-
active and innovative. So, for example, as 
Nicholas Burckel wonders in the opening 
chapter, could institutional eff ectiveness 
assessments be strengthened by collabo-
ration among the members of the SAA to 
identify best practices in documenting 
student learning, followed by the devel-
opment of guidelines and strategies for 
archivists to carry out such documen-