394

Book Reviews

Colin Darch and Peter G. Underwood. 
Freedom of Information and the Develop-
ing World: The Citizen, the State and Mod-
els of Openness. Oxford, U.K.: Chandos, 
2010. 317p. $80 (ISBN 9781843341475).

Freedom of information—a citizen’s 
right to request and obtain information 
from the state—tends to be regarded as 
an unproblematic good. That is precisely 
why this excellent book by two South 
African scholars is so valuable. Colin 
Darch is a researcher based at the Af-
rican Studies Library at the University 
of Cape Town. Peter G. Underwood is 
Director of the University of Cape Town 
Centre for Information Literacy as well 
as Professor of Librarianship at the 
University of Cape Town. They examine 
assumptions underlying the adoption of 
freedom of information principles and 
laws throughout the world and explore 
local histories and political systems af-
fecting its implementation in developing 
countries. Far from being unproblematic, 
freedom of information is described as “a 
deeply subversive way to reconfigure the 
relationship between state and citizen by 
specifying how and under what terms 
political knowledge is shared.”

The authors show that, although the 
first freedom of information act was 
passed in Sweden in 1766 and informa-
tion rights were included in human 
rights declarations after World War II, 
the specific sense of a right to access to 
state documents is relatively recent. And 
law is only a beginning. Governments 
throughout history have been secretive, 
and to a large extent remain so. Stud-
ies of bureaucracy indicate that “non-
compliance is not an aberration.” Even 
in Western countries with well-developed 
systems of record-keeping, the state is a 
“site of struggle.” Governments find ways 
to avoid complying with the law, and 
pre-emptive destruction of documents 
continues to take place. 

Darch and Underwood 
question Article 19 of the 
United Nations Declaration 
of Human Rights, which 
states that freedom of in-
formation aids economic 
development; prevents hun-
ger, environmental damage and disease; 
reduces corruption; and enables democ-
racy. They find such claims overstated and 
point out that “inflation” of the concept of 
human rights can be counterproductive. 
They suggest that the moral argument 
might be better framed as a duty of the 
state rather than a right of the citizen.

The book continues with detailed 
case studies of freedom of information 
in individual countries where local 
conditions have determined outcomes. 
China offers an example of a country 
where increasing access to information 
has occurred without democracy. Russia 
under Putin is approaching a “condition 
of near-obsessive secrecy.” Conditions in 
individual Latin American countries vary 
greatly, from the impenetrable secrecy of 
police archives in Guatemala to the legacy 
of natural resource exploitation in Bolivia 
to the issue of media access in Brazil. Ac-
cess to information in the Philippines is 
based on case law rather than legislation.

The situation in Africa is covered in 
detail, although the case histories do 
not claim to be typologies. The authors 
admit at the outset that “this chapter 
does not consist of a series of stories in 
which virtue triumphs over oppression.” 
Zimbabwe, where colonial records were 
purposely destroyed and bellicosity 
continues, is certainly a discouraging 
case. Nigeria presents a more encourag-
ing example due to an outspoken press 
and experienced human rights groups, 
although freedom of information legisla-
tion was voted down there in 2008. Some 
access and demand exist in Mozambique 
among elites, but there are linguistic and 



Book Reviews 395

socioeconomic barriers to widespread use 
of information. South Africa exemplifies 
an incomplete transformation from the 
highly developed, bureaucratic, and se-
cretive apartheid state to a country with 
explicit freedom of information rights but 
low citizen use and sporadic data collec-
tion. African countries, however, are “not 
a basket case.”

This book more than meets its objec-
tive of interrogating common assump-
tions about the universal application 
of freedom of information rights. The 
nonideological stance of its authors is 
one of its strengths, along with their 
superb research and mastery of theory, 
history, and politics in many domains. 
It leaves a rather dispiriting impression 
in the end, as if freedom of information 
were not merely an unattainable ideal 
but possibly a mistaken one. In the final 
chapter, the authors propose a tentative 
solution: movement toward nonjuridi-
cal, nonadversarial practices (break the 
“hermeneutics of suspicion’’), toward a 
culture of access in which governments 
recognize that secrecy leads to bad policy. 
The Wikileaks model is mentioned too, 
where technology enables direct action 
against an authoritarian state. Truthfully, 
however, the authors have no solution or 
policy recommendations to offer, which 
may be just as well given their distrust of 
universal solutions. Readers should be 
grateful for their temperate and stimu-
lating treatment of a subject that largely 
has gone unexamined by library profes-
sionals.—Jean Alexander, Carnegie Mellon 
University.

June Abbas. Structures for Organizing 
Knowledge: Exploring Taxonomies, 
Ontologies, and Other Schemas. New 
York: Neal-Schuman Publishers, 2010. 
xxi, 248p. alk. paper, $85.00 (ISBN 
9781555706999). LC2010-024861. 

Organization is at the heart of the library 
profession: without organization both 
physical (as on shelves) and virtual (as 
in databases and OPACs), users cannot 
access information and materials. As the 

library grows to include more digital 
resources and users begin to create their 
own metadata, librarians must expand 
their concepts of knowledge organization 
beyond traditional means of description 
and classification. 

June Abbas’s Structures for Organiz-
ing Knowledge: Exploring Taxonomies, 
Ontologies, and Other Schemas discusses 
the many ways in which human beings 
organize objects and how librarians 
and other information professionals can 
make use of these tendencies to design 
effective tools for organizing informa-
tion. The book is not a practical guide for 
designing and developing said tools, nor 
a detailed explanation of the schema used 
therein; rather, it is an overview of the 
underlying concepts that shape human 
organizational behavior and, thus, tools 
for organizing knowledge.

Abbas divides the book into three 
“threads”: Traditional Structures for 
Organizing Knowledge, which covers 
organizational structures commonly used 
in libraries and the academic world and 
the history thereof; Personal Structures 
for Organizing Knowledge, which cov-
ers organizational structures developed 
by individuals; and Socially Constructed 
Structures for Organizing Knowledge, 
which covers organizational structures 
that are developing as a result of Web 
2.0 technologies, such as folksonomies, 
tagging, and bookmarking. Each chapter 
begins with “Focus Points” that present 
the basic concepts to be presented in that 
chapter and concludes with “Thought 
Exercises,” a series of questions about the 
concepts discussed; there are also ample 
bibliographical references. Abbas notes 
in the preface that the book is written for 
library and information science students 
as well as practicing professionals and 
researchers, for whom the “Thought Ex-
ercises” might serve as assignments; for 
others, discussion points.

The first “thread” encompasses chap-
ters 1–4, which include an introduction 
to the concept of knowledge organization 
as well as the historical development of