405 Book Reviews Scholarly Practice, Participatory De- sign and the eXtensible Catalog. Eds. Nancy Fried Foster, Katie Clark, Kor- nelia Tancheva, and Rebekah Kilzer. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2011. 176p. alk. paper . $40 (ISBN 9780838985748). LC 2011013357. http://hdl.handle. net/1802/12375 The eXtensible Catalog (XC) of this book’s title is a project started at University of Rochester ’s River Campus Libraries to create “a set of open-source applications designed to provide access to resources across a range of databases, metadata schemas, and standards.” Currently the XC Software Suite has four components, downloadable for free at www.extensible- catalog.org: a Drupal-based user interface toolkit; a Metadata Services Toolkit; an OAI Toolkit to connect XC with MARC metadata; and an NCIP Toolkit to connect XC with ILS circulation functions. But the book itself is not really about the eXtensible Catalog project. Rather, it consists of a series of articles on research behaviors and scholarly practices among university students and faculty, collected via interviews at four institutions: Cornell University, Ohio State University, Uni- versity of Rochester, and Yale University. Supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, teams at the four universities conducted a total of eighty interviews. They asked questions about researchers’ most recent searches for information, methods for keeping cur- rent, searching for known and unknown items and primary sources, use of library resources for teaching, knowledge of card and online catalogs, use of librarians, and more. The current volume, edited by team members from Rochester, Ohio State, and Cornell, focuses on responses from faculty and graduate students, while a second volume, “What Researchers Do: A Report on User Research for the eXtensible Catalog” (http://hdl.handle. net/1802/12376) presents re- sponses from all faculty and student interviewees. The first chapter, by three XC project members from University of Rochester, provides a helpful overview of XC and explains the rationale for conducting user research for the project. By explor- ing how students and faculty work in various disciplines, their difficulties with existing library systems, and their wish lists for new systems, the team hoped for “a participatory, collaborative process of co-creation.” Their plan was also to create a system that would be flexible enough to evolve with user needs, instead of a static product that would only address known problems of existing catalogs: hence, the “extensible catalog.” The opening chapter is also important for its description of the interview process. Strangely, the edi- tors did not include the list of interview questions in this volume; even though the questions are available online, it would have been helpful to reproduce them here since the analyses in the following chap- ters depend so heavily on the interview transcripts. The remaining chapters report on specific themes discovered through ex- amination of the interview transcripts; with one exception, the analyses focus only on responses from single institu- tions, meaning that each article relies on interview transcripts from, at most, twenty-three subjects. For example, the authors of chapter 2, “Stumbling Blocks and Their Workarounds in the Research Process,” analyze nineteen interview tran- scripts (thirteen faculty and six graduate students) from Cornell University, with a focus on research difficulties; the authors of chapter 6, “Personal Management of Scholarly Information,” use the same set of transcripts but focus on how research- 406 College & Research Libraries July 2012 ers take notes and keep track of their sources. Only chapter 5, “The Use of Ar- chives and Special Collections,” attempts to analyze all eighty interview transcripts. It is curious that, with such a large base from which to draw data, the editors chose to compile only these thin “slices” rather than more comprehensive stud- ies. The worth of the volume is severely limited by the small samples and the focus on transcripts from individual in- stitutions. The differences noted in “How Faculty Members Use Journal Literature” (chapter 4), for example, would be more instructive if the author could also pro- vide comparisons between institutions, between disciplines, or between faculty and students. In addition, the interviews took place in 2008, so the responses reflect a research landscape that has changed significantly in four short years. There is value in asking questions about how our faculty and students find and interact with library resources, but it is unclear how much value there is in the way the answers are presented here. The chapters do a fair job of pulling out common threads from their small sample sets, but in general do not do a good job of answering the more important ques- tion: “So what?” Chapter 6, “Personal Management of Scholarly Information,” goes into great detail on the filing systems and organizational principles used by faculty and graduate students (Do they store articles in print or electronic form? What labeling or naming conventions do they use? How do they take notes on articles and books?), yet the chapter does not provide any ideas on how or why this information could be useful to librarians in serving their users or to the XC Project team in designing next- generation research tools. The authors are to be applauded for the ambitious nature of their user research project and for the wealth of data they have collected. It is regrettable that they were not similarly ambitious in analyzing and reporting the results.—Timothy Hackman, University of Maryland. John R. Turner. A Bibliography of Un- authorised American Editions of The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter 1904–1980. Stroud, U.K.: Ian Hodgkins & Co., 2012. 228p. alk. paper. $60.00 (ISBN 9780906460139). The origin of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, as well as that of some other classic Beatrix Potter stories, was in illustrated letters Potter wrote to the children of her former governess. At the suggestion of a friend, Potter became intrigued by the idea of converting these letters into published books and, as a first attempt, expanded one of them into what she titled The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Mr. McGregor’s Garden. After being rebuffed by several publishers, Potter decided to have her story published privately, under its now familiar shortened title. This was done in two editions, in December 1901 and February 1902, in a combined total of 450 copies. Shortly thereafter, staff at Frederic Warne & Co., one of the firms that had previously declined to publish Potter’s story, saw a copy of the privately printed Peter Rabbit and changed their minds about its prospects. They offered to publish the story with one major demand: that the illustrations, which in the first printings of the book are black and white line drawings, be published instead in color. Potter very reluctantly agreed to produce color versions of her pictures, and these were translated into print by Edmund Evans, the masterful color printer who had been responsible for the color reproductions in earlier English children’s books by artists such as Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway. The Warne edition of The Tale of Peter Rabbit appeared in October 1902, and, by the end of that year, about 28,000 copies had been sold. By the present day, it is thought that 45 million copies have been sold, making it one of the best-selling books of all time. One would naturally expect, with such overwhelming success in Great Britain, that Warne would wish to capture the American market as well, and that indeed was their intention. Unfortunately for