Book Reviews 401 Library and Technical Skills for Reproducible Research are particularly well developed and provide a wealth of information for librarians who are instructing learners who are new to evaluating and working with datasets. Part II, Data in the Disciplines, focuses on data-related practices within the disciplines and how academic librarians are supporting discipline-specific data needs. The theme of this section itself is very interesting, as are the essays within; however, it would be even more appealing with a robust section on data and the digital humanities. Prac- titioners supporting multiple data needs across disciplines will benefit from reading these chapters. Further collections exploring this topic would be welcome due to the diversity of data, instruction, and management needs across disciplines and within multidisciplinary projects. In Part III, Data Preservation and Access, the focus is on data management, archiving, and access practices. All six chapters are very robust in detail. The chapter on Exploring Disciplinary Metadata and Documentation Practices to Strengthen Data Archiving Services contains important resources that can be used when creating a discovery roadmap for datasets created within the institution. Additionally, the chapter on data-sharing policies addresses a very relevant and important topic of how to share data across institutions and how publishers and journals are exposing and sharing data. Data sharing and transparency are linked to the lively discussion surrounding data access and ownership. These topics have taken front and center stage with the growing open data movement, in addition to the swelling ranks of academic publishers who are publishing datasets to accompany articles. Part IV, Data: Past, Present and Future, features four chapters. The first two chapters provide readers with insights into the work of data librarians in Canada and the United Kingdom. The third and fourth chapters focus on what it’s like to be a data librarian and provides a review of a course taught on data librarianship at the University of Toronto’s iSchool. The first two chapters are relevant and interesting, as data librarians in the United Kingdom are very active on numerous fronts, especially in regard to data management plans and planning. The final chapters are comprehensive roadmaps that can help data librarians assess their skillsets and discover topics and technologies that they may want to explore in the future. Databrarianship: The Academic Data Librarian in Theory and Practice is an essential read for anyone interested in or supporting data services and solutions in an academic library. This work complements titles such as Data Management for Libraries: A LITA Guide and Research and Data Management: Practical Strategies for Information Professional. With the role of librarians in this data-driven world rapidly evolving and expanding, this timely collection of essays will be well received by those who are new to data librarianships, as well as by seasoned data practitioners.—Kara Kugelmeyer, Colby College Sheri V.T. Ross and Sarah W. Sutton. Guide to Electronic Resource Management. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Libraries Unlimited, 2016. 159p. Paper, $55 (ISBN 978-1-4408-3958- 0). LC 2015037581. The complex fluidity and plain messiness of electronic resources management op- erations are extraordinary. The task of abstracting into a single text the foundational knowledge necessary to inform the library science student on this field of practice therefore presents extraordinary challenges. The textbook Guide to Electronic Resource Management is coauthors Sheri V.T. Ross and Sarah Sutton’s effort to provide library science students with a background and overview of the endeavor. This survey is en- riched by deeper discussion of those rare-but-critical functions and responsibilities of which library science students should become aware and which the aspiring electronic resources librarian will need to master on the way to expertise. doi:10.5860/crl.78.3.401 http://10.5860/crl 402 College & Research Libraries March 2017 Considerable intellectual power and professional credibility undergird this textbook. Both Ross and Sutton hold doctoral degrees and are library science instructors. Sutton is an experienced electronic resources librarian. In their Guide, Ross and Sutton instruct the reader about aspects of electronic resources work critical to success, the extant in most library settings and anticipated to persist in the field. All of this is anchored in insights key to professional-level understanding of the enterprise while leaving room for instructors and students to further develop the subject in the classroom. Presented as a survey rather than a reference work, and therefore not intended to inform actions or decisions at point of need, the Guide emphasizes large issues in the field. The authors illustrate some important general concepts with screenshots from existing database products but, for the most part, do not discuss specific databases, publishers, or vendors. The addition of enlivening current examples is left for the instructor who might assign this as a text in coursework. Nevertheless, at times such detail is included that it is unclear who the intended audience really is—a general library science student or the aspiring electronic resources librarian. The book’s eleven chapters are arranged more or less according to a resource his- tory- and life-cycle trajectory: “Emergence and Entrenchment of Electronic Resources in Libraries,” “The Information Environment,” “Information Standards,” “Identifying and Selecting Electronic Resources,” “Acquiring and Licensing Electronic Resources,” “Providing Access to Electronic Resources,” “Managing Access and Discovery,” “Assess- ing Electronic Resources,” “Preserving Electronic Resources,” “Scholarly Communica- tion,” and “Future Directions of Electronic Resource Management.” This organizational structure makes sense as a survey focusing on the material but does not summarize actions delineating electronic resource workflows. At the same time, the chapters on information standards and licensing give far more detail than the nonspecialist would require. Pedagogically, this book is useful in a classroom setting but is less useful for self-teaching. All but the first and last chapters supply activities relevant to topics covered that, like their associated chapters, are noncumulative. A number of instructive diagrams are included, to expound graphically the electronic resources life cycle and to describe models of several larger concepts, including open access publishing, and an interesting pair of diagrams comparing a generic print serials flowchart with an analogous one for electronic resources. Each chapter concludes with a list of references. Many chapters also include recommendations for further reading. There is no bibliography. Each chapter stands well on its own, so harmonizing this new text with an exist- ing syllabus would be possible. For example, an instructor already treating electronic resource collection development as a single topic might pair the very strong chapter 4 with chapter 8 in a single reading assignment. Chapter 4, “Identification and Selection of Electronic Resources,” grounds the reader in the most common requirements for col- lection building, while chapter 8, “Assessing Electronic Resources,” covers deselection as part of its discussion of assessment. An instructor wishing to begin a course with an even broader view than the historical background given in chapter 1 might elect to assign chapter 10, “Scholarly Communication,” as the first reading. There is a good deal of material in this text suitable for class discussion. In chapter 5, on acquisition of electronic resources, the authors state that, after resource selection, “work begins with the acquisitions department to ensure that all of the institution’s requirements are met during the licensing and contract negotiation process” (57). This provides an opportunity for discussion of differences among institutions in organiza- tional structure and payment processing flows. Another passage that might stimulate discussion appears in chapter 11, on “Future Directions” (153): “Although the need for electronic resource librarians to be able to thrive in an environment of ambiguity and constant change is not likely to lessen, their responsibilities may evolve. One possible Book Reviews 403 scenario is that a new intermediary position in libraries devoted to license and contract negotiation will begin to appear. The current situation, that is, the need for librarians to have substantial responsibilities in an area in which they are not professionally trained, for instance, contract law, is not sustainable. An alternative to a new position, one that is already occurring in some academic libraries, would be that such responsibility is farmed out to institutional legal counsel or purchasing specialists.” Besides speculat- ing about the future, this passage captures current controversy in the library world. Care should be taken in presenting these assertions to a generalist audience: that is, a group of library science students planning careers in public service or administration rather than technical services. However, the passage exemplifies beautifully the kind of inquiry to which the newly fledged electronic resources librarian should be equipped to respond, in a manner appropriate to the particular professional setting. While the book’s content has strengths, its editorial problems make it unnecessarily difficult to use and, in some instances, a poor example of an effective presentation of material for students. If we understand that course texts not only provide knowledge but also model standards for how knowledge should be presented, then editorial decisions have ramifications beyond the surface. Grammar and punctuation errors are numerous. The most notable editorial weakness is the index, a shortcoming that, one hopes, will be redressed in future editions. Significant terms used in the book are omitted: for example, “best practices” does not appear in the index at all. However, it occurs in the table of contents and appears seven times across a span of four chapters (32–84). There are also instances in which a term may be listed in the index but the pages on which it appears are only partially enumerated: for example, the term “link resolver” is indexed as appearing only on page 101 when in fact it appears in the text five ad- ditional times. Some terms appear in the index only as compounds: for instance, “Project COUNTER” appears under “P,” its presence indicated on pages 111–114, but the standalone term “COUNTER” appears on its own on five more pages, including a substantive discussion on page 41, yet is not indexed under “C” at all. These indexing issues were discovered through a series of full-text searches in Google Books. Relying on a full-text search in the e-book version is problematic irrespective of the need to type a query each time a reference is desired. For example, when a search on forms of the word “cancel” (also absent from the book’s index) was done, it yielded nonmutu- ally exclusive results. On its own, the index is an incomplete and at times potentially misleading reflection of the book’s content, and in particular it makes content review and analysis, even of topics known to have been covered, significantly more difficult. It also makes harmonizing the learning experience across users of the print vis-á-vis the electronic edition problematic. The coauthors have curated the information from the electronic resources domain that is most difficult to absorb independently and methodically. In doing so, they have contributed a concise survey that promises to remain topical into the future and provides a skeleton for the necessary deeper investigations that electronic resources management requires at a professional level.—Mary O’Dea, St. Cloud State University Cathy O’Neil. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. New York: Crown Publishers, 2016. 272p. Hardcover, $26 (ISBN 978-0553418811). At a moment when democracy is under threat on multiple fronts, Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy describes how a wide spectrum of industrial and governmental practices, poorly conceived models, and algorithms are being used to negatively impact the lives of the most vulnerable. Through a series of engaging case studies, she documents these doi:10.5860/crl.78.3.403 http://10.5860/crl