College and Research Libraries


in decline, in ascendance, at a standstill-
gives credibility to the encyclopedia by 
acknowledging the varying viewpoints 
of industry analysts, scholars, and prac-
titioners. 

The second part of the encyclopedia 
considers the state of publishing from the 
perspective of six regions-Africa, Asia, 
Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, 
and North America-and selected coun-
tries (about thirty, including South Africa, 
Japan, Russia, Nigeria, and Canada). Al-
though there is no formula for style or 
coverage, the reader can reliably expect 
the historic, demographic, and sociopo-
litical background of each country to be 
explored and relevant current statistical 
information about publishing to be pro-
vided. These country-based essays de-
scribe at length the cultural context that 
characterizes book publishing. Even the 
most cosmopolitan of readers will have 
something to learn: why some experts 
guard against African indigenous pub-
lishers "leapfrogging" over conventional 
book production methods directly to new 
electronic technologies; the lack of 
trained publishing professionals in devel-
oping countries, such as copyeditors in 
India; how the distribution system in Ja-
pan, which is based on consignment 
sales, affects book selling; the significance 
of "komiks," derived from the American 
comic book, in the Philippines; or why 
Great Britain and France have displaced 
Mexico and Argentina as the leading 
countries importing books from Spain. 

The shortcomings of the encyclopedia 
are few; however, the following are wor-
thy of mention. Among world regions, 
Africa and Asia receive the most exten-
sive consideration. Europe lacks the over-
view essay that other regions receive-
an instance where the significance of the 
European Union as a publisher might 
have been articulated. The Middle East 
consists of merely three essays and only 
the contribution on "Israel" by Irene 
Sever is new. "The Arab World" and 
"Egypt" figure among seven reprints in 

Book Reviews 91 

the encyclopedia, three of which are from 
Altbach's Publishing and Development in 
the Third World (1992). The contribution 
on the United States is largely a financial 
statement, devoid of philosophical or cul-
tural context. The other regional essays are 
so informative that the reader longs for 
comprehensive geographic coverage. 

Topics lacking treatment include eth-
nic publishing in the United States and 
an overview of official and intergovern-
mental publishing. Most subjects are suf-
ficiently introduced within the typical 
double-column, six- to twelve-page, 
length, but others are perhaps too com-
plex to explore within these confines. Al-
bert Greco's "Mergers and Acquisitions 
in the U.S. Book Industry, 1960-89" falls 
short of a satisfactory examination of eco-
nomic concentration in the publishing in-
dustry; the reader expects more precise 
documentation for some of the tables and 
would be grateful if the appendix of 
mergers took into account the seminal 
work of Elin Christianson, "Mergers in 
the Publishing Industry, 1958-1970," Jour-
nal of Library History (1972). 

Through the range and diversity of 
topics and countries covered, common 
themes emerge-discussions about the 
stakeholders in international copyright 
debates from various regional perspec-
tives; the importance of autonomous in-
digenous publishing; and the value of the 
book as a cultural asset weighed against 
its viability as a commercial product. In-
ternational Book Publishing: An Encyclope-
dia is greater than the sum of its parts and 
should stimulate further research.-Mar-
tha L. Brogan, Yale University, New Haven, 
Conn ecticut. 

Reference and Information Services: An In-
troduction . 2nd ed. Eds. Richard E. 
Bopp and Linda C. Smith. Englewood, 
Colo .: Libraries Unlimited, 1995. 626p. 
$47.50 cloth (ISBN 1-56308-130-X); $35 
paper (ISBN 1-56308-129-6). 

If the year 1876 counts as the Big Bang of 
United States librarianship, arguably the 



92 College & Research Libraries 

major force unleashed by the explosion 
was that of information, research, and 
educational services to users. This auspi-
cious year brought (in addition to the 
founding of ALA) publication of the Bu-
reau of Education's Public Libraries in the 
United States of America chapter on 'Works 
of Reference for Libraries" and Samuel 
Green's pioneering "Personal Relations 
Between Librarians and Readers" (Library 
Journal, 1876). The subsequent quarter 
century produced a literature that estab-
lished the repertory of goals, categories, 
and issues for reference work as text-
books like Reference and Information Ser-
vices teach us that repertory now. 

Combining features of such bibliog-
raphies of reference publications as Alice 
Kroeger's Guide to the Study and Use of 
Reference Books (1902) and such how-to's 
on the rudiments of library research as 
Margaret Hutchins's A Guide to the Use 
of Libraries (1925), the general reference 
textbook lineage proper begins with 
James I. Wyer's A Reference Work (1930) 
and, contrary to the implications of the 
present editors' ''belief" that their first 
edition (1991) filled "a need for a refer-
ence text that would go beyond the study 
of the tools and interview techniques 
used at the reference desk," descends 
with considerable scope and consis-
tency of approach through its succes-
sors, Hutchins's Introduction to Reference 
Work (1944) and William A. Katz's two-
volume Introduction to Reference Work 
(1969; 6th ed., 1991). 

The new Reference and Information Ser-
vices looks back at this history and its 
own first edition from the vantage of 
another Big Bang, the explosion of the 
Internet, a development signaled by the 
expansion of a couple of pages from the 
old chapter 5 into a new chapter on net-
worked information. The new edition is 
approximately 150 pages longer than the 
first and continues its bipartite division 
of topical chapters on "concepts" (that 
is, the various dimensions of reference 
service) and "source" chapters on types 

January 1996 

of publications. The subject index has 
been helpfully expanded, and coverage 
of children's and Canadian materials has 
been increased. The text has been rede-
signed so that sections and subsections 
are now better distinguished typographi-
cally, and it has been thoroughly revised. 
Revisions range from tinkering with 
paragraphing and word choice to gen-
eral augmentation (chapter 1) to thor-
ough reworking (chapter 10, former 
chapter 2) to updating with sources, for-
mats, and services not available to the 
first edition. 

In summarizing a field's knowledge, 
a textbook both instructs the neophyte 
and reminds the practitioner while act-
ing for both as a guide to the literature. 
The revised Reference and Information Ser-
vices, succeeds in these roles. While of-
fering much information in highlight-
able, outlined form, it reports the variety 
of opinion on disputed questions, and 
lards its pages with notes and chapter 
bibliographies from which students 
might develop papers or presentations 
and librarians might review what they 
think they already know. 

Students should be warned, however, 
that reference librarianship is more inter-
esting than this text makes it out to be. 
Because of the need to summarize, text-
books often are clearly written but 
struggle to be interesting. With their func-
tional, usually simple prose and their 
gray expanses of material arrayed in test-
able format, they tend to drain a topic of 
the blood of everyday reality; moreover, 
the form encourages such portentous or 
merely vapid generalizations as "The 
learner does the postulating, analyzing, 
and, ultimately, learning" in the present 
chapter on instruction. No one will con-
tend that this book is a good read, for, 
although the editors have largely harmo-
nized the discord that can creep into 
multiauthored works, one misses voice 
and color in this book's blandly utilitar-
ian displays of information and analy-
sis. About this highly personalized activ-

. 



ity of reference service, about personal 
qualities and behaviors, the people who 
offer and use reference services, it has less 
to say than it might. Unlike its predeces-
sors, it is reticent about the affective as-
pects of service, the interpersonal dy-
namics, pleasures, and satisfactions of the 
work; in general, the hard glint of clini-
cal abstraction lingers in its gaze. Thus, 
no Bopp and Smith librarian would feel 
the "interest, amounting to fascination, 
[the] thrills, amounting at times to ec-
stasy" that Wyer sees as the librarian's 
occupational reward. If capable of it, the 
Bopp and Smith information hound 
would raise an ironic eyebrow at 
Hutchins's narrative of a young librarian 
who returns "flushed from the periodical 
indexes" to the desk, where she is flus-
tered to encounter a student whom she 
and colleagues are transforming into a 
library-competent scholar; nor would the 
student, days later, feel a pang of disap-
pointment in not finding her at her post. 

Those who lament the absence of theo-
retically minded "dead Germans" in li-
brarianship will find no comfort here ex-
cept perhaps in the rather eccentrically 
cast chapter 10, which, with chapter 1, 
might have paid more attention to the 
economic and political trends that cur-
rently threaten egalitarian library service. 
The editors might have reconciled chap-
ter 6 on instruction, and indeed the en-
tire history of reference librarianship, 
with the statement in chapter 7 that 
"[r ]eference librarians rarely see them-
selves as educators." An uneasy tension 
pervades the text's participation in the 
transition from print to electronic ser-
vices. OCLC and RLIN are still quaintly 
labeled "nontraditional" reference 
sources; cards introduce bibliographic 
control and printed pages periodical in-
dexing; the encyclopedia chapter dis-
cusses multimedia but gears search strat-
egies to printed versions. Granted the 
difficulties of using electronic interfaces 
to demonstrate these points, might the 
text not be reconceived to do so? 

Book Reviews 93 

Bopp and Smith situates its workman-
like bulk squarely in the century-old 
United States tradition of reference ser-
vice and is eminently usable in all the 
ways its predecessors have been. Because 
Katz (new edition scheduled for 1996) 
covers similar territory in similar ways, 
personal preference may ultimately de-
termine whether a general reference 
course requires one or the other. Minor 
differences of emphasis aside, Bopp and 
Smith is rather more conscious of itself 
as a survey of the reference literature, 
whereas Katz, like Wyer and Hutchins, 
is more interestingly written. Bopp and 
Smith smells rather of earnestly cheerless 
"learning sessions" in airport Ramadas, 
whereas Katz smells a little more of the 
reference desk-Robert Kieft, Haverford 
College, Haverford, Pennsylvania. 

Literary Texts in an Electronic Age: Schol-
arly Implications and Library Services. 
Ed. Brett Sutton. Urbana-Champaign, 
Ill.: Graduate School of Library and 
Information Science, Univ. of Illinois, 
1994. 207p. $25. (ISBN 0-87845096-3). 

This book, which publishes the papers 
presented at the 1994 Clinic on Library 
Applications of Data Processing, focuses 
on fairly recent developments in the area 
of electronic texts. Its attempt to address 
the impact of these developments on both 
scholarly research and library services is 
not always successful. Although the 
eleven papers are appropriately wide-
ranging, their quality is very uneven. 

Because a significant number of librar-
ies have started to provide access to elec-
tronic texts in a serious fashion, a thor-
ough examination of the impact of these 
texts on library services has recently be-
come possible and necessary. As a result, 
libraries have begun to grapple with a 
number of issues, such as the develop-
ment of selection criteria, licensing and 
copyright regulations, changes within the 
MARC format to allow for description 
of and access to electronic/internet re-
sources, and fundamental decisions on