reviews


 
 

Book Reviews 395 

through serendipity, not by following a 
carefully planned lifelong career chart. 
Most of the essays convey a sense of 
optimism, as well as an ability to cope 
well with less job security than many of 
our ilk tolerate comfortably. The ben­
efit for these essayists (particularly 
those who are self-employed) is free­
dom from bureaucracy, supplanted by 
the ability to absorb and adapt to 
change quickly and responsively. An­
other hallmark of the collection is the 
number of people who have created 
new careers for themselves out of fam­
ily necessity: Aluri developed his pub­
lishing venture when he moved to North 
Carolina with his wife Mary Reichel 
when she assumed the university librar­
ian post at Appalachian State, whereas 
Mary K. Feldman married, raised four 
children, and started college at age 42— 
all in preparation for her return-to-work 
career as an independent librarian! 

There are two vital lessons for aca­
demic library readers in What Else You Can 
Do with a Library Degree. The first is that 
librarians—even those firmly entrenched 
in academe—can do something else with 
that MLS. (Perhaps we would all do well 
to venture outside the box on occasion to 
refresh ourselves, our perspectives, and 
our organizations.) The second lesson is 
this: When one of these people decides to 
return to traditional librarianship in 
higher education and applies for work in 
our organizations, we should consider 
seriously what they bring—flexibility, 
ingenuity, creativity, and a heavy dose of 
optimism. Rather than focusing on the 
presence or lack of traditional academic 
credentials, we might see that these 
people are high-energy innovators whose 
skills and perspectives could be of enor­
mous benefit in the conventional library 
setting. 

What Else You Can Do with a Library 
Degree is far from a scholarly work. Its 
essays are chatty, personal, and readable. 
They all have potential use for profes­
sional development collections in aca­

demic libraries, particularly those with 
encroaching burnout among professional 
staff and those facing staff cutbacks or 
retirement buyouts. Many of these librar­
ian-writers have made lemonade from 
lemons, and their stories are worth read­
ing and sharing.—Diane J. Graves, Hollins 
University, Virginia. 

Meadows, A.J. Communicating Research. 
London: Academic Pr., 1998. 266p. alk. 
paper, $59.95 (ISBN 0-12-487415-0). LC 
97-23432. 

In the great chain of scholarly communi­
cation, there really are only two essential 
beings—author and reader. The rest of 
us—publishers, libraries, indexers, book­
sellers—are all in the middle foraging for 
existence in the hard ground between the 
two. Some of us are more successful than 
others, such as Elsevier with its huge net 
profits. All of us, as A. J. Meadows points 
out, occupy niches that have been defined 
over the past three hundred years. 

Since the middle of the seventeenth 
century, the number of people engaged 
in research and, correspondingly, the pub­
lications describing their research, have 
been increasing exponentially. Every ten 
or fifteen years, the volume of published 
information has doubled—meaning that 
over the course of any individual’s career, 
the number of publications and the vari­
ous channels for those publications has 
at least tripled. Meadows uses the illus­
tration of the volume of research expand­
ing like a balloon with researchers inhab­
iting the expanding surface. To cover the 
same area, researchers have learned to 
specialize and to collaborate in an effort 
to become more focused and simply to 
be able to keep up. Exponential growth 
cannot continue forever, and Meadows 
suggests that the expansion in research 
and in the communication of that research 
will follow an S-shaped curve that will 
flatten out around the middle of the 
twenty-first century. If it does not, Mead­
ows points out, every adult and child in 
the world, along with every dog and cat, 



  

 

396 College & Research Libraries July 1998 

will be engaged in handling research. 
Just as the curve may be beginning to 

flatten, information technology has 
given it a boost by making researchers 
more efficient and, possibly, making 
scholarly communication more man­
ageable. Meadows’s theme in this book 
is that research communication has al­
ways been evolving and changing. Re­
searchers themselves, the readers and 
the authors, and their communities 
change slowly. The means of communi­
cation, which are handled by publish­
ers, libraries, and others in the middle, 
have always changed more rapidly, and 
the rate of change is being accelerated 
by developments in information tech­
nology. 

His message is especially critical to aca­
demic librarians. With his background at 
the British Library and his deep scholar­
ship as a historian of science combined 
with his extensive research in informa­
tion science, Meadows achieves a special 
balance that is fresh and welcome. In this 
book, he traces the growth of scholarly 
and scientific inquiry over the centuries 
with a focus on the sciences and brings 
his discussion remarkably close to the 
present day, given the production sched­
ule of a scholarly monograph (a subject 
he treats in the book). It is a well-struc­
tured book with six chapters that often 
parallel each other as he discusses the 
evolution of research and its commu­
nication and how the growth of re­
search resulted in the development of 
disciplines. He also focuses on the char-

Index to advertisers 
AACR 296 
AIAA cover 4 
BIOSIS 347 
Blackwell’s Book Srvcs cover 3 
Information Quest 322 
Library Technologies 295 
Merck cover 2 
OCLC 300 
Primary Source Media 362 

acter of the people who undertake re­
search, the channels involved in com­
municating research, the way that re­
s e a r c h  i s  m a d e  p u b l i c ,  a n d  h o w  
people find out about research. He al­
ways ends his chapters by focusing on 
the effects of technology. 

Meadows is evenhanded in his treat­
ment of libraries and publishers. He 
stresses that both institutions face diffi­
culties as electronic publications become 
increasingly important for the commu­
nication of some research. He outlines the 
issues thoroughly and, although his pur­
pose is not to offer an overarching solu­
tion, he does suggest how the future may 
evolve. 

Any practicing academic librarian will 
find much that is familiar here but also 
will learn a great deal as Meadows builds 
his arguments methodically and com­
pletely. He does not spend much time on 
the economics of publishing or on ex­
plaining how commercial publishers 
came to dominate STM (scientific, tech­
nical, medical) publishing. Although that 
would have been useful, he is concerned 
with broader trends. 

This would be an excellent text book 
for a course on the subject and a superb 
primer for administrators and faculty 
who want to learn about the underlying 
pressures that threaten the research en­
deavors of our universities. Any academic 
librarian will benefit from reading it and 
will be better grounded when explaining 
the crisis we face in scientific publishing 
to faculty, administrators, and the pub­
lic.—William Gray Potter, The University of 
Georgia, Athens. 

Rochlin, Gene I. Trapped in the Net: The 
Unanticipated Consequences of Comput­
erization. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton 
Univ. Pr., 1997. 293p. alk.  paper, $29.95 
(ISBN 0-691-01080-3). LC 96-41003. 

If you have not already read this book, 
you owe it to yourself to do so. It is mas­
terfully structured, well researched and 
documented, and often as gripping as a