bookrevs


196 College & Research Libraries 

broaden the mind, but it also may con­
fuse, even frighten, and reinforce tenden­
cies to withdraw. Management of the 
emerging information glut becomes the 
important issue. O’Donnell has kind 
words for librarians, and he sees oppor­
tunities for them to take the lead by ex­
tending their profession’s experience and 
expertise in evaluating, filtering, and de­
scribing information resources into 
cyberspace. Librarians are the intelligent 
software needed to organize electronic 
information resources, but they will face 
significant challenges in maintaining ac­
cess to, and preserving resources in, elec­
tronic formats. 

Higher education, too, has a significant 
contribution to make in preparing people 
for life in a world of electronic text. How­
ever, this will require a reordering of pri­
orities and practices as well as significant 
changes in the way we teach. The elec­
tronic resources already at hand provide 
an unprecedented opportunity to empha­
size the learning process by having stu­
dents participate in the ongoing work of 
scholarship. In cooperation with each 
other and with their professors, students 
can engage interactively with textual re­
sources in projects that will make them 
active participants in broadening and 
deepening our collective knowledge. 
Such experience in the classroom can give 
students a better preparation for life after 
graduation than do conventional peda­
gogical practices. 

O’Donnell points out that improve­
ments and innovations in technology ini­
tially tend to be perceived simply as bet­
ter ways to do familiar tasks. Over time, 
their cumulative effects, which cannot be 
foreseen, much less controlled, create new 
and different environments to which in­
dividuals and societies must adapt. In 
Avatars, O’Donnell has chosen to speak 
to the positive potential consequences of 
electronic texts even as he acknowledges 
that there are other, less desirable possi­
bilities. As individuals, we may hope for 
the best while fearing something worse 
and, bearing in mind Cassiordorus who 
puts in a final appearance at the conclu-

March 1999 

sion of Avatars, do the best we can to re­
spond constructively.—Chris Africa, Uni­
versity of Iowa. 

Qualitative Research. Eds. Gillian M. 
McCombs and Theresa M. Maylone. 
Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois 
Graduate School of Library and Infor­
mation Science, Library Trends 46, no. 
4 (spring 1998): 597–789. $18.50 (ISSN 
0024-2594). 

Despite, or perhaps because of, the im­
portance of a largely quantitative infor­
mation science in the recent history of li­
brarianship, efforts to introduce us to, and 
school us in, qualitative research are now 
much more common than they once were. 
Wisely steering clear of the more general 
epistemological issues in the philosophy 
of the social sciences (not because these 
are unimportant but, rather, because their 
importance demands separate and full 
treatment elsewhere), this collection of ten 
contributions nonetheless manages to 
cover a sizable range of methodological 
and theoretical issues. That in itself makes 
it worth reading. 

For example, Horn economically de­
scribes a set of four general theoretical ori­
entations that tends to frame much, if not 
all, of qualitative research: symbolic 
interactionism, phenomenology, herme­
neutics, and critical studies (the bibliog­
raphy provides many places to continue 
for those who are interested). Gary P. 
Radford addresses the positivist bias of 
information science with useful discus­
sions of recent French social theory. Day 
discusses organizational change from the 
standpoint of discourse analysis and ex­
pansive ideology-critique. And Liebscher 
rounds out the more theoretical end by 
recognizing (as much of the better work 
in the social sciences shows) that quanti­
tative and qualitative methods need not 
be mutually exclusive and should be cre­
atively played off one another. For those 
entrenched in the positivist camp who are 
unconvinced by the general arguments 
set forth in favor of qualitative research, 
Liebscher ’s discussion of triangulation 
should be especially relevant. They ought 



 

Book Reviews 197 

to be reassured to learn, if they do not al­
ready know, that the attempt to tackle the 
more interesting empirical questions is 
leading an increasing number of research­
ers to select methods from both para­
digms. 

The remainder of the papers, with one 
exception, presents results of empirical 
research in library and information use. 
McCombs applies the ethnographic ap­
proach of cultural anthropology to an aca­
demic computing center so as to better 
appreciate the contrast between the cul­
tures of computing and librarianship. 
Resurrecting an older theme in studies of 
reference work, Marie L. Radford pre­
sents data from a naturalistic study show­
ing how nonverbal cues from library 
workers influence users’ decisions to seek 
help (eye contact seems to be the most 
notable of these). Borrowing from cogni­
tive anthropology, Smith and Yachnes 
discover and describe the kinds of men­
tal scripts followed by users of electronic 
texts. And Pendleton and Chatman study 
the use and exchange of information en­
tirely outside the formal contexts of li­
brary use, in what the authors call “small 
world perspectives.” The final paper 
(Wallace and Van Fleet) is somewhat out­
side this general scope and deals with the 
reception of qualitative research from the 
standpoint of the editorial traditions of 
professional journals. 

Even though this collection is largely 
coherent and the contributions explore 
various inflections of a central topic, it is 
still rather hard to evaluate. Perhaps this 
is because the very idea of qualitative re­
search harbors a demanding diversity of 
viewpoints, styles, and methods; quanti­
tative research, by contrast, seems to seek 
(though it may not always achieve) uni­
versality or even uniformity of purpose 
and outlook. This raises the question, how 
is it possible to manage all this diversity? 

In her introduction, Maylone claims 
that an underlying common framework 
unites these viewpoints—the “emphasis 
on context.” This is true when we oppose 
qualitative to quantitative; and it seems 
to fit reasonably well when we are look­

ing at symbolic interactionism or herme­
neutics, two of Horn’s four frameworks. 
But with phenomenology, the picture is 
otherwise, for here subjectivity (or inten­
tionality perhaps) is more fundamental 
than context; indeed, the contexts of ex­
perience are understood in phenomeno­
logical terms as constitutive achievements 
of consciousness. And with critical stud­
ies, a rather broad category that may need 
greater refinement, the common denomi­
nator seems to be power, not context. In 
Foucault, to take one example, there is a 
strong sense that the power distributed 
unevenly throughout various contexts of 
discourse tends to break up contexts epi­
sodically and reorganize them along dif­
ferent lines. 

Aside from these conceptual issues, 
there is one other problem that, though 
certainly not fatal, makes overall assess­
ment difficult. Although the papers are 
all relatively interesting on their own and 
are worth reading, they are not all clearly 
related to the four paradigms set out in 
Horn’s lead essay. The papers by Gary 
Radford and Day, for example, exemplify 
aspects of critical studies; in the essays by 
McCombs, Marie Radford, Smith and 
Yachnes, and Pendleton and Chatman, on 
the other hand, there is a common reli­
ance on ethnography. How are they re­
lated to symbolic interactionism, phe­
nomenology, or hermeneutics? Thus, al­
though these papers present interesting 
qualitative findings, their theoretical sig­
nificance remains somewhat unclear. Al­
ternatively, perhaps Horn’s essay places 
too much emphasis on general philo­
sophical perspectives and not enough on 
the relation between ethnography and so­
cial theory in the emerging qualitative 
paradigm. Either way, the effect is one of 
imbalance. 

These observations suggest areas in 
which more work might be done and cer­
tainly do not detract from the consider­
able interest of the volume. Mark Tyler 
Day’s essay, for instance, is heavily theo­
retical, and yet he also provides an ex­
ample of how specialized software that 
has been used in theory-testing also can 



 

198 College & Research Libraries 

be used to generate theory from digitized 
text collections by permitting the analy­
sis and interpretation of texts along the­
matic lines. This kind of research has been 
done, of course, for decades with much 
expenditure of time and effort, but Day’s 
examples show a new approach that au­
tomates some of the work and presum­
ably frees the researcher for more analy­
sis and interpretation. One cannot help 
but wonder if something like this has ap­
plications in areas such as citation and 
citation context analysis, which hitherto 
have been served mostly by quantitative 
methods. If so, one could study citations 
as discursive practices, just as one stud­
ies the larger texts and contexts in which 
they are embedded. Examples such as 
these show that this volume has the po­
tential to stimulate some very promising 
research indeed.—Michael F. Winter, Uni­
versity of California-Davis. 

Travis, Molly Abel. Reading Cultures: The 
Construction of Readers in the Twentieth 
Century. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Il­
linois Univ. Pr., 1998. 173p. $39.95, alk. 
paper (ISBN 0-8093-2146-7). LC 97­
10063. 

Reading Cultures explores the expectations 
that readers bring to books and the ways 
that critics, scholars, teachers, and the 
texts themselves work to “construct” 
readers in different times and places. It 
analyzes reactions to and interactions 
with different kinds of literary works. The 
particular contribution that Molly Abel 
Travis (associate professor of English at 
Tulane University) hopes to bring to the 
field of reader response theory is to ex­
amine reading communities or cultures 
as defined by race, gender, class, and age. 
To oversimplify a bit, she wants to syn­
thesize the rhetorical study of texts and 
readers with newer concerns of feminism, 
cultural studies, postcolonialism, queer 
studies, and so on. No small task. 

The implied reader of this book about 
readers is an English professor or gradu­
ate student. Because I am neither, I found 
the book heavy going. It would be easy 
to declare it unreadable: laden with ref-

March 1999 

erences to other people’s theories (no 
doubt the residue of a dissertation) and 
brimming with the specialized vocabu­
lary of critical theory (“metaplagiarism” 
was a new term for me). But this would 
be cowardly. As others have argued, lit­
erary studies—like all academic disci­
plines—is entitled to its own jargon, 
theory, and intellectual rigor. So I will 
soldier on and try to translate the main 
points of the book into ordinary English. 

Travis works her way through the 
twentieth century in five chapters, each a 
foray into a different field of readerly 
complexity. “Two Cultures of Reading in 
the Modernist Period” begins with an 
analysis of “the cultural effort invested 
in rendering Joyce’s Ulysses readable.” 
The author makes excellent use of pri­
mary sources and quotations to tell this 
essentially comic tale. Readers were per­
plexed and angered by Ulysses. Perhaps 
many still are. Joyce knowingly dis­
mantled and parodied all the comfortable 
conventions of nineteenth-century narra­
tive, refusing to compromise for 
readability’s sake. Promoters of high art 
labored to persuade the American public 
of the novel’s order, harmony, and mas­
tery. Travis reproduces a two-page spread 
that appeared in the Saturday Review of Lit­
erature in 1934 entitled “How to Enjoy 
James Joyce’s Great Novel Ulysses,” with 
a plan of Dublin, list of characters, and 
detailed synopsis. The chapter continues 
with some rather desultory discussion of 
Virginia Woolf’s terror of a devouring 
middlebrow culture, touching on such 
institutions as the Book of the Month 
Club, Reader’s Digest, and the Saturday 
Review itself. 

The next two chapters deal respec­
tively with gender and racial differences 
in texts, readers, and interpretation. “Sex­
ing the Text: Postmodern Reading, Femi­
nist Theory, and Ironic Agency” compares 
works by Vladimir Nabokov and Italo 
Calvino (who implicitly assume a mas­
culine reader) with works by the avant­
garde feminist writers Kathy Acker (a 
punk writer) and Angela Carter (“who 
wants her readers to engage interactively