reviews.indd


Book Reviews 85 

Theme three looks at usability and ac-
cessibility of digital library services. The 
papers in this section are quite diverse, 
moving from a broad and general ex-
amination of the characteristics of the truly 
usable and accessible digital library to far 
narrower studies involving barriers to 
library use by Nigerian professionals and 
digital library services at the Italian Health 
Institute library. Theme four is similarly 
structured. Its focus is on designing the 
information environment from the na-
tional and institutional perspective, and, 
again, the papers vary in content, from an 
examination of broad principles involving 
researchers and resources to specifi c stud-
ies such as those involving Web services in 
Portuguese public libraries and Denmark’s 
electronic research library. 

The last section focuses on the creation 
of digital resources by user communities 
and the provision of “usable” reposito-
ries for others. These communities can 
be large or small—for instance, the gen-
eral public that might wish to participate 
(aided by museums, libraries, or archives) 
in the sharing of cultural heritage infor-
mation online or the “closed” community 
of a university where an “open archive” is 
established to store an institution’s schol-
arly output such as papers (published or 
not), data, reports, and so on. 

The diversity of papers in this volume 
is indicative of a number of major ways 
in which libraries and librarians are 

Index to advertisers 
AIAA 2 
Annual Reviews cover 2 
CHOICE 7 
EBSCO cover 4 
Greenwood Publishing cover 3 
Harvard Leadership 19 
Idea Group Publishing 1 
Modern Language Association 4, 5 

changing. Technology is occupying a tre-
mendous amount of our time and energy, 
and “knowledge workers” are not afraid 
to experiment, customize, and play with 
various products and resources. Nor, if 
these papers are accurate, are we reluctant 
to specify when the results have been 
less than stellar: Great emphasis is now 
placed on pinning down and defining 
the ingredients that make up a successful 
service, project, or product via the use 
of social science research methods. Our 
profession seems hungrier than ever for 
statistics on anything and everything that 
can be measured, looking for the answer 
to such elusive matters as: What makes 
this thing tick, run, work, succeed? What 
doesn’t? What characteristics are we look-
ing for? How should we quantify this? Is 
it quantifiable? Could we do this again 
somewhere else? Do we really want to? 

Nevertheless, until the day comes that 
librarians work from their homes in front 
of computers—in the same manner as the 
programmers and other computer work-
ers we hear about who simply roll out of 
bed, make coffee, and start their day in 
front of the computer in their home of-
fice—libraries will continue to be places 
with walls. Accordingly, the idea of space, 
place, and geography in these papers is 
real and palpable even when discussing 
patrons not using the resources located 
within the actual building itself. The char-
acter of a physical institution—a place 
with walls from which projects and ideas 
emanate—is overwhelmingly evident in 
every single paper in this volume. And 
that rootedness in place is, quite frankly, 
the real joy in reading a collection such 
as this.—Nancy McCormack, Queen’s 
University. 

Staikos, Konstantinos Sp. The History of 
the Library in Western Civilization, Vol. I: 
From Minos to Cleopatra: The Greek World 
from the Minoans’ Archival Libraries to 



86 College & Research Libraries 

the Universal Library of the Ptolemies. 
Trans. Timothy Cullen. New Castle, 
Del.: Oak Knoll; The Netherlands: Hes 
& DeGraaf; and Athens: Kotinos. 2004. 
351p. $75 (ISBN: 1584561149, USA). 
LC 03-58221. 

From Minos to Cleopatra is volume one of 
a proposed five-volume series. The other 
four are: Volume II, The Roman World from 
Cicero to Hadrian: From the First Bilingual 
Collections to the Monumental Libraries of the 
Empire; Volume III, The Byzantine World, 
from Constantine the Great to Cardinal 
Bessarion: The Influence of the Church on 
the Spread of Learning and the Foundation 
of University Libraries; Volume IV, The Me-
dieval World in the West, from Cassiodorus 
to Furnival: The Influence of the Church on 
the Spread of Learning and the Foundation 
of University Libraries; and Volume V, The 
Renaissance, from Petrarch to Michelangelo: 
The Role of the Revival of Ancient Literature 
and the Spread of Printing in the Foundation 
of Humanistic Libraries. 

From Minos to Cleopatra is divided into 
five chapters. Chapter I, The Minoan and 
Mycenaean Civilizations, covers ancient 
scripts, including the pictographic or 
hieroglyphic (2500–1800 BC), Linear 
A (1900–1450 BC), Phaistos Disc (circa 
1700 BC), Linear B (1400–1200 BC), and 
the Cypriot syllabary (1050–320 BC), as 
well as the work of Bronze Age scribes 
in making tablets and storing them in 
archives. Evidence from excavations in 
the Near East, such as the state archives 
in the palace library at Ebla, indicates that 
the usual arrangement for fi ling tablets 
consisted of wooden shelves attached 
to the walls and supported on wooden 
posts. The shelves were often used to store 
wooden or plaster boxes or wicker baskets 
that served as bookcases. Other shelves 
were partitioned into pigeonholes, where 
tablets were arranged in a way similar to 
books today. Tablets often stood vertically 
like books in a bookcase with only the 

January 2005 

edge showing; at other times, they were 
stacked lying flat so that only the text of 
the first side of the tablet on top of the 
stack was visible. Most tablets included a 
length of fiber or string inserted into the 
center. The free end of the string had to be 
long enough to be threaded through a clay 
sealing and fi rmly knotted. The sealings 
usually served as labels for individual 
tablets and also often used to indicate the 
contents of boxes or baskets of tablets or 
papyrus rolls. 

Chapter II, From Homer to the End of 
the Classical Period, covers the develop-
ment of public, academic, and private 
libraries in the Greek World from the time 
of Polycrates of Samos and Pisistratus 
(founder of the fi rst public library Athens 
in the sixth century BC) to the formation 
of the first libraries in the Athenian philos-
ophy schools, Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s 
Lyceum, the Garden of Epicurus, and 
Zeno’s Stoa (in the fourth century BC). Be-
fore the mid-fourth century BC, the value 
of the written word and its usefulness to 
education were vigorously debated. Evi-
dence suggests that the era of the written 
word occurred in the Greek world in the 
early decades of the fifth century, accom-
panied by a decline in the oral tradition. 
Images of the scribe and the reader of the 
Aristotelian age came to symbolize the 
new era as the written word inexorably 
replaced oral recitation from memory of 
the Socratic and Platonic ages. 

Although chapters III and IV both 
cover the Helenistic Period, chapter III 
focuses on the Universal Library of the 
Ptolemies in Alexandria and chapter IV 
focuses on the monumental libraries of 
other dynasties that succeeded Alexander 
the Great in Asia Minor and the Near 
East, from Pergamum to Ai Khanoum 
to the libraries of the gymnasia. At the 
very mention of the Hellenistic period, 
most readers imagine the Alexandrian 
Library as a symbol of the Greeks’ cultural 



supremacy in the then known world. The 
three main factors that led to this accu-
mulation of books included the opening 
up of relations between the Greek world 
and the East, the passionate love of books 
displayed by the Ptolemaic kings, and the 
rise to prominence of the new discipline 
of textual studies in literature. The found-
ing of great libraries and the growth of 
textual studies were not limited to the 
Greeks but were also the characteristic 
feature of other kingdoms ruled by Al-
exander the Great’s successors as well as 
other intellectual centers that managed to 
remain administratively independent of 
the ambitious Macedonian kings. Of the 
latter, the library at Pergamum in Asia 
Minor, founded by the Attalids, tried for 
a long time to create a library rivaling the 
Alexandrian Library. Also, the archives at 
Ai Khanoum in Bactira in the northeast 
of Afghanistan, one of the kingdoms 
through which the Silk Road ran, was a 
Greek cultural center located in one of the 
most remote spots on the globe. 

Chapter V, Architecture, focuses on the 
architecture, interior layout, furniture, and 
fittings of libraries and archives toward 
the end of the second century BC. Drawing 
together the conclusions of architectural 
historians and evidence from excavations, 
Staikos has painted a picture of a typical 
library during this period. The library 
would have a main hall designed to house 
only a token quantity, not the main collec-
tion. These books would not necessarily 
have been the most used or useful, the 
concept of the reference library being a 
more modern concept. Around the main 
hall would be auxiliary buildings where 
the majority of the books were kept. As 
the process of collecting books continued 
over a long period and followed no pre-
ordained plan, it is reasonable to assume 
that the bulk of the collection was housed 
in outbuildings that grew up like the “cells 
of a beehive, with big and small rooms 

Book Reviews 87 

connected to each other by roofed stoas 
and hidden corridors.” 

From Minos to Cleopatra is a handsome 
volume, which is printed on glossy paper 
and bound in maroon buckram-covered 
boards with title and publication data 
embossed in gold on the front cover and 
spine. An illustration of an imaginary 
reconstruction of the Museum in Alexan-
dria from the title page of M. Meibonius’s 
Diogenes Laertius (published in Amster-
dam in 1698) is affixed to the cover and 
bordered with a gold-embossed frame. 
A dust jacket with illustrations from the 
Late Minoan period (1600–1550 BC) and 
from the time of Cleopatra VII (51 BC[?]) 
adds both protection and further detail. 
Lavishly reproduced illustrations in black, 
white, and sepia, as well as full color, bring 
the well-written (and skillfully translated 
from the original Greek) text to life. 

Each chapter is documented copiously 
with endnotes that further illumine the 
text. An extensive twenty-three-page 
bibliography leads the reader to primary 
and secondary sources on the history 
of libraries in the ancient world, and a 
nineteen-page index provides detailed 
access to this volume. It was surpris-
ing that Lionel Casson’s Libraries in the 
Ancient World (Yale 2001) was not in the 
bibliography. Although Casson’s and 
Staikos’s works cover some of the same 
territory, Casson’s, with illustrations 
limited to black and white, sells at a third 
of the price of Staikos’s. Academic and 
research libraries and serious collectors 
of library history will certainly want both 
for their different approaches and for 
their discussions of material that does 
not overlap.—Plummer Alston Jones Jr., 
East Carolina University. 

Warner, Julian. Humanizing Information 
Technology. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 
2004. 156p. alk. paper, $35 (ISBN: 
0810849569). LC 2003-17048.