reviews.indd Book Reviews 573 liousness, collective decision making, dialogue, negotiation, insight, action, and the relationship of morality to defi- ance. The teaching methods he presents are quite varied. Along with group work and discussion, they include role play, forum theater, discussions of literary works, having participants construct and analyze a metaphor that portrays them in their professional practice, and exercises using Paulo Freire’s concept of naming and renaming. Newman grounds his concepts and methods in philosophy and critical theory, employing Camus, Sartre, Paulo Freire, Jürgen Habermas, Alfred Jules Ayer, the South African philosopher Rick Turner, and many others. For readers not intimately familiar with philosophy and critical theory, Newman’s explications of key concepts perform a welcome service. An example is his discussion, in Chapter 11, “Disruptive Negotiation,” of how this type of negotiation can transform the issues and the conflict, as well as the people, involved in the negotiation. His model is an incident in Queensland, Australia, in 1996. Negotiations were held among cattle grazers, aboriginals, and environmentalists about land use on the Cape York peninsula. To show that the manner in which these negotiations were conducted changed the perceptions the stakeholders had of each other, he employs both Sartre’s phenomenological writing about the Other, the gaze, and shame and Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of the stranger. Stories are woven throughout the book, and they are effective on several levels. Newman uses stories to illustrate philosophical or theoretical concepts, to motivate, and to provide practical ex- amples of how he teaches the various ele- ments of defiance. They provide a context that enables the reader (and, ultimately, the student) to remember the material and transfer it to new contexts. The ef- fectiveness of these stories is amplifi ed as readers quickly find themselves writing their own stories—thinking of their own contexts, past or future, in which these would be useful techniques. Librarians will find numerous ways to employ this book’s insights and techniques. In the classroom, some of the techniques are best suited to credit courses; but others can be used as pre- sented, or adapted, for one-shot instruc- tion sessions. Instruction librarians can illustrate information literacy skills using topics (for instance, global warming) that embody the need for activism and change. They can ensure that the session also shows students that gathering thorough information from a variety of viewpoints equips citizens to make informed choices. Other techniques can be used in library workplace settings, whether to structure a discussion in a meeting or to help nudge a bureaucracy toward change. Librarians can also use this book in their campus or community service work. For those of us dismayed (as Newman is) by the Iraq War and a host of other conditions that cloud our future, this book provides a language for thinking about and discussing our feelings and our choices. It also gives us the tools to move on to productive action.—Glenn Ellen Starr Stilling, Appalachian State University Pálsdótt ir, Ágústa. Health and Lifestyle: Icelanders’ Everyday Life Information Behaviour. 237 + 45p. Åbo, Finland: Åbo Akademi University Press, 2005. (ISBN 9517652720 print; 9517652739 digital) We’re ordinarily labeled as ‘information professionals,’ but that’s not an entirely sufficient term for who we are and what we, as librarians, do. That is, what we do is certainly centered on information, and we produce and creatively use much metadata about information. And we do all this with the goal of providing the information we preserve to those users who will turn it into knowledge. But, in important ways, our whole profession is built upon anecdotal presumptions about the relationships among needs, 574 College & Research Libraries information seeking, and information delivery. We have in recent years begun to move outside the library walls, to interact with our users on their turfs, to better anticipate their future needs and how we might meet them more effi ciently. We are attempting to insert ourselves and our resources into the research process at earlier points. Readers of this journal have the additional advantage of working in institutional settings where patterns and processes of information seeking are more or less structured by academic disciplines and expectations. For all of that, however, we know best (or only) about users who more or less meet us on our terms. We rarely stop to wonder how those who don’t do that get their needs met, apart from smugly (if truthfully) asserting that we do a better job than, say, Google, for most needs of most us- ers. All in all, though, we don’t usually think about how people in the general population seek, successfully or not, to meet information needs. Ágústa Pálsdótt ir’s dissertation, Health and Lifestyle: Icelanders’ Everyday Life Infor- mation Behaviour, addresses these issues in a sample study of a national population. The word to emphasize in the previous sentence is “dissertation.” The book is a striking il- lustration of why dissertations have the stereotyped negative reputation that they do, yet it has value precisely because the exhaustive review of seemingly everyone’s studies of information-seeking behavior has the cumulative effect of raising the reader’s awareness of the multiple factors that make up both individuals’ behaviors and our attempts to understand it. Pálsdóttir considers four questions: Is there a relationship between “purposive information seeking about health and lifestyle and other aspects of information behavior”? Is information seeking related to health behavior? Is health behavior related to “health self-effi cacy beliefs”? Does such self-efficacy beliefs relate to health behavior? A central concept in Pálsdótt ir’s analy- sis is “perceived self-effi cacy,” taken from November 2006 “social cognitive theory” and now, she declares, “a component in most theoreti- cal models of health behavior.” It refers to one’s belief about whether one can “master a behavior” and how success- fully. She stresses that “the emphasis is not on people’s skills, but on what they believe they can do with their skills under different circumstances.” This might be a fruitful addition to academic librarians’ understanding of our users, taking it be- yond their desires, skills, and strategies to include what users believe is possible. While the information about behav- iors was gathered from questionnaire responses, and hence actually indicates what people say they do, or think they do, rather than what they in fact do, nonethe- less this study goes beyond many library- user surveys, which tend to measure satisfaction with interactions with library staff or resources. To the extent that we can report on more substantial outcomes than satisfaction, the better we’ll be able to direct our efforts to assist our users. The study benefits from the well- known utility of Iceland for social re- search, given a population large enough to provide randomness and variation but small enough to be well understood, with thorough records available. Pálsdótt ir was able to randomly draw a sample for her survey from a National Register of Per- sons; 1,000 people were mailed question- naires in 2002, and 50.8% responded. The resulting data was sorted into a 4-cell grid: high and low information seeking behavior and high and low self- effi cacy attitudes. The resulting “clusters” are described as active, moderately active, moderately passive, and passive. In each case, much data are provided both to justify the categorization and to indicate variation in gender, class, education, and other factors that might illuminate the results. The survey collected finely distin- guished information. There are 23 kinds of sources specified, including newspa- pers, health publications, other serials, brochures from health authorities, refer- ence books, Web sites of various kinds, and discussions with various categories of people. For each, people were asked which they had used to seek health in- formation, in which they’d come across such information, how useful they’d found information from each category, and how reliable they considered each source. Similar details were elicited about demographic, economic, and education factors. All the questions are given in an appendix, in English and in Icelandic. Since the study investigated “everyday life information behaviour,” sources and methods of information seeking were all-encompassing: Internet, print and broadcast media, professional consulta- tions, and conversation with kin, neigh- bors, friends, and colleagues. Again, from an academic librarian’s perspective, the value lies in the attempt not merely to in- vestigate how users interact with us and/ or our resources, but whence and how information is sought or encountered any- where in society. Since the reviewer is an anthropologist as well as a librarian, I ap- prove of letting what research subjects do, or, at least, report, structure the findings. Since Pálsdóttir didn’t directly interview her respondents, much less observe them in their lives and information seeking, the study can’t be called ethnographic. It is, however, closer to ethnographic than too much library research, which takes us and our arena as the focus of user behavior and expectations. The questionnaire was pretested with small samples and was modified on the basis of respondent ques- tions and suggestions. Because the book is a dissertation, the author avoids problems of ambiguity or imprecision—every concept, every method, every interpretation is explicitly grounded in prior scholars’ analyses and definitions. This makes for slow progress for the reader, but one does understand what’s being discussed and how succes- sive researchers have refined those mean- ings. The nature of the study also means that the reader should know more than many will about the fairly refi ned sta- Book Reviews 575 tistical techniques that Pálsdóttir uses to analyze her data, most especially within “clusters.” The nature of the book is such that no one except another dissertation writer could imagine sitting and reading it through. I would doubt that many read- ers of this review will rush to buy a copy, and the percentage of selectors who’ll add it to their collections will likely be low. The thoroughness of the literature re- view means, however, that librarians can benefit from awareness of the substantial body of research for which “information science” is a real term and not merely a euphemism for “librarianship.” People are trying to sift out meaningful distinc- tions between what information people think they want, what they think they can do to get it, and—not least—what, if anything, they do with it once they obtain it. If, as librarians, we want not merely to measure “outcomes” of our work, out- comes we ourselves define, but instead want to understand how what we do articulates real needs of real users, studies like Pálsdóttir’s will be necessary. They won’t be fun to read, and won’t translate into bullet points easily, but they could provide a deeper and more substantial understanding of our profession and what we do.—Gregory A. Finnegan, Har- vard University Sonn, William J. Paradigms Lost: The Life and Deaths of the Printed Word. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2006. 393p. alk. paper, $35 (ISBN: 0810852624). LC 2005-23073. Upon seeing a steam-driven printing press for the first time, a Leipzig printer commented that: “This machine will make many impressions, but nothing beautiful.” This clash between printing purists and print-cheapening innovators and the liberation/dissemination of in- formation to the masses came in several cycles, from before Gutenberg to the In- ternet, and is the subject of this amazingly detailed book by William Sonn. Sonn is an independent historian and professional