Is Digital Different? How Information Creation, Capture, Preservation and Discovery Are Being Transformed. Michael Moss, Barbara Endicott-Popovsky, and Marc J. Dupuis, eds. London: Facet Publishing, 2015. 224p. Paper, $95.00 (ISBN 978-1-85604-854-5).


556 College & Research Libraries July 2016

doi:10.5860/crl.77.4.556

the author is straightforward and candid not only in making her suggestions but also 
in sharing her own experiences. The book will prove to be a practical and enjoyable 
resource for librarians who are thinking of adding embedded librarianship to their 
instruction arsenal. Additionally, librarians who have already decided that the embed-
ded life is for them will benefit from Reale’s fresh survey of embedded librarianship, 
keen self-analysis, and imaginative lists of strategies. This volume will make a handy 
addition to any instruction librarian’s bookshelf.—Kelli Johnson, Marshall University

Is Digital Different? How Information Creation, Capture, Preservation and Discov-
ery Are Being Transformed. Michael Moss, Barbara Endicott-Popovsky, and Marc 
J. Dupuis, eds. London: Facet Publishing, 2015. 224p. Paper, $95.00 (ISBN 978-1-
85604-854-5).

Those who experienced a streamed curriculum in their library education have likely 
questioned the practice of offering areas such as archives as discrete and separate 
disciplines of study. Is Digital Different? addresses the need to recognize information 
studies as interdisciplinary and interlocking. This is reflected in the background of the 
editorial team who represent such fields as cyber security, human factors, and archival 
science. The reader will also note the international cross-section of contributors, rep-
resenting institutions from the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, and Australia. 

The editorial team brings a wealth of both academic and practical experience to 
the project and was active in authoring a third of the volume. Each chapter functions 
as a top-level introduction to a field of interest to information professionals. Topics 
covered include essentials on the Semantic Web, trusted information management 
systems, crowdsourcing, archival information retrieval, digital information seeking, 
information privacy, and online security. Thomas and Johnson in the final chapter of 
the book add digital humanities and related tools, mass digitization projects, scholarly 
communication, open access, digital libraries and digital monographs to the discussion. 
Marketed to graduate students in information science, this volume is salient reading 
for students and established information professionals alike. 

Of note is Norman Gray’s introduction to RDF and the Semantic Web. A difficult 
topic to introduce in narrative style, his attempt to clarify concepts and technical 
terminology is one of the better guides available to date. Readers may be shaken by 
Endicott-Popovsky’s chapter on security, which advises us that today’s network manag-
ers “have evolved to adopting a strategy of ‘assumption of breach’, which accepts that 
attackers are already established within” (162). This illustrates directly the complexity 
of digital when considering offering online access to archival records in light of secu-
rity and information privacy issues as discussed in McCarthy and Morgan’s chapter.

Those pondering future library crowdsourcing projects will appreciate Berglund 
Prytz’s contribution to the volume. The author cautions that infrastructure and sup-
port on the library side for crowdsourcing projects can be rather labor intensive and 
that the greatest benefit to be gleaned from such initiatives is the increased awareness 
and appreciation of the work of the library borne out of positive engagement with 
contributors. As such, the library must anticipate staffing such projects adequately to 
support their publics at points of need. 

Gollins and Bayne’s thoughtful chapter “Finding Archived Records in a Digital Age” 
addresses the need to level the playing field between paper and born-digital archival 
documents. As born-digital materials are likely to benefit from the use of modern lan-
guage, longer descriptions, and superior Optical Character Recognition (OCR) results, 
the authors introduce a layer of abstraction called an information asset as a means of 
standardizing descriptions for archival records. The information asset functions as a 
flexible surrogate data model for a variety of purposes including search and display. 



Book Reviews 557

The concluding chapter provides a thoughtful top-level view of the transformations 
that digital has had on humanities research, the book, scholarly communication, and 
the library. It takes the reader on a tour of research possibilities but also questions how 
much has actually changed. Although succinct and well written, the wealth of topics 
covered in the chapter could easily be expanded into a full-length monograph. Student 
readers would stand to benefit from additional chapters dedicated to these topics. In 
addition, with the target audience in mind, a feature to consider for a future edition 
would be to add a section to each chapter that lists a few annotated supplemental read-
ings selected to provide the student with deeper grounding on the introduced topics. 

As can be seen, there is great breadth on offer for the reader. What is not apparent is 
the strategy behind the organization of the chapters in the volume. This is particularly 
noticeable in the transitions between the chapters that vary significantly in technical 
content, disrupting the potential for narrative flow between chapters. One could also 
argue in favor of this arrangement, however, in that the book resists the creation of 
disciplinary silos and that this juxtaposition has a generative effect that encourages 
the reader to ponder the relations. 

We must ask, finally, does the book answer its own question? The authors ask us 
to pause before assuming the affirmative. The affordances of digital may speed up 
operations, although that may not ultimately change the way we do things or should 
do things in all cases. Moss cautions us not to abandon the practices the profession has 
developed over the centuries to ensure the safety of sensitive content, its discovery, and 
its persistence. The editors, by assembling their interdisciplinary response, provide us 
with a model; we are urged to bring a diverse chorus of voices to the table to carefully 
consider our path forward.—Andrea Kosavic, York University

Nigel Ford. Introduction to Information Behavior. London (UK): Facet Publishing, 2015. 
224p. Paper, $85.00 (ISBN-13 978-1-85604-850-7). 

Introduction to Information Behavior seeks to provide the reader with a one-stop shop of 
the history, theories, and definitions that have come to encapsulate the very broad and 
highly studied field in librarianship. The author Nigel Ford is a professor of Informa-
tion Science at Sheffield University. His extensive background on the topic is evident 
throughout the book in his references to the variety and amount of research that has 
been conducted on information behavior. The book is divided into three parts so the 
author can address such a broad and far-reaching idea. Part 1 defines the basic concepts 
of information behavior. Part 2 illustrates what the current level of knowledge is as it 
pertains to information behavior. Part 3 shows how an understanding of information 
behavior can be deployed in an analytical setting. By examining each part in further 
detail, we can see where the book succeeds and where it falters.

Part 1 serves as the foundation of the text. It is composed of two chapters, “Informa-
tion Behavior” and “Changing Conceptions of Information Needs,” which summarize 
the increasingly complex discussion that follows in the subsequent chapters. These 
chapters both stylistically and methodologically help the reader begin to understand 
the tremendous amount of information covered. Each of the first two chapters starts 
with a series of term definitions and the relevant scholars who have proposed those 
definitions. Peppered throughout these chapters and the book as a whole is a series 
of “Think” boxes. These boxes serve as a moment of contemplative reflection for the 
reader to internalize some of the key concepts discussed. 

Part 2 covers a variety of different topics as they relate to some of the different com-
ponents of information behavior. This is a complex section that deals with a variety 
of the component structures that define information behavior. The key chapter in this 
section is chapter 6. This chapter is an interesting and dense discussion on the differ-

doi:10.5860/crl.77.4.557