College and Research Libraries Recent Publications BOOK REVIEWS Mingle, James R. and Associates. Chal- lenges of Retrenchment: Strategies for Con- solidating Programs, Cutting Costs, & Re- allocating Resources. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1981. 394p. $17.95. LC 81- 47770. ISBN 0-87589-507-7. In 1979 the Southern Regional Educa- tion Board (SREB) began to study and ana- lyze how colleges and universities would respond to higher rates of inflation, the decline in enrollments, and lower finan- cial support expected throughout the 1980s. The SREB also initiated a review of public policies emerging as a result of the no-growth or contraction of higher educa- tion. This book presents the summaries of those studies and analyses and the pro- posals by leaders in American higher edu- cation.lts purpose is to assist the thinking about the management of decline in higher education. A variety of tools, strat- egies, and solutions to the problems of re- trenchment are included in the nineteen chapters. Most of the authors assume that the im- portant decisions affecting higher educa- tion in the coming decade will be made by the states, not by the federal government. One of the important questions addressed is what should be the relationship be- tween the states and the private colleges and universities. Another is what adjust- ments will result in the competition for en- rollments. David W. Breneman, Senior Fellow, the Brookings Institution, predicts that two groups will absorb the bulk of the enroll- ment decline, the public state colleges and the non-selective private liberal arts col- leges. While the major research institu- tions will keep up their undergraduate en- rollments, they will face grave problems in graduate education and research. Brene- man's predictions already have been real- ized in some institutions. At the state level, policy decisions will be influenced by the demands of practical politics and a respect for the autonomy of the institu- tions. A mix of market strategies and cen- tralized planning will shape the models for retrenchment most likely to emerge. Lyman A. Glenny and Frank M. Bowen present a checklist of thirty early-warning signals of enrollment and financial stress. Ten signals are those over which the insti- tution has little or no control. These in- clude shifts in the ethnic and socioeco- nomic mix, shifts in federal subsidies, decline in birth rates. Twenty signals, in- cluding admission standards, unit costs, percentage of full-time and part-time fac- ulty, and campus environment, can be controlled by the institution. James R. Mingle, director of the SREB project, and Donald M . Norris, University of Houston, report the results of twenty case studies in their chapter on "Institu- tional Strategies for Responding to De- cline." They offer advice: institutions should use a combination of strategies rather than a single proposal; institutions should "plan for the worst and hope for the best." To achieve successful retrench- ment, institutions should cut deeply enough to realize savings while allowing the initiation of new programs and the en- 81 82 College & Research Libraries January 1983 hancement of existing ones. Strong lead- ership on the part of the president and the academic deans is essential to successful response to decline. Other topics include evaluation of pro- grams and their discontinuance, the nego- tiation of institutional mergers, the effects of program contraction on the faculty, en- rollment management, state funding, state budgets, and retrenchment, and public policy toward private institutions. Higher education expanded in the 1960s to meet society's demand for broader ac- cess to college and university education and training. Formerly a privilege, higher education was transformed into a right and governmental support was generous. As demand and resources shrink, higher education is faced with the need to scale down its size. This book offers advice, so- lutions, and strategies for doing just that. While the size of the total enterprise shrinks, an agenda for growth emerges. The SREB has provided a basic book for faculty, administrators, and government officials to use in making the inevitable choices relating to retrenchment and to expansion.-Beverly P. Lynch, University of Illinois at Chicago. Norman, Adrian R. D. Electronic Document Delivery: The ARTEMIS Concept for Docu- ment Digitalisation and Teletransmission. White Plains, N.Y.: Knowledge Indus- try Publications, 1982. 226p. $45. LC 81- 20774. ISBN 0-86729-011-0. Electronic document delivery is a sub- ject receiving increasing amounts of atten- tion in the library community in recent years. The existence of large bibliographic databases containing many locations for millions of titles coupled with the growing usage of numerous subject-oriented infor- mation retrieval systems that make users and potential users aware of books and ar- ticles have created an expanding demand for improved delivery of the intellectual content of a work, if not the original for- mat itself. Reference librarians and interli- brary loan librarians know all too well that the bibliographic databases stimulate an expectation in the user, who too often is disappointed because the material located in the wink of a flashing cursor must wend its way through significant obstacles to ar- rive in days or weeks or months instead of in hours or less. Adrian Norman, of the Arthur D. Little Company, an internationally known man- agement consulting firm not unfamiliar with libraries, was a team leader for a proj- ect carried out for the Commission of the European Communities, which has had a guiding hand in the development of EURONET and its first offspring, DIANE (Direct Information Access Network for Europe). The project is called ARTEMIS or "Automatic Retrieval of Text from Eu- rope's Multinational Information Ser- vice." The tendency to draw upon my- thology for acronyms is a pleasant custom, which deserves some attention on this side of the Atlantic. ARTEMIS is a delivery-service concept to supplement DIANE, the information service. It envisions printing out at local terminals pages of scientific and technical documents requested via a large-scale in- terconnected computer system through EURONET. Some documents, principally journal articles, would be loaded directly into the system from previously encoded text coming from publishers. The intent is that capturing the text in machine- readable form as early as the author's transfer of thought to "paper" is a sound economic advantage for all parties. Other documents, some current and some retro- spective, would be scanned using newly available digitalizers that capture data electronically in digital form from hard copy. While some documents would be scanned based on expected demand for them, others would be scanned only when requested. Scanning is much more expensive than receiving and storing text already in machine-readable form. The book, which is costly ($45) for its size and content, is divided into two parts. The first is a long executive summary hit- ting the highlights of the ADL report, which concludes that ARTEMIS is feasi- ble. The second part consists of ten appen- dixes, which delve fairly deep into techni- cal specifications. This is a technical book for the average librarian, but is technically shallow for the systems designer trying to build a better mousetrap. In other words,