College and Research Libraries


472 College & Research Libraries 

saying ("Managers do things right; 
leaders do the right things"), or draw on 
the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Not 
surprisingly, the bibliographies often 
cite the same sources. 

Characteristically, many of the essays 
begin with easy, self-evident, or unsub-
stantiated generalizations: "Perhaps no 
area of library leadership receives so 
much criticism as the area of com-
munication"; "Communication is one of 
the most discussed topics in libraries"; 
"Conflict is one of our most difficult 
areas for communication because we 
generally feel strongly about the issues 
involved in the situation." Similarly, 
many conclude vaguely: "In short, 
growing to greatness as a library com-
municator is a never-ending process"; 
''Through the preceding steps and the 
use of positive communication skills, we 
can takeourpositionofleadership"; "An 
appropriate response, then, to those who 
urge greater leadership from librarians, 
and for those who desire to exert more 
leadership in the world outside the pro-
fession, is attention to increasing our 
communication skills." 

The writers often admonish us: "Being 
a good listener is the other essential part 
of communication and should not be 
forgotten." Urging us to believe that 
communication is important, the essays 
exhort us to communicate well, but after 
reading several, one cries, "Communi-
cate what?" A few give practical tips or 
examples. These range from reorganiz-
ing the library to using body language 
carefully: "If standing, place your feet as 
parallel as possible (inward indicates 
subordination)." 

Five noteworthy contributions pro-
vide substance. Eugene S. Mitchell's con-
cise "Review of Leadership Research" 
directs readers through the literatures of 
management and librarianship. Peggy 
Johnson writes clearly about openness, 
trust, and intuition in personal com-
munication in "The Role of Empathy in 
Managerial Communication." John M. 
Budd's "Leading through Meaning: Ele-
ments of a Communication Process" dis-
tinguishes between information and 
meaning. Rosemary Huff Arneson's "Me-

September 1992 

diation: A Language of Leaders" de-
scribes the potential of the formal 
process of mediation as a management 
tool. Richard H. Moul' s "Discourses of 
Vision and Necessity: The Information 
Age, the Library, and the Language of 
Leadership" offers concepts with which 
to perceive and criticize our professional 
discourse. 

Unfortunately, this book does not 
succeed on its own terms and falls short of 
its pOtential. It probably will not make 
better leaders. Had the editor articulated a 
deeper vision and had the writers reflected 
on one another's work, they might have 
worked together toward one common end 
and produced a book that added up to 
more than the sum of its parts. 

Rather shamefully, the book lacks an 
index. Of all people, librarians and the 
editors of ALA publishing should know 
the value an index adds to the book. 

This book exhibits the problem with 
leadership everywhere in our country 
today: hollow words and generalities in-
stead of deeds and substance. Like bad 
politicians, we aspiring library leaders 
stand here mouthing platitudes with our 
feet carefully parallel, claiming a position 
of leadership and hoping no one will notice 
we are doing nothing.-Marcia Pankake, 
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 

From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar 
Bush and the Mind's Machine. Ed. by 
James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn. San 
Diego, Calif.: Academic Press, 1991. 
367 p. $40 (ISBN 0-12-523270-5). 
Vannevar Bush could well be to elec-

tronic information theory what Panini is to 
the study of language or Melvil Dewey to 
library science. As director of the Office of 
Scientific Research and Development, 
Bush oversaw the massive scientific 
bureaucracy created for weapons research 
during World War II. An engineer by trade 
and a pre-war pioneer in the development 
of electromechanical analog computing 
devices, Bush grew concerned as the war 
came to a close about the future of scien-
tific research. In a 1945 essay, Bush ex-
plained it this way: 

There is a growing mountain of re-
search. But there is increased evidence 



that we are being bogged down today 
as specialization extends. The investi-
gator is staggered by the findings and 
conclusions of thousands of other 
workers-conclusions which he can-
not find time to grasp, much less to 
remember, as they appear. Yet special-
ization becomes increasingly neces-
sary for progress, and the effort to 
bridge between disciplines is corre-
spondingly superficial. Professionally 
our methods of transmitting and re-
viewing the results of research are 
generations old and by now are totally 
inadequate for their purpose. 
That essay, "As We May Think," pro-

posed a device called a Memex as a solution 
to what is perhaps still a disturbingly fa-
miliar problem. The Memex was to be "a 
device in which an individual stores all his 
books, records, and communications, 
and which is mechanized so that it may 
be consulted with exceeding speed and 
flexibility. It is an enlarged supplement 
to his memory." Bush's original thumb-
nail sketch of the Memex included a vast 
store of information on microfiche 
cached in a personalized retrieval device 
hidden in a desk. Among other items, 
"As We May Think" predicted the desk-
top computer, computer databases, the 
laserdisk, optical scanning, artificial intel-
ligence, multimedia technology, and on-
line searching-technologies essential to 
the contemporary library. But perhaps the 
more essential issue, as Bush wrote (in 
1945!), "goes deeper thana lag in the adop-
tion of mechanisms by libraries .... Our 
ineptitude in getting at the record is largely 
caused by the artificiality of systems of 
indexing. Information retrieval systems," 
Bush argued, "must function more like 
the associative pathways of human 
thought" if they were to remain useful in 
the age of the information explosion. 

From Memex to Hypertext is a three-part 
collection of Vannevar Bush's writings 
along with essays by others focusing on 
the Memex concept and its subsequent in-
fluence on information theory and comput-
ing. The first part describes the development 
of the ideas in "As We May Think" in the 
contexts of Bush's work with analog com-
puters and the social history of scientific 

Book Reviews 473 

speculation in the 1930s and culminates 
with the seminal 1945 essay. The second 
part covers Bush's continuing extension 
of the theoretical and engineering issues of 
Memex in later years as digital computing 
technology developed. The third part, 
''The Legacy of Memex," traces its in-
fluence in current work in information re-
trieval, computer software and hardware 
design, and hypertext. 

Although many of the technologies 
predicted and proposed by Bush in "As 
We May Think" have become part of 
everyday life, the "generations old" 
methods for disseminating information-
traditional paper journals, citations, in-
dexes, and catalogs-which Bush found so 
inadequate in 1945 continue to be the basis 
of the modem university library. Thus 
while Bush's original writings are fascinat-
ing in their prescience and their close un-
derstanding of the history of the 
relationship between information re-
trieval technology and intellectual pro-
gress, the contemporary reader may find 
the last section-concerning the exten-
sion of Bush's theoretical constructs into 
the practical reality of a working elec-
tronic university--of more interest. 

Hypertext is the intellectual descen-
dant of the Memex, an attempt to put 
Bush's "natural" indexing system into 
practical use through modem computing 
technology. Included in the last section are 
pieces by hypertext pioneers Doug Engel-
bart and Ted Nelson; an excellent explana-
tion of the relationship between Bush's 
ideas, hypertext, and current multimedia 
technologies by Norman Meyrowitz; and a 
contemporary scholar's experience with 
trying to implement the Memex concept 
in classical studies (Gregory Crane's 
Perseus Project at Harvard). 

From Memex to Hypertext is an impor-
tant contribution to the emerging field of 
electronic information theory, both for 
the critical links it establishes between 
the early work in the field and current 
technologies and as an anthology of the 
theoretical essays of its most cited pioneer, 
Vannevar Bush. While individual essays 
may be overly technical or specific in detail 
for many readers, the collection as a whole 
is a solid integration of the historical, 



474 College & Research Libraries September 1992 

theoretical, and practical problems of ac-
cessing electronic information. It is rec-
ommended reading for those grappling 
with planning and philosophical issues 
concerning the use of electronic resources 
and for library school courses in informa-
tion retrieval theory, information systems 

design, reference, and collection man-
agement. Librarians and their technical 
partners would surely profit from, or at 
least be reassured by, this half-century of 
material that addresses our contemporary 
concerns.-Matthew Wall, Sloortlzmore Col-
lege, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. 

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