College and Research Libraries


Guest Editorial 
Our View of Reviewing 

At present, book reviewing does not 
work very well in academic librarianship. 
Published reviews should be a significant 
part of the process of critique and counter-
critique by which serious scholarship 
proceeds. When book reviews work, they 
serve a variety of important functions in a 
profession or discipline. Beyond indicating 
whether a book is worth reading or buying, 
they function as a current awareness serv-
ice, alerting readers to what is new in a 
field. By summarizing the content of a 
book, a review can serve as a kind of 
proxy for reading the book itself. It can 
place a new book in the context of pre-
vious contributions on the same topic 
and often can become a highly con-
densed overview or survey of the lit-
erature. A well executed review can 
take a seemingly narrowly conceived 
book and place it in a context that argues 
for a much wider significance. When 
they fulfill their potential, reviews may 
provoke responses that can develop into 
extended correspondence and debates 
among readers. In all these ways, book 
reviews enter the collective thinking of a 
profession and help constitute its public 
sphere of discourse. 

Having worked now for more than 
two years as book review editors for Col-
lege & Research Libraries, we offer the fol-
lowing propositions: 
• More librarians with experience, ex-

pertise, and clout need to be willing to 
review and to take reviewing seri-
ously. Book reviewing should not be 
regarded as an activity solely for un-
practiced writers to cut their teeth on. 

• Readers should be more willing to re-
spond to reviews. A review, after all, is 

itself a response, and it needn't (and 
shouldn't) be the last word. 

• Much of what publishers of books in 
librarianship are producing is weak, 
and they need to hear it. Reviews of 
bad or dull books are harder to write 
than one might think. We are loath to 
devote scarce space to such books, and 
it is often difficult to find reviewers 
willing to take them on. But there needs 
to be better exercise of quality control 
over the books published for librarians, 
and serious, critical reviews would help 
raise publishing standards. 

• None of the journals in academic 
librarianship includes more than the 
occasional review of a foreign book. 
This phenomenon is easy to explain 
but difficult to justify. We need to be 
less provincial. 

• There should be much more reviewing 
of books relevant to academic librari-
ans but published outside the field. 
We grapple on a day-to-day basis with 
complex issues of technological change, 
the economics of the information mar-
ket, the politics and demographics of 
higher education, and the changing 
nature of scholarly research and com-
munication. We need to assimilate the 
research and thinking being done on 
these subjects wherever they are pub-
lished, identifying and reviewing a 
wide range of materials in a way that 
orients and supports our daily work 
and deepens our understanding of the 
issues confronting us. In College & Re-
search Libraries we have been reviewing 
books such as Jaroslav Pelikan's Idea of 

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92 College & Research Libraries 

the University, Julie Thompson Klein's 
Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and 
Practice, and Tony Becher's Academic 
Tribes and Territories. The other journals 
in academic librarianship also carry a 
small number of reviews of this type. 
We need to be doing many more. 
We would like to see a library journal 

that comprehensively and critically re-
views books of interest and importance 
to academic librarians. One need only 
consider journals such as American His-
torical Review, Contemporary Sociology, Con-
temporary Psychology or Notes-all pub-
lished by professional associations-to see 
how book reviews can help articulate 
and shape the best thinking in a discip-
line. A two-tiered reviewing structure-
in general outline not unlike what is 
currently being done in the Journal of 
Academic Librarians/zip-would allow 
detailed, analytical reviews for those 
books whose subject and significance 
warrant such attention and effort, and 
shorter, more descriptive reviews for the 
rest. 

Given current budgets and constraints 
on journal space, it is difficult to imagine 
any existing library journal that would 
take on something so ambitious. Perhaps 
our concept of a review journal is more 
feasible in an electronic environment. 

March 1993 

Since, at present, publishing on the Inter-
net avoids many of the direct production 
and distribution costs of conventional 
journals, book reviews would seem to be 
prime candidates for an online journal. 
Certainly the timeliness of publication 
would be improved and the opportuni-
ties for a richer public dialogue would be 
significantly enhanced. The lively and 
rigorously edited Bryn Mawr Classical 
Review is an encouraging example of the 
intellectual vitality an online review 
journal can offer. 

But the needed improvements in book 
reviewing in librarianship will not be 
solved by a technological fix. Online as 
well as on paper, the success of ~he enter-
prise will depend primarily on the quality 
of the involven:tent of practicing librarians, 
both as writers and as readers. To lament 
the state of research and publishing in 
librarianship is, we realize, to sing an old 
song, but the need for clear and farsighted 
thinking about libraries has never been 
greater. Book reviewing is only a corner 
of the world of academic librarianship, 
but its problems are symptomatic of a 
larger failure. Why not start here? 

STEPHEN LEHMANN 
AND BOB WALTHER 

C&RL BOOK REVIEW EDITORS 
UNIVERSITY OF I'I:NNSYLVANIA