College and Research Libraries


networks. The economic scale is com-
puted by the percentage of information 
workers in a nation's work force, the 
contributions of the information sector 
to the GNP /GDP, and to productivity in 
the industrial sector. Finally, the social 
scale is seen as the rate of literacy and the 
percentage of a nation's school-age 
population attending tertiary schools. 
Data are assembled and analyzed for 
nineteen countries, which are stratified 
as high-; middle- and low-income na-
tions. By these measures, the authors de-
termined that "in general ... what was 
forecast decades ago was confirmed," 
that there has been significant growth in 
all three scales in almost all nations, that 
the richer nations are more advanced 
and advancing faster than poor nations 
with undereducated populations, and 
that the United States and Japan are 
closest to being information societies, al-
though they fall short of expectations in 
many ways. None of the generalizations 
or conclusions will surprise or inform 
anyone who has been reading the U.S. 
newspapers over the past ten years. 

This book's value lies in the data the 
authors have assembled. Although the 
data are sparse and "not easily amenable 
to either longitudinal analysis within a 
country or comparative analysis among 
countries," having the numbers is use-
ful. The book has some merit as an un-
dergraduate textbook, in its broad stroke 
presentation of global economic changes. 
It has nothing to say about the application 
of information technologies in the scien-
tific or academic realms. The authors de-
fine and discuss information purely as a 
commodity (e.g., in numbers of words 
supplied and in words consumed). 

The writing is clumsy and jargon-rid-
den, and an odd naivete pervades the 
book from opening premises to its con-
clusions. In the second paragraph the 
authors note without a hint of irony, 
"Looking for the information society is 
made more difficult by the enormous 
amount of data .... " In their opening 
sentences they ask, "Have modem infor-
mation technology and telecommunica-
tions heralded a new society, and a new 
man and woman? Has the Industrial 

Book Reviews 85 

Revolution been replaced by the infor-
mation revolution, with none of the dis-
benefits of the foimer?" Is this empty 
rhetoric or do the authors really expect 
these things to have happened in thirty 
years? The authors provide no historical 
context, no measure by which to assess 
whether the rate of change they observe 
is reasonable or expected. They cite no 
studies or data on normal rates for tech-
nology transfer and diffusion to support 
their conclusions. Most of the data they 
have assembled and displayed relative 
to "informatization" is from the 1980s. 
Yet the authors conclude, "For those 
who study the theories of information 
societies in the twenty-first century, it 
will not be difficult to see the mistakes 
others have made in the past several de-
cades. The determinists have erred when 
communication messages were thought 
to have the effect of a hypodermic 
needle; they erred when development 
communication was treated as a panacea 
to problems in Third World nations; and 
we believe they are wrong today .when 
information technologies are portrayed 
as the panacea for equitable world 
economic growth." The critical and in-
formed reader may find these beliefs and 
conclusions startling, given the paucity 
of data, the comparative brevity of the 
period under study, and the profundity 
of the restructuring in process.-Nina W. 
Matheson, Johns Hopkins University School 
of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland. 

Scholarly Communication in an Elec-
tronic Environment: Issues for Re-
search Libraries. Ed. by Robert Sidney 
Martin. Chicago and London: Rare 
Books and Manuscripts Section, Asso-
ciation of College and Research Li-
braries, ALA, 1993. 136p. $28.99, 
ACRL member price $24.99 (ISBN 0-
8389-7686-7). . 
On the face of it, the Rare Books and 

Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of ACRL 
seems an unlikely organization to spon-
sor a program on new information tech-
nologies. But the proceedings of the 
section's 1992 preconference amply de-
monstrate that special collections librari-
ans and historians of the book can bring 



86 College & Research Libraries 

invaluable insights to bear upon ques-
tions of the long-term research value of 
e-texts, responsibility for their collection 
and preservation (intellectual as well as 
physical), and thorny issues of future 
access to them. This volume consists of 
five of the six papers delivered at the 
plenary sessions of the conference, fol-
lowed by reactions from a historian, a lin-
guist, and a classicist. (A presentation on 
legal issues was considered too complex 
and its subject too fluid to present in an 
essay comprehensible to lay readers.) 

John Budd's keynote essay, ''Not What 
It Used to Be: Scholarly Communication 
Then and Now," sketches out in quick, 
broad strokes the history of scholarly 
communication. Budd argues that the 
culture of the scholarly community up to 
now is best analyzed from a structuralist 
perspective, but that as the electronic en-
vironment develops, "we are entering a 
post-structuralist age of scholarly com-
munication." He points to the malleability 
of electronic texts and asks, ''What becomes 
of the author if information is lifted, re-for-
matted, re-used, and absorbed into some-
thing different?" As thought-provoking as 
Budd's arguments are, they do not seem to 
be echoed in the presentations that follow, 
although they must have sparked some 
lively discussions around the coffee urns. 

Paul Evan Peters, director of the Coali-
tion for Networked Information, can-
didly admits his political agenda in ''The 
Coevolution of Networks, Networked 
Information, and Knowledge Communi-
ties." His aim, he says, is to enlist his 
audience in the network "movement," 
where they can exercise leadership in 
addressing five issues: the lack of an arti-
fact in the networked environment; the 
ahistorical attitudes of most network users; 
standards of responsible behavior; the evo-
lution of organizational forms and func-
tions (from an archivist's viewpoint); and 
the concept of "network users" and their 
approach to information. 

A presentation by Elaine Brennan about 
her experiences in editing HUMANIST 
and other electronic lists provides a good 
summary of this medium for those who 
have not experienced it firsthand. But 
most list readers will find that it breaks 

January 1994 

little new ground for them. Gordon B. 
Neavill's paper, "Libraries and Texts in 
the Electronic Environment," in con-
trast, is a thought-provoking examina-
tion of what constitutes text. How 
should we define "the stock of knowl-
edge" in the electronic context, and how 
are librarians responsible for its collec-
tion and preservation? As a scholar of 
the American blues tradition, Neavill 
draws comparisons to the oral tradition, 
"an extraordinarily robust form of trans-
mission and preservation." The thread 
of continuity from eighteenth-century 
Scottish ballads to African-American 
blues songs is proof that text can survive 
without libraries, yet it is through Fran-
cis James Child's nineteenth-century 
printed ballad collections that a 
scholar can trace · the connection. 
Neavill argues persuasively that, while 
"studies of scholarly communication 
tend to focus on scholarly publications 
themselves, ... the real problems in the 
electronic environment concern the raw 
material for scholarly research, espe-
cially for humanistic and historical re-
search." It is difficult at this early stage to 
imagine the most rational and effective 
means of gathering e-texts for future use. 
As a possible model Neavill points to per-
spicacious and indefatigable private col-
lectors who have formed priceless 
specialized research collections of 
ephemeral material eventually housed 
in research libraries: the Thomason seven-
teenth-century tracts and the Schomburg 
collection of African-American culture. 
The librarian's role in such cases has been 
to accept, organize, and preserve the mate-
rial, making it accessible to researchers as 
far into the future as possible. 

PeterS. Graham's contribution to the 
volume, "Intellectual Preservation and 
the Electronic Environment," is also par-
ticularly cogent and valuable. He begins 
with issues of preserving the medium 
and long-term access to it, no small 
matter in the electronic context, and 
proceeds to the even knottier questions 
of intellectual preservation. The latter 
problems arise from the fact that "the 
ease with which an identical copy can be 
quickly and flawlessly made is paral-



leled by the ease with which a flawed 
copy may be undetectably made," either 
accidentally or maliciously. How can I be 
sure that what I am reading is what I 
intended to read or what I read before? 
Graham explains clearly the potential of 
three electronic techniques to protect text: 
encryption, hashing, and time-stamping. 
He argues forcefully that librarians are 
uniquely qualified as a professional group 
to wrestle with the combined issues of 
authentication, security, and preserva-
tion. And to those who would shrink 
from this task because of the apparent 
complexity of technologies he rejoins 
that minds that are capable of using Hin-
man collators or dealing with corporate 
authorship are equal to the task! 

Due to the illness of another speaker, 
Graham also delivered his paper several 
days later at ALA in the Association for 
Library Collections and Technical Serv-
ices President's Program. Therefore it 
has been published in essentially the 
same form in the proceedings of that 
program, After the Electronic Revolution, 
Will You Be the First to Go? (1993.) 

Some of the chapters in the RBMS 
volume are based on tape transcripts of 
the presentations, rather than formal 
written papers. Unfortunately, the Pe-
ters and Brennan transcripts escaped 
rigorous scrutiny by author and editor-
they abound in homonyms and missing 
words that in some instances merely 
annoy or amuse, but in others hopelessly 
obscure the meaning. In the electronic 
environment it is crucial to remember 
that spelling checkers do not replace edi-
tors!-Sem C. Sutter, University of Chi-
cago, Chicago, Illinois. 

Heim, Michael. TI1e Metaphysics of Virtual 
Reality. New York: Oxford Univ. Pr., 
1993. 175p. $21 (ISBN 0-19-508178-1). 
Our world is being changed by infor-

mation technologies in ways we cannot 
claim to understand fully. Exploration of 
the nature and extent of the changes is a 
job for philosophers as well as for social 
scientists and others. Michael Heim is 
described on this book's dust jacket as 
being "known internationally as 'the 
philosopher of cyberspace."' He has 

Book Reviews 87 

published a philosophical study of word 
processing (Electric Language, 1987), as 
well as a translation of Martin Heideg-
ger's Metaphysical Foundations of Logic 
(1984). This collection of essays explores 
word processing, online searching, hy-
pertext, and computer outliners, and 
discusses Heidegger's and Marshall 
McLuhan' s views ·on technology before 
turning, in the last five chapters, to vir-
tual reality, "the totally inclusive com-
puter simulation." The approach is to try 
to make connections between the views 
of philosophers like Plato and Leibniz on 
the one hand, and questions about the 
nature and consequences of new infor-
mation technologies on the other. But the 
discussions of the philosophers often 
seem ornamental rather than structural, 
and the best parts of the book do not rely 
on a philosophical background. There is, 
for instance, a lucid and straightforward 
discussion in Chapter 8, ''The Essence of 
VR," of different facets of, and ap-
proaches to, virtual reality, which seems 
to owe nothing to philosophical ances-
tors. A discussion in Chapter 7 of life in 
electronic worlds or cyberspace is of the 
sort one finds in good popular ma-
gazines, and owes more to William Gib-
son, the cyberpunk author, than to Plato 
or Leibniz. Where philosophy clearly 
makes a difference, it is not a very im-
pressive one. Virtual reality is poten-
tially indistinguishable from the real 
world, Heim says, but it has to be kept 
not-quite-real "or it will lessen the pull 
on imagination" and become ''bland and 
mundane." How can it be kept not-quite-
real? Alluding to Heideggerian themes 
of finitude, temporality, and care, Heim 
goes on to suggest, very briefly, that a 
virtual world need not "duplicate the 
deadlines of the real world," that it can 
offer total safety, unlike the dangerous 
real world, and that "with the help of 
intelligent software agents, cares will 
weigh on us more lightly." (This is the 
way to avoid becoming ''bland and mun-
dane"?) If this is metaphysics, it is de-
finitely a low-calorie, less filling brand. 
Some of the discussions are seriously 
misleading; that on Boolean search logic 
seems not to be clear a bout the difference