College and Research Libraries


464 College & Research Libraries 

for topics such as academic libraries and 
research libraries. Internal cross-refer-
ences are also provided for items cited in 
more than one chapter. 

This guide constitutes a valuable re-
source for practicing information pro-
fessionals not only in the technical 
services but also in library administra-
tion and bibliographic systems. Initially 
the notion of a technical services parallel 
to the Guide to Reference Books appears 
artificial and arbitrary. However the im-
plications are tantalizing. Perhaps only 
time will tell whether the Guide to Tech-
nical Services Resources has the capacity 
to fill the niche it attempts to create. The 
imagination found in its creative solutions 
for bringing a measure of order to a 
dynamic, interdisciplinary body of 
know ledge is heartening.-/. Brad Young, 
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. 

The Black Librarian in America Revisited. 
Ed. E. J. Josey. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 
1994. 382p. (ISBN 0-8108-2830-0). 
When University of Pennsylvania law 

professor Lani Guinier withdrew her 
nomination for assistant attorney gen-
eral for civil rights, she called on all 
Americans to recognize the importance 
of a "public dialogue on race in which all 
perspectives are represented and in 
which no one viewpoint monopolizes, 
distorts, caricatures, or shapes the out-
come." E. J. Josey similarly challenges 
librarianship in The Black Librarian in 
America Revisited, a new collection of es-
says by a range of African American 
voices in the library and information sci-
ence community representing different 
generations, work environments, and 
geographical regions. What ties these es-
says together is the theme of race and 
profession in the 1990s. 

This new volume does not displace its 
predecessor, The Black Librarian in Amer-
ica (1970), or a companion volume to the 
original work, entitled What the Black Li-
brarians Are Saying (1972). In fact many 
of the essays here represent the work of 
a generation of African Americans who 
were inspired by the original collections 
to enter the fields of library and informa-
tion science. And they are an impressive 

September 1994 

group: administrators, faculty, and 
front-line librarians and allied informa-
tion professionals in industry, colleges 
and universities, government, and in 
public libraries serving large and small 
communities. It is sobering to realize 
that the enduring racism in American 
society and among professions makes it 
necessary to revisit many of the same 
issues more than twenty years later. 

Stories of professional success seem to 
be among the most vibrant of the essays 
with some authors using narrative ap-
proaches to relate the individual self to 
both community and profession. Exam- 1 
pies are the essays by Mary Lenox and 
Marva DeLoach, who use autobiogra- [ 
phy as a vehicle for understanding their 
educational choices and their experi-
ences on campuses, in communities, and 
in professional associations and the im-
pact of these on their careers. Vivian 
Hewitt reveals how personal drive and 
.resilience formed the basis for her elec-
tion as president of the Special Libraries 
Association and as a leader in improving 
the climate for African Americans in spe-
cial libraries. Casper Jordan's essay on 
the career of Virginia Lacy Jones tran-
scends the boundaries of the biographi-
cal sketch as he reconstructs her life as a 
library and information science educa-
tor who, through a commitment to raz-
ing racial barriers, "worked untiringly 
to make librarianship a better profession 
for all." 

Of particular interest is the section 
"From Academia," which is the most co-
hesive of the entire collection. Jessie C. 
Smith returns to her theory of the "four 
cultures," an idea inspired by C. P. Snow 
that she explored in the earlier volume. 
Smith's four cultures-as a librarian, 
woman, African American, and south-
erner--create a web of gender, race, pro-
fessional, and geographical identity that 
becomes a framework for understanding 
the .nexus of personal and professional 
worldviews that shaped her career as an 
academic librarian. It is also a frame-
work for getting the most from the es-
says that follow, particularly the 
juxtaposition between the essays of a 
library dean at a historically black col-



lege and her counterpart at an ARL institu-
tion. Despite differences between these insti-
tutions, the authors share concerns about 
negotiating with their environments, facing 
organizational and technological change, 
and recruiting and mentoring the next gen-
eration of librarians. 

While the essays collected here are 
well written, and the collection as a 
whole is worth reading, there are several 
shortcomings. Although individual es-
sayists have supported their arguments 
with appropriate data, more compara-
tive and longitudinal empirical evidence 
on African Americans and librarianship 
might have served to reinforce the key 
ideas of the volume. Also, because it is 
organized around environment or type 
of library, issues and questions sur-
rounding collection development, infor-
mation technologies, and theoretical 
questions of intellectual freedom are not 
as fully developed as they might have 
been. This shortcoming is particularly sig-
nificant for academic librarians, given the 
primacy of these issues for colleges and 
universities in the remainder of this dec-
ade. Finally, more attention should have 
been given to librarianship in school sys-
tems, particularly with the emergence of 
early intervention as a focal point for an 
ongoing discussion about quality and 
outcomes. 

Despite these shortcomings, Josey has 
done a commendable job in bringing the 
questions of race and profession back to 
librarianship. Perhaps this volume will in-
spire a new generation of African Ameri-
can librarians. One also hopes that it will 
help reinvigorate the public dialogue over 
race and profession.-William We/burn, 
University of Iowa, Iowa City. 

Designing Information: New Roles for 
Librarians. Ed. Linda C. Smith and 
Prudence W. Dalrymple. Urbana-
Champaign, Ill.: Graduate School of 
Library and Information Science, 1993. 
222p. $25. 
This volume contains the proceedings 

of the 1992 Clinic on Library Applica-
tions of Data Processing, held April 5-7, 
1992, and sponsored · by the Graduate 
School of Library and Information Science 

Book Reviews 465 

at the University of lllinois at Urbana-
Champaign. In her summary of this clinic 
M. E. L. Jacob writes that its goal was to 
explore "current state-of-the-art technol-
ogy," as it relates to librarians' roles as 
information managers and designers of 
information systems. The papers pre-
sented in the clinic fall into four basic 
categories: (1) concept statements at-
tempting to define emerging areas of in-
formation or knowledge management; 
(2) descriptions of local solutions to infor-
mation provision and management in a 
networked environment; (3) papers on 
designing information for presentation 
in online systems, specifically through 
screen design and the heuristic structur-
ing of information for easy navigation 
by means of hypertext applications; and 
(4) papers focusing on some of the policy 
implications of providing public access to 
what has become known as the "infor-
mation superhighway." 

This volume seeks to advance the no-
tion that librarians have a significant, 
perhaps even defining, role to play in 
structuring and designing new approaches 
to managing digital, online information. 
The combination of theoretical models, 
practical design considerations, and exam-
ples taken from the field is also surely 
meant to act both as a handbook and as 
encouragement to other library profes-
sionals. The breadth of the exposition of 
problems and solutions, from large aca-
demic libraries (as exemplified in the pa-
pers by Virginia Tiefel and Timothy Cole 
et al.) through the public library Gean 
Polly) to the school library (David Loert-
scher), is likewise meant to offer "break-
through" examples of the modem librarian 
as information designer and knowledge 
manager in a variety of settings. 

Unfortunately, most of the projects 
and thinking on which these papers are 
based took place well before 1992, and in 
some instances even before 1990, and the 
technology employed in the most far-
reaching of these is a state-of-the-art tech-
nology for that period. What has 
happened since then, however, has been 
an explosion of information resources, 
information tools, and information net-
works, which gives most of the practical