College and Research Libraries


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188 College & Research Libraries 

envisions only individual citizens seem 
to participate meaningfully. After the 
display of so much legal expertise, her 
call for individual participation appears 
somewhat ingenuous, as she acknow-
ledges the power of "powerful vested in-
terests" and their lobbies only once. 
Disagreement with her conclusion need 
not, however, preclude librarians' using 
her analytic surveys of topics that are of 
great interest to librarians and other in-
formation professionals.-Je.ffry Larson, 
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. 

Rossman, Parker. The Emerging World-
wide Electronic University: Information 
Age Global Higher Education. Westport 
Conn.: Greenwood, 1993. 176p. $17.95 
(ISBN 0-275-94776-9). 
The elements of this volume's vision 

of the future are mostly familiar. It com-
prises on one hand the expectations of 
the electronic zealot who expects a net-
worked world to transform information 
processing and education totally, and on 
the other hand the internationalist's 
commitment to advancing the interests 
of humankind through broadly collabo-
rative international projects. The 
author is "Vice-President of the Global 
Systems Analysis and Simulation Project 
(GLOSAS/USA) and Chair of the 
GLOSAS/Global University-Long-Range 
Planning Committee." This project goes 
back twenty years and at the time of 
writing (1991) had still not offered an 
actual course internationally; a veronica 
search of gopherspace finds that the en~ 
terprise is active but cannot confirm that 

March 1995 

it is actually offering courses. It spon-
sored, for example, the first international 
conference on distance learning ever 
held in Moscow this past summer. 

The volume is not, however, hostage 
to the fortunes of the author's enter-
prises. It is a creditable journalistic sur-
vey of recent (at the time of writing) 
discussion of the possibilities for creat-
ing broad-based educational enterprises 
running beyond national boundaries. 
The particular synergy it seeks arises out 
of the power of electronic information to 
forge links between geographically re-
mote locations and the political commit-
ment to create such links in the first 
place. The faith that the work represents 
is a familiar mix of the internationalist 
and the peace activist. A fair amount of 
what is mentioned is vaporware, and the 
intellectual and cultural contexts are 
slightly disconcerting (e.g., H. G. Wells 
fantasizing about the "World Brain"). 
Soothing buzzwords (the Pacific rim, 
lifelong learning) are regularly heard. 
The basis in reality is fairly slight: a sense 
of economic pressures is only lightly 
present, and I find no discussion of in-
tellectual property laws and the com- · 
mercialization of electronic information 
and how that might affect the pious day-
dreams here. The chapter on "Connect-
ing the World's Research Libraries" 
contains fresh material ·of interest to all 
those who have not yet heard of or famil-
iarized themselves with the workings of 
OCLC, but to few others.-James J. 
O'Donnell, University of Pennsylvania, 
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

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95,112 
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99 
100 
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cover 3 
132, 143 
cover 4 
185, 187