College and Research Libraries


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Book Reviews 
Challenges in Indexing Electronic Text 

and Images. Ed. Raya Fidel, Trudi Bel-
lardo Hahn, Edie M. Rasmussen, and 
Philip J. Smith. Medford, N.J.: Pub-
lished for the American Society for 
Information Science by Learned Infor-
mation, 1994. 306 p. (ISBN 0-938734-
76-8). 
As academic libraries continue to ex-

pand public access to diverse electronic 
information resources, they are provid-
ing increasingly new types of informa-
tion beyond conventional bibliographic 
data. For a growing number of libraries, 
the World-Wide Web has transformed 
hypermedia from an intriguing futuris-
tic possibility to a day-to-day reality. 
WAIS servers and CD-ROM systems 
have made full-text access equally com-
monplace. Specialized image systems 
are emerging, ranging from page-image 
databases of digital representations of 
printed materials to fine art databases of 
photographs, pictures, and other graphic 
material. 

Given these trends, Challenges in In-
dexing Electronic Text and Images is a 
timely work. The book is organized into 
four sections: indexing and accessing 
images, indexing of hypermedia, com-
puter support tools for indexers, and in-
dexing and retrieval from full text. 
Papers in each section are introduced by 
one of the editors. The papers include 
research reports, discussions of particu-
lar systems and projects, theoretical trea-
tises, and scholarly overviews of different 
areas of study. 

Several papers in this volume are es-
pecially notable. Joseph A. Busch's pa-
per discusses the specialized information 
needs of historical researchers, espe-
cially art historians, and describes how 
these needs are met by representative 
information retrieval systems. This pa-

282 

per underscores the fact that different 
disciplines have different information 
organization and retrieval needs, and, 
where feasible, we must build systems 
that address these unique requirements. 

As hypertext documents proliferate 
because of the enormous popularity of 
the World-Wide Web, we are in desper-
ate need of good design principles to 
improve navigation within and between 
these documents. Gary Marchionini' s 
paper examines the relationship be-
tween indexing and hypertext, and he 
suggests that hypertext designers be-
gin the document creation process by 
building an index to the projected work. 
This paper is a welcome reminder that 
the traditional principles of indexing 
are still valid and useful in new con-
texts. 

While hypertext authors are being en-
couraged to discover conventional in-
dexing techniques, commercial and 
nonprofit index publishers are investi-
gating new techniques to improve the 
indexing process. One of the most inter-
esting and potentially significant index-
ing strategies being employed is the use 
of "knowledge-based" indexing, which 
is derived from artificial intelligence and 
expert system research. Susanne M .. 
Humphrey's paper surveys develop-
ments in this field, and describes her 
important MedindEx prototype at the 
National Library of Medicine. A key 
challenge inherent in know ledge-based 
indexing is the effort required to encode 
a detailed store of knowledge about the 
subjects under consideration and their 
interrelationships. 

The often bemoaned "information ex-
plosion," which has spawned a seem-
ingly endless supply of texts to be 
indexed, motivates researchers to de-
velop computer-based techniques that 



minimize or eliminate human interven-
tion in the indexing process. Donna Har-
man's paper is a concise and lucid 
survey of automatic indexing strategies, 
covering topics like stop words, stem-
ming, term weighting, relevance feedback, 
and phrase indexing. Amy J. Warner has 
written an equally laudable overview of 
the use of linguistic information in the 
retrieval of full-text documents. For 
nonspecialists interested in quickly un-
derstanding these inherently complex 
topics, these papers are real gems. 

Overall, Challenges in Indexing Elec-
tronic Text and Images is a commendable 
work that includes contributions by 
noted experts. It is more oriented toward 
information scientists than library prac-
titioners; however, it has a good selec-
tion of papers that academic librarians 
may find of interest, and it is recom-
mended for readers with a serious inter-
est in indexing topics.-Charles W. Bailey, 
Jr., University of Houston, Houston, Texas. 

Les Bibliotheques dans l'universite. Ed. 
Daniel Renault. Paris: Editions du 
Cercle de la Librairie, 1994. 358p. 
(ISBN 2-7654-0548-4). 
France is the birthplace of networked 

information for the general public. That 
country's Minitel, launched in 1982, 
was the first working system to purvey 
digitized information to the uninter-
ested user-the user who neither 
knows nor cares how the system itself 
works. This general public orientation 
of the Minitel was a harbinger of 
things to come. These now are arriving 
with a vengeance for the U.S. Internet. 
Libraries in France, as elsewhere, have 
been heavily involved in networked 
information: in Minitel, in the Internet, 
in BITNET and JANET, and other 
"nets." And yet university libraries, 
which have been in the forefront of 
networked information in the United 
States and the United Kingdom, have 
been badly behind in France. This has 
been not so much from conscious design 
or difference of approach. It has been 
more the result of historical circum-
stances: political, social, financial. These 
have been in some respects uniquely 

Book Reviews 283 

French; but in other respects they have 
been distressingly evocative of prob-
lems now faced, increasingly, by univer-
sity libraries in the United States and 
elsewhere. So Daniel Renault's book-a 
tightly drawn compilation of essays by 
leading thinkers from France and other 
European countries-can provide back-
ground indispensable for understanding 
both the current general travails of 
French university libraries and a few of the 
problems now dawning for university li-
braries in the United States and elsewhere, 
in networking and other areas. 

The book offers six sections: (1) a su-
perb recent history of French university 
libraries by the able current inspector-
general of French libraries, Denis Pallier; 
(2) a description of the modern context 
of the French university and of its infor-
mation service, both library and nonli-
brary by Pierre Carbone; (3) an analysis 
of the user community, both university 
and general public, by Renoult himself 
(he directs planning for the Bibliotheque 
Nationale de France) and Maggy Peyeril 
of Montpellier's library; (4) a descrip-
tion of French library infrastructure-
organization, buildings, administration, 
classification, personnel-in essays by 
several authors, with descriptions of 
library service approaches which to 
foreigners can sound both familiar 
("Computerization Is under Way") and 
endearingly French ("La Fonction Patri-
moniale"); (5) a section on networking giv-
ing the French approach to dealing with 
what every librarian elsewhere knows, 
that computers and the information that 
they offer are here to stay, and that they 
must and may be dealt with effectively 
and even happily; and, finally, (6) a for-
eign, comparative perspective, including 
(a) an introspective essay on Germany 
by Gernot Gable of Cologne, (b) a wist-
ful, "grass is always greener" report on 
a tour of modern German library build-
ings by the French librarian Marie-
France Bisbrouck, (c) a startlingly bleak 
current assessment of university librar-
ies in the United Kingdom, by Derek 
Law (King's College, London), and (d) 
an optimistic and encouraging account 
of a Dutch approach so successful that it