College and Research Libraries


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 



284 College & Research Libraries 

is being adopted beyond Dutch frontiers 
by PICA's Look Casters. 

At a time when universities them-
selves are expanding, Renault argues, 
one must ask what parallel future their 
libraries will pursue. (An American re-
members the 1992 ARL study, University 
Library and Scholarly Communication, 
which highlighted the relative decline in 
libraries' presence on U.S. campuses.) 
Renault resists the technological pana-
cea often embraced by financially 
strapped libraries: "messianic technol-
ogy," he says, is no substitute for the 
collective action represented by library 
service and indeed by a university as a 
whole. Library missions must change to 
keep up with changes in the universities 
that they serve. In France, Renault be-
lieves, this will result in three principal 
models going forward: (1) the "main" 
academic library, containing vast mul-
tidisciplinary collections serving hu-
manities and social sciences in large and 
ancient universities; (2) the "center with 
satellites," a model evolved since the 
1960s to keep up with fragmentation in 
the traditional university's structure-a 
model that finds it difficult to cope with 
independent user-organized libraries, 
Renault says; and (3) "dispersed docu-
mentation," in which each independent 
research center collects its own materials 
and provides its own information serv-
ices, a model used in higher research that 
most closely follows the "balkanization 
of specialties and diplomas" on campus. 
The most general model, Renault sug-
gests interestingly, is coming to be that 
of a "network" as opposed to a "hierar-
chy"; perhaps, one is tempted to add, 
"like everything else." 

An outstanding characteristic of the 
current changes, Renault says, is "direct 
service to the users." OPACs, document 
delivery, multimedia databases, desktop 
computer dial-in access, the Internet: 
these-and the involvement in them al-
ready of libraries, of networks like RUN 
and OCLC, and of vendors like Black-
well and EBSCO-are among the most 
significant recent developments. Re-
nault warns that although universal bib-
liography might be alive, with the 

May1995 

complexity and complementarity that 
can be achieved with the new tech-
niques, universal access is still far out of 
reach: our continuing inability to obtain 
and assimilate information still calls for 
organization, international cooperation, 
and, as always-he evokes the names of 
historians H-J. Martin and Lucien 
Febvre-for libraries. 

The excellent bibliography is limited 
to printed resources: sad, considering 
the large and rapidly increasing body of 
online resources on the subject available 
to both foreign and French readers. 
There also is an index of acronyms, 
indispensable for any non-European 
reader ("How can one govern a commu-
nity composed of a dozen nations, with-
out acronyms?"). The book is easily 
read: its language is nontechnical and 
is unlikely to tax anyone's French seri-
ously. There are interesting maps by 
Nancy Dupont, depicting various recent 
statistics. The book provides a general, 
comparative, and thoughtful understand-
ing of the current situation of university 
libraries in France, and, more generally, 
of academic libraries everywhere, as they 
encounter problems of political, finan-
cial, demographic, and computer origin. 
It is highly recommended.-Jack Kessler, 
kessler@well.sfca. us. 

Crews, Kenneth D. Copyright, Fair Use, 
and the Challenge for Universities: Promot-
ing the Progress of Higher Education. Chi-
cago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1993. 256p. 
$22.50 (ISBN 0-226-12055-4). 
Ten years, or even five years ago, the 

topic of copyright was a giant yawn. At 
learned and professional society meet-
ings, the word assured a sparsely popu-
lated session attended only by those 
who had some connection to managing 
publishing rights and permissions or by 
lawyers specializing in copyright. Not 
so now. Copyright on a program electri-
fies the conference, and the meeting 
room is likely to host an overflow crowd. 

In the world of big business, commu-
nications carriers bid sums higher than 
any princely ransom for companies that 
own content, that is, that hold a full-hand 
of copyright cards. The 1993 dogfight