College and Research Libraries Book Reviews Bergman, Jed I. Managing Change in the Nonprofit Sector. San Francisco: Jossey- Bass, 1996. 249p. $34.95, alk. paper. (ISBN 0-7879-0138-5). Recently, I sent a note of congratulation to a colleague who had accepted a senior position in one of the five institutions whose financial history constitutes the subject of this book. Had I read the book. first, I probably would have written him a note in a differ~nt key. Sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, this study is some- thing of a landmark. For the first time to my knowledge, we have historical finan- cial profiles of five key independent re- search libraries: the Huntington, Folger, Morgan, Newberry, and American Anti- quarian Society. The Mellon Foundation deserves credit for sponsoring this, the first of what William Bowen, the foundation's president, anticipates will be a series of similar analyses designed to help non- profits better understand the dynamics of institutional success and failure. Rather than simpy continuing to funnel resources to hard-pressed institutions, Mellon de- cided that it was time for some much- needed diagnostic work to help libraries and museums better manage their fates. This is an important and sobering work. Its subtitle might well have been: ''Why Institutions Succeed and Why They Don't." Machiavelli observed that it is easier to found states than it is to maintain them. So it seems to be with the libraries in this study. With one exception, they were cre- ated by wealthy benefactors at the end of the last century and the beginning of the present one, the cultural patrimony of industrial capitalism. The founding fa- thers left collections and endowments sufficient for these institutions to live off their investments until the postwar pe- riod. However, by the '60s and '70s it be- carne clear that, in and of themselves, the core endowments could no longer meet rising levels of expenditures. Prewar budget surpluses were replaced with deficits, and to one extent or another, each institution had to cope with the new-and ongo- ing-reality of red ink. Addi- tional funding had to be found, transforming these libraries from "income spenders" into "fund-seekers." Like many other nonprofits, they joined the ranks of institutions now actively courting donors to meet program and op- erating costs. Some have done so better than others. The forces behind this fundamental structural change are several, and it is the great strength of Jed Bergman's study to have gone into them in considerable de- tail. Probably the most salient factor was the attempt of these institutions to rede- fine themselves and their missions in ways that spoke to new and expanded constituencies. The changes were dra- matic to say the least-from staid, gentle- manly repositories serving the privileged few to active centers of teaching, learn- ing, and outreach. The traditional collec- tion-centered focus of the institutions moved down on agendas that now privi- leged symposia, seminars, public lectures, and exhibitions. The Folger had its the- atre and the Morgan its "blockbuster" shows, while the Newberry seemed poised to metamorphose into a mini-hu- manities university. Hand in glove with developments that brought these librar- . ies more into the cultural mainstream of the times was the emergence of the NEH as a major catalyst for change. The NEH encouraged and supported program growth that emphasized collection use and outreach, and most of these institu- tions were quick to seize on the new avail- ability of federal funding to expand the reach and range of their efforts. 303 304 College & Research Libraries The fiscal result of these new orienta- tions was increasing levels of expendi- tures-in some cases quite sizeable. More- over, new institutional missions con- verged with pressures for other sorts of improvements: expanding and/ or up- grading facilities; professionalizing the staff and improving compensation pack- ages; and acquiring collections en bloc, among others. At the same time, the tra- ditional wisdom that shaped endowment investing created a dismal group of underperforming portfolios. Finally, these newcomers to the ranks of the fund-seek- ers had to mount ongoing development campaigns simply to meet day-to-day operating expenditures. In most cases the result has been chronic deficit spending. How and why did institutions allow themselves to be forced into cycles of re- curring, perhaps permanent, debt? These are the questions most difficult to answer in print. It is extremely difficult to avoid constructing narratives not peopled by heroes and villains. Bergman does an admirable job in trying to strike a balance: to contextualize without at the same time whitewashing. In this case, comprendre ne c' est pas tout pardonner. But still, it is the dead who come under critical scrutiny; the living tend to emerge as skillful mari- ners who will eventually guide their ships to shore. Passive, ineffectual, even refrac- tory boards of trustees are rightly made to bear a substantial amount of the re- sponsibility for bottom-line difficulties, although in some cases library directors were equally negligent in ignoring the warning signals. In the worst case, that of the Newberry, the two sides worked together to create an ominous fiscal sce- nario that may not be reversable. There, poorly contained costs, unrestrained spending practices, and development ef- forts overfo-cused on funding individual projects and programs instead of build- ing operating endowment all coalesced in an unfortunate alchemy. Conversely, the more successful insti- tutions were those that heeded the warn- May 1996 ing signs, brought spending under con- trol, and opted for moderate growth funded by a balanced approach to devel- opment. Those institutions seem healthi- est which have best been able to calibrate growth with their own institutional de- velopment potential. They have been careful not to overreach themselves. As institutions, they have come-albeit per- haps belatedly-to know themselves. Al- though Bergman's concern is with fiscal policy and its consequences, one cannot help but conclude that all the gurus on Wall Street could not help an institution that lacks a realistic appraisal of itself and its niche. The oracle at Delphi should be the starting point of fiscal redemption. One cannot help but be struck by the bind these institutions have found them- selves in. They cannot afford not to grow, while at the same time they have been unable to grow without incurring peren- nial deficits. Their current stewards un- derstand this well and have made struc- tural and policy changes to prevent the errors of the past from recurring. They have redefined the nature of trusteeship and have refreshened their governing boards with players rather than specta- tors. They have professionalized staffs, introduced cost containment policies, and launched major development campaigns. Yet it took more than two decades for the gravity of the dilemma to become clear, and in some cases it may take as long or longer to restore fiscal equilibrium. There are no quick fixes. The strength as well as the weakness of Bergman's analysis is its concentration on finances. Critically important as they are, they are not the only measures of success and failure. Bill Towner's vision of the new Newberry may have been se- riously flawed, but it would be hard to find an institution as deeply involved in and committed to scholarship and the community of scholars. The Newberry has contributed enormously to the hu- manities, and although its fiscal picture seems dismal, it nonetheless has a strong and substantial scholarly constituency. This makes the Newberry's case, warts and all, fundamentally different from that of the New York Historical Society. Need- less to add, the same could be said of any of the other four libraries in the study. One of the things that sets America so radically apart from Europe is the way in which our cultural patrimony is distrib- uted among so many independent librar- ies and museums. It is arguable that such a decentralized approach to preserving and making accessible the past is prefer- able to an overly controlled, overly cen- tralized approac~. From the perspective of one who has spent his professional career within the walls of large research universities, I can only admire the ways in which these libraries have served to complement the work of the academy, through both their collections and their programs. It would be hard to imagine the pursuit of historical and humanistic scholarship without them. Anyone who cares about them, indeed anyone who is concerned about the future of non profits in general, should pick up a copy of this book. At the very least, it should be re- quired reading for all trustees and offic- ers of institutions. I hope that Mr. Bowen keeps his word and that the Mellon Foun- dation sponsors future case studies as readable, as provocative, and as useful as this one.-Michael Ryan, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. White, Howard D. Brief Tests of Collection Strength: A Methodology for All Types of Libraries. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Pr., 1995. 208p. $55. (ISBN 0-313-29753-3). Librarians have long quested for resource sharing and cooperative collection devel- opment. The goal seemed near when, in the early 1980s, the Research Libraries Group promulgated the Conspectus as an instrument through which all libraries could use common categories and a com- mon language to describe their holdings. But the expected cooperative rewards never materialized. Libraries' inconsis- Book Reviews 305 tent self-assessments figure prominently in postmortem explanations. Conspectus rankings have been highly subjective, and the "verification studies" that would cali- brate scores across institutions have proved both difficult to prepare and ex- pensive to implement. Howard White has probed the evalu- ation dilemma for more than a decade. This book offers his solution: "a new, rela- tively brief test to assign libraries a score for existing collection strength in a sub- ject area." Each ''brief test" consists of forty titles, divided evenly among ten- item segments that correspond to the Conspectus' four collection levels ("mini- mal coverage," "basic coverage," "in- structional collections," and "research col- lections"). More than three hundred sample tests, for the most part constructed and applied by White's library school stu- dents, reveal a cheap and simple ap- proach that provides reasonably consis- tent results. The sample tests also evince a methodologically satisfying pattern in which a library holding more than half the test items for any particular Conspec- tus level will own that many or more items from all of the lower levels. The tests thus bear out the hypothesis that real-life collections do not combine weak holdings of basic works with a strong representa- tion of the esoteric. A final wrinkle vali- dates the Conspectus level to which test creators assign each sample title-initially a subjective process-by tallying that title's holdings on OCLC. Although many librar- ies own the test items associated with "ba- sic" collections, titles that test for "re- search" collections are held only sparsely. As White himself acknowledges, this innovative approach invites methodologi- cal disputation. For instance, though this short volume is blessedly free of math- ematical jargon, we are given neither em- pirical nor statistical arguments to justify fully the choice of forty items. The author eloquently defends testing economy and common sense, but does not explain why tests with ten items for each of four Con-