reviews Book Reviews 503 this side of the Atlantic. Bernard de­ scribes the markup scheme used by the taggers, details of the speech transcrip­ tion conventions developed, analysis tools (mainly SARA, short for SGML- Aware Retrieval Application), types of queries, and much more. The only mys­ tery remaining by the end of this article is why for years there had been no le­ gal access for American libraries and scholars to this resource, as if it were some kind of defense-sensitive rocket technology. Only in March 1999 did the British Library announce publication of a BNC Sampler CD, containing a two- million-word subset of the entire corpus complete with analytical software, with the assurance that it and all future releases of the BNC would be available world­ wide. With this exception, it is in fact the depth and breadth of transatlantic coop­ eration in the area of library digitization that impresses the North American reader. Electronic Beowulf, for example, arose out of a collaboration between ex­ perts of the British Library, the Univer­ sity of Kentucky, and Western Michigan University. Photographic expertise was enlisted from the University of Kansas, and collections that hosted the shoots in­ cluded Copenhagen and Harvard. Anec­ dotes—such as the fact that the large photoflood lights used at the Royal Li­ brary in Copenhagen blew out the fuses there three times—not only add some human interest to these reports, but they remind us all that without pain there can be no gain. It may be that most of the articles in this volume will be chiefly of historical interest ten years from now, so rapidly is the landscape changing. But that still gives us several years to browse through them and to share them with frontline administrators and electronically aware faculty, who will no doubt be grateful for the courtesy. General information on the Initiatives for Access Programme and the many projects it brought into life, most of which have now been mainstreamed, is available from the British Library’s online information server Portico at http://portico.bl.uk.—Jeffrey Garrett, Northwestern University. Watson-Boone, Rebecca. Constancy and Change in the Worklife of Research Uni­ versity Librarians. Chicago: ALA (ACRL Publications in Librarianship, no. 51), 1998. 172p. $30, alk. paper (ISBN 0­ 8389-7984-X). LC 98-26935. Complementing several oft-cited socio­ logical studies of professionals such as physicians, scientists, and college teaching faculty, Watson-Boone’s book is an ethnog­ raphy of the work life of academic librar­ ians at a large public research university in the mid-1990s. The object of her research was not simply to describe and analyze an academic library as a place but, rather, to understand the work of academic librar­ ians. She considered work not merely as a set of tasks and attendant working condi­ tions separate from human actors but also sought to learn how the librarians them­ selves defined and valued their work. To this end, the author—a librarian, library and information studies educator and re­ searcher, and president of the Center for the Study of Information Professionals— interviewed twenty-nine (about one-third) of the nonadministrative academic librar­ ians at the pseudonymous Midwest Pub­ lic Research-I University (abbreviated MIRI-U). This book is a description and interpretation of her findings. For studying the librarians, the author used the qualitative sociological method known as grounded theory—a method that emphasizes induction of theory from actual cases instead of its derivation from a grand, overarching theory. Hers is not a quantitative study. Devotees of statistically based methods might well object to its lack of formal hypothesis testing, rigorous sam­ pling procedures, and quantified responses to questions. Nevertheless, qualitative methods have enabled her to write an illu­ minating portrait of her informants’ work. Besides an introduction, a bibliogra­ phy, and an index on method, the book is divided into five chapters and an appen­ dix. The first chapter, consisting of an abstract discussion of work and its mean­ http://portico.bl.uk.�Jeffrey 504 College & Research Libraries ing to workers, introduces the concept of work centrality, defined as “the extent to which a person defines him- or her­ self through work and expresses a com­ mitment to working.” For the most part, the remaining four chapters, which comprise the core of the study, present an emic, or insider’s, view of their work­ place culture. In this perspective, the ethnographer uses the informants’ words to reveal and explicate their cul­ tural categories and themes. Each of the chapters contains quoted excerpts of interviews that illustrate the work- related activities and values of a par­ ticular respondent. Simply put, the au­ thor lets the librarians speak for them­ selves, although she places what they say in an interpretive context. Through inductive interpretation, she demon­ strates that work is central to the MIRI­ U librarians she studied. In the second chapter, “Tell Me What You Do,” the author distinguishes four categories of academic library work, then tells how librarians occupying those cat­ egories regarded their work. Each cat­ egory—collection management, catalog­ ing, reference, and learning-teaching­ training—constituted the librarians’ pri­ mary work, conceived by them to be ei­ ther their most time-consuming cluster of tasks or the tasks by which they defined themselves professionally. As one might expect, differing value orientations cor­ related with the different kinds of primary work; for example, whereas catalogers found satisfaction in organizing library materials according to established rules, reference librarians prized interacting with users and expediting the relation­ ship between materials and users. All the same, a majority of the respondents, re­ gardless of the identity of their primary work, shared a commitment to the intrin­ sic rewards of work, placing higher value on work itself than on salary or prestige. The next two chapters examine in greater detail the meaning and context of the librarians’ work. Chapter 3, “The Uni­ versity and the Library,” examines the re­ lationships between the MIRI-U librarians September 1999 and the organizations and personnel that surround, shape, and respond to their work. For the librarians, the most influen­ tial organizations are MIRI-U itself and its library system. They see MIRI-U favor­ ably as a university composed of students and faculty, and unfavorably as an imper­ sonal bureaucratic institution. Similarly, they conceptually dichotomize the library’s organization into their own functional units—for example, cataloging, reference, and subject libraries on the one hand, and administration on the other. The librarians expressed strong preference for au­ tonomy, participatory decision making, and decentralization; valued collegiality; and revealed generally negative feelings to­ ward administration. The author argues that all these attitudes are consistent with those characterizing other “think workers” or professionals. The following chapter, “Expressions of Self,” provides additional support for this interpretation. Although one would be hard-pressed to gainsay its essential points, the con­ cluding chapter, “A Postindustrial Future,” is the least informative section of the book. And although it does present some librar­ ians’ perceptions of the impact of techno­ logical change on their work, its focus is clearly not change. Indeed, this leads to a question about the accuracy of the title of the book itself. Despite its title, the book only incidentally describes and analyzes the phenomenon of change in the work life of librarians. It is evident from both the text and the appendix on method that the study was not designed to measure change either prospectively or retrospec­ tively. It is not, in fact, a study of change. A more apt title might have been “The Work Life of Research University Librar­ ians.” With minor exceptions this book is well conceived, clearly written, and carefully edited. Most academic librarians who read it will be impressed by the fact that the work and attitudes of the librarians at MIRI-U seem familiar, if not identical, to their own. Recommended for all aca­ demic librarians. —James D. Haug, East Carolina University.