reviews Book Reviews 295 interest to educators worldwide. Thus, the audience is not limited to those in Western nations. The editorial board includes a num­ ber of “names” within the lifelong/distance learning community, although the member­ ship is drawn primarily from Common­ wealth countries. The writing is well ed­ ited and the articles relevant to the mission of the publication. I shared the volume with the distance learning library services coor­ dinator at our library and her impression was favorable; in fact, she was impressed, exclaiming that “these people really ‘get it.’” As with any new journal launch, it remains to be seen if it will succeed. The prolifera­ tion of journal literature guarantees that it is a risk; however, the topic is timely and reports of successful outreach to lifelong learners by librarians are certainly welcome and useful.—Eleanor Cook, Appalachian State University. Successes and Failures of Digital Libraries: 35th Annual Clinic on Library Applica­ tions of Data Processing, 1998. Eds. Su­ san Harum and Michael Twidale. Ur­ bana: Univ. of Illinois Graduate School of Library Information Science, 2000. 134p. $30 (ISBN 0-87845-107-2). One of the most important things we are learning about technological change to­ day is that it increases at a rate that many of us find is hard to match. Moore’s Law gives us eighteen months; other laws give us less. Another important thing we are learning is to discriminate between the kinds of information packets that need the full bibliographic and digital treatment and those that are more transitory—pack­ ets that have timeliness, but not necessar­ ily staying power. We also are learning how to take advantage of Web technol­ ogy to provide warp-speed access to in­ formation and events. These were some of the thoughts go­ ing through my head as I started to read these papers: timeliness, relevance, and future interest quotient. How does this publication measure up against these cri­ teria? These annual clinics, sponsored by the Graduate School of Library and Informa­ tion Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are organized around specific themes designed to ex­ pose librarians, information scientists, and others to new trends and approaches in information technology. The theme for the 35th clinic in 1998 was digital librar­ ies, the successes and failures thereof, al­ though perhaps a better and certainly more descriptive title for this work would have been “digital library test bed projects funded by the four-year NSF/ARPA/ NASA Digital Library Initiative (DLI).” Indeed, a brief history of the DLI, phase 1, is the topic of the first paper contrib­ uted by Stephen Griffin, NSF program director. Are there lessons here for librarians struggling with the “if, why, and how to go digital” dilemma? Not really, because the technologies described have already both migrated and become more main­ stream. For the researcher? Perhaps. But it is clear to most educated participants in the digital arena that the remaining is­ sues are primarily nontechnical in nature. Cultural, social, and legal issues are the crucial stumbling blocks still to be over­ come. The laborious processes described in these papers call to mind the TULIP (The University Licensing Program) experi­ ment in the early 1990s, which held out so much promise for taking librarians to the cutting edge of electronic information delivery. Yet, by the time it took to fully conduct all those e-journal test bed projects, the world had moved on, the technology had changed, and Tim Berners-Lee had launched Mosaic from CERN. It is important that library re­ searchers participate in these kinds of projects, and yet it seems we cannot pro­ ceed quickly enough. One of Thomas Hickey’s conclusions in his paper describ­ ing OCLC’s early efforts with full text— that users were not interested in e-jour­ nals until they had become used to the Web as a technology—seems almost pre­ historic because so many of our users to­ day will not look at anything that is not available on the Web. 296 College & Research Libraries The struggle to come to terms with technology seems to be disheartening to one of our leading professional bellweth­ ers. David Levy, no longer with Xerox PARC, but now an independent digital libraries consultant, relates an existential sense of our own mortality and imperma­ nence to the concept of a universal li- brary—thus, the apocryphal title of his paper “Give Me Documents or Give Me Death.” His basic conclusion is that “whether we think of libraries as collec­ tions of documents or storehouses of knowledge, we come to the same conclu­ sion: libraries and death are intimately related.” Many of us would come to the opposite conclusion—that a universal li­ brary, whether stored digitally or not, linking us with sounds, sights, and thoughts from the past—can only show the life everlasting of creative output. Can anyone listening to the music of Mozart or watching a Shakespeare play think any­ thing but that those two great artists live on today? Catherine Marshall’s paper on the fu­ ture of the annotated text addresses ques­ tions that many of us have been ponder­ ing, including the fate of annotations, both those already written and those per­ haps never to be written or captured in a digital world. However, she neglects to discuss the hand-to-brain connection that helps our minds to actually commit these notes to memory. Other papers range from a discussion of the semantic issues inherent in digital libraries (Hsinchun Chen) to a retrospective on the Illinois Digital Library Project (Bruce Schwartz et al.). Edward Fox’s paper on the “Net­ worked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations” seems remarkable for its lack of reference to the commercial data­ base that already fills much of this need and forces the reader to wonder if we are reinventing the wheel. The editors, Su­ san Harum and Michael Twidale, are to be credited for providing a useful index and biographical notes on the contribu­ tors. In sum, this collection of papers pro­ vides a historic marker on the laser beam May 2001 path from yesterday to tomorrow, and such should be archived. However, there is little enlightenment for the practicing librarian dealing with these issues. Let us, indeed, consider ways to publish this kind of rapidly obsolescing content elec­ tronically. As a step in the right direction, the interested reader can find the intro­ duction to this collection online at http:/ /www.lis.uiuc.edu/puboff/, as well as in the table of contents.—Gillian M. McCombs, Southern Methodist University. Willinsky, John. If Only We Knew: Increas­ ing the Public Value of Social Science Re­ search. New York: Routledge, 2000. 252p. $85 cloth (ISBN 0-415-92651-3), $22.95 paper (ISBN 0-415-92652-1). LC 00-035275. From the acknowledgments at the very beginning of his new book, John Willinsky’s view of public knowledge is evident. Regarding placement of foot­ notes in his book, Willinsky writes, “Fol­ lowing my interests in the public’s en­ gagement with scholarship, the publisher has agreed to place the footnotes at the bottom of the page, rather than use the more common endnotes that are placed at the back of the book.” Willinsky, Pa­ cific Press Professor of Literacy and Tech­ nology, Department of Language Educa­ tion, Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, wants a kind of scholarship— in this case, research produced in social science disciplines—that does more to engage the public. Such an engagement should affect every phase of research en­ deavors, from conceptualization through publication and distribution. If Only We Knew continues Willinsky’s thesis on the value of research to the gen­ eral public explored in his previous book, Technologies of Knowing: A Proposal for the Human Sciences (1999). It is an obvious thesis at first glance, as Willinsky argues relentlessly, if not repetitively, for the im­ portance of public knowledge of research produced by social scientists. Yet, from the very beginning, he is not so much a sup­ porter of the popularization of research www.lis.uiuc.edu/puboff