reviews Book Reviews 97 on equipment and space utilization. These topics are covered comprehen- sively and will likely be the most heavily consulted sections of the book. The reader comes away from them with a clear over- view of the many options available. Also notable is Hinchliffe’s thoroughness as a bibliographer on this subject. There are close to two hundred book/article refer- ences, thirty-one legal references to codes, standards, and the like, a directory of sev- enty-two suppliers, and a list of twenty- three library classroom Web sites. URLs are supplied whenever possible. Less successful is the section on plan- ning, mainly because of its rudimentary nature. Most librarians at this level are unlikely to need coaching on how to gather information and reach a decision. It also should be noted that the book is geared toward those libraries that are big enough (and rich enough) to have a ro- bust instruction program that justifies a dedicated electronic classroom. Many small academic libraries do not fall into this category. They wind up using exist- ing facilities or sharing space with other programs such as distance education. As the use of electronic information in academia has increased, library-based instruction has evolved from handy op- tion to practical necessity. And, of course, a fundamental element of such instruc- tion is a properly designed and equipped facility. Although the majority of major academic libraries today are likely to have electronic classrooms up and running, some still do not. A ready audience, es- pecially in those institutions that need to upgrade out-of-date or inadequate facili- ties, exists for this useful handbook.— Paul Rolland, Mesa State College. The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Tech- nology in the First Age of Print. Ed. Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday. London, New York: Routledge, 2000. 212p. alk. paper, $85, cloth (ISBN 0415220637); $25.99, paper (ISBN 0415220645). LC 99-087623. The essays of this collection are guaran- teed to raise some hackles among book history purists. Is it acceptable, for ex- ample, to characterize an octavo edition of a seventeenth-century book—the Eikon Basilike of 1649—as a “neat palmtop,” while referring to larger quarto and folio versions as cumbersome “laptops” and “desktops?” How can Claire Preston de- scribe the curiosity cabinet of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a “visual search-engine” and Neil Rhodes call the humble almanac “the information super- highway (or cobbled lane, at any rate) of the later sixteenth century?” Anne Prescott begins an essay on early modern reference books by asking, dead seriously, “Is an encyclopedia a computer?” The last straw for a number of readers may just be Jonathan Sawday’s comparison of John Donne (1572–1631), the great Elizabethan poet, with William Gibson, the cyberpunk author of the 1984 cult novel Neuromancer. In essay after essay, we are confronted with never-before-heard comparisons, similes, metaphors, and analogies, imposing, it would seem, the nomenclature of our com- puter age onto aspects of early modern lit- erature and book culture. This book contains then, prima facie at least, more than enough evidence to convict the editors and contributors alike of the high historiographical crime of anachronism, which the Encyclopaedia Britannica defines as “neglect or falsifica- tion, intentional or not, of chronological relation,” as “disregard of the different modes of life and thought that character- ize different periods… in ignorance of the facts of history.” But then take a closer look at the con- tributors’ biographies: There’s not a cyberpunk or a geeky anachronist among them. Timothy J. Reiss, for example, is a distinguished early modernist at New York University; Leah S. Marcus, a Re- naissance scholar at Vanderbilt; and Stephen Orgel, professor of humanities at Stanford, is the editor of standard edi- tions of works by Shakespeare, Jonson, and Marlowe. The more numerous U.K. contributors are equally distinguished. Indeed, the volume bristles with scholar- ship, and no claim is made that is not an- 98 College & Research Libraries January 2002 chored in lucid argument and copious references to the literature, both early modern and contemporary. What’s more, if it is true that modern categories and fashionable computer vo- cabulary have been projected a bit too enthusiastically back into time, there is certainly more than enough movement in the other direction as well, for the authors of these essays are just as eager to show how Renaissance philosophers, math- ematicians, poets, and dreamers antici- pated many of our own modern knowl- edge technologies. The history of the com- puter began, after all, with Pascal’s add- ing machine of 1642, with Thomas Hobbes’s reflections on “computation” in 1656, and with Leibniz’s “calculus ratio- cinator,” first demonstrated in January 1673. Far less known is the contribution of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets who imagined what we would someday know as the Internet and the World Wide Web, introducing for the purpose words such as matrix, Web, and net that we now regard as being so trendily our own. In a poem in 1611, for example (quoted by Sawday), John Donne describes how a network of mind has been “thrown upon the heavens” and, like the nets used by fishermen, now brings the universe to us—to our very desktop, as it were: For of Meridians, and Parallels, Man hath weav’d out a net, and this net throwne Upon the Heavens, and now they are his owne. Loth to goe up the hill, or labour thus To goe to heaven, we make heaven come to us. Hyperlinks, image maps (such as the “zodiacal man”), use of icons as memory devices linking to larger meaning com- plexes, even interactivity (in the form of almanacs that performed astronomical calculations for the user and contained blank pages for the reader to add his own observation data)—all of these informa- tion-processing tools were anticipated, many also fully developed, in the printed works of early modern times. Today, when we use a combination of hardware and software to retrieve a subset of data from a larger set based on shared proper- ties, does it really matter whether we call the device a “search engine” or, with Samuel Quiccheberg (1529–1567), a “promptuarium?” It becomes clear to the reader of these essays that the twentieth- century pioneers of computing, the Internet, and the Web all applied exist- ing topoi, algorithms, and mnemonic de- vices to make their creations, confirming the truth of Victor Hugo’s dictum: Imaginer, ce n’est au fond que se ressouvenir. (“Imagining is in fact nothing other than remembering”). Or, as Thomas Browne put it in his Religio Medici of 1635, by Claire Preston, “intellectual acquisition… were but reminiscential evocation.” There are numerous parallels between then and now. In his essay “The Early Modern Search Engine: Indices, Title Pages, Marginalia and Contents,” for ex- ample, Thomas Corns shows how “pub- lishers and printers in the first century of print were already aware of the complex issues of varieties of user-interface” and succeeded in providing a host of user-friendly features that surely won them appreciative readers. His main case study is the Geneva Bible of the mid-1500s, financed and annotated by Calvinists to advance their version of the true faith. As Corns writes: “Each book has an abstract, as does each chapter. Each page has a header indicating content. The margins ooze glosses, interpretation, cross-references, and further pointers to context.” But this user-friendliness has its price, for despite the wealth of reader aids, “paradoxically, its apparatus, while facilitating access, closes down the open- ness of the text.” This shows, in Corns’s words, the “repressive potential” of hypertext and other user-friendly appa- ratuses that facilitate access on the one hand, but also “direct and control inter- pretation,” serving the ends of “prema- ture closure.” The implications for cre- Book Reviews 99 ators and users of heavily linked Web sites today could not be more obvious and disturbing. (Several pages later, Sarah Annes Brown describes in “Arachne’s Web: Intertextual Mythography and the Renaissance Actaeon” the astonishing va- riety of Renaissance responses to Ovid’s story of Actaeon, showing just how “open” a text can be, how myriad the potential “links” are that actual readers make in their minds. By implication, Brown confirms Corns’s fears about the restrictive potential of hypertext, how constraining and limiting even the most richly linked electronic version must be). The sense of incongruity that arises from the curious juxtapositions of lan- guage, concepts, and minds that is so jar- ring as we begin this book yields only gradually to appreciation and under- standing. We first must learn to see how very different words from entirely differ- ent eras can, in fact, relate to the same ref- erent—that whatever word we may use to name the rose changes not what the rose itself is. By the time we complete Neil Rhodes’s impressive final essay, “Articu- late Networks: The Self, the Book and the World,” we realize that the difference that modern computers have effected in our world is really one of degree rather than of kind. This is an enormous and a hum- bling realization, a gift to the reader from a fine piece of humanities research.—Jef- frey Garrett, Northwestern University. Westbrook, Lynn. Identifying and Analyz- ing User Needs: A Complete Handbook and Ready-to-Use Assessment Workbook with Disk. New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers, 2001. 307p. $75, alk. paper (ISBN 1-55570-388-7). LC 00-045220. Because of the continued growth and de- velopment of information technology, people who work in libraries are con- fronted, almost daily, with changing ex- pectations concerning their roles. Ac- countability and assessment have become keywords for those trying to provide up- dated services to library patrons. At the same time, librarians and staff are ex- pected to justify budget expenditures, set priorities for collection development and reference services, adapt to change, seize new opportunities for services as they arise, and position the library as a major competitor in the information business. According to Dr. Lynn Westbrook, faculty member of Texas Woman’s University’s School of Library and Information Stud- ies, support for these decisions can be obtained by conducting a community in- formation needs analysis (CINA). Westbrook believes that CINA can be a key in gaining an understanding of the existing information needs of the popu- lation the library serves, whether it is a public, school, or academic library. She presents a step-by-step procedural tool for conducting such a study in any of these three settings, emphasizing the cyclical nature of identifying information needs, implementing the appropriate changes in services, and evaluating those changes. Westbrook clearly states the prerequisites for doing a CINA: staff support, neces- sary resources, ethical considerations, and the correct techniques and questions to include. Later chapters explain important points in designing various data-gather- ing instruments and assessing the in- house data already available through sys- tem reports. She takes great care to ex- plain various sampling techniques and methods, to define types of statistical analysis, and to describe how to organize the data into meaningful patterns and codes. The book’s value is enhanced by its many features. Most apparent are the suggested readings. Westbrook has not only compiled an extensive works cited list, but she also has categorized the read- ings at the end of every chapter, provid- ing an annotated bibliography for each type of library. The appendices include examples of different library studies and the coded and charted statistical reports created by various OPACs. An ample glossary and index also are provided. Academic librarians may find them- selves wishing she had written an indi- vidual book addressing their specific needs instead of trying to speak gener- << /ASCII85EncodePages false /AllowTransparency false /AutoPositionEPSFiles true /AutoRotatePages /All /Binding /Left /CalGrayProfile (Dot Gain 20%) /CalRGBProfile (sRGB IEC61966-2.1) /CalCMYKProfile (U.S. Web Coated \050SWOP\051 v2) /sRGBProfile (sRGB IEC61966-2.1) /CannotEmbedFontPolicy /Warning /CompatibilityLevel 1.3 /CompressObjects /Tags /CompressPages true /ConvertImagesToIndexed true /PassThroughJPEGImages true /CreateJobTicket false /DefaultRenderingIntent /Default /DetectBlends true /DetectCurves 0.0000 /ColorConversionStrategy /CMYK /DoThumbnails false /EmbedAllFonts true /EmbedOpenType false /ParseICCProfilesInComments true /EmbedJobOptions true /DSCReportingLevel 0 /EmitDSCWarnings false /EndPage -1 /ImageMemory 1048576 /LockDistillerParams false /MaxSubsetPct 1 /Optimize true /OPM 1 /ParseDSCComments true /ParseDSCCommentsForDocInfo true /PreserveCopyPage true /PreserveDICMYKValues true /PreserveEPSInfo true /PreserveFlatness false /PreserveHalftoneInfo true /PreserveOPIComments false /PreserveOverprintSettings true /StartPage 1 /SubsetFonts false /TransferFunctionInfo /Apply /UCRandBGInfo /Preserve /UsePrologue false /ColorSettingsFile () /AlwaysEmbed [ true ] /NeverEmbed [ true ] /AntiAliasColorImages false /CropColorImages false /ColorImageMinResolution 151 /ColorImageMinResolutionPolicy /OK /DownsampleColorImages true /ColorImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /ColorImageResolution 300 /ColorImageDepth -1 /ColorImageMinDownsampleDepth 1 /ColorImageDownsampleThreshold 1.10000 /EncodeColorImages true /ColorImageFilter /DCTEncode /AutoFilterColorImages true /ColorImageAutoFilterStrategy /JPEG /ColorACSImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /ColorImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /JPEG2000ColorACSImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /JPEG2000ColorImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /AntiAliasGrayImages false /CropGrayImages false /GrayImageMinResolution 151 /GrayImageMinResolutionPolicy /OK /DownsampleGrayImages true /GrayImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /GrayImageResolution 300 /GrayImageDepth -1 /GrayImageMinDownsampleDepth 2 /GrayImageDownsampleThreshold 1.10000 /EncodeGrayImages true /GrayImageFilter /DCTEncode /AutoFilterGrayImages true /GrayImageAutoFilterStrategy /JPEG /GrayACSImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /GrayImageDict << /QFactor 0.15 /HSamples [1 1 1 1] /VSamples [1 1 1 1] >> /JPEG2000GrayACSImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /JPEG2000GrayImageDict << /TileWidth 256 /TileHeight 256 /Quality 30 >> /AntiAliasMonoImages false /CropMonoImages false /MonoImageMinResolution 600 /MonoImageMinResolutionPolicy /OK /DownsampleMonoImages true /MonoImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /MonoImageResolution 1200 /MonoImageDepth -1 /MonoImageDownsampleThreshold 1.16667 /EncodeMonoImages true /MonoImageFilter /CCITTFaxEncode /MonoImageDict << /K -1 >> /AllowPSXObjects false /CheckCompliance [ /None ] /PDFX1aCheck false /PDFX3Check false /PDFXCompliantPDFOnly false /PDFXNoTrimBoxError true /PDFXTrimBoxToMediaBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXSetBleedBoxToMediaBox true /PDFXBleedBoxToTrimBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXOutputIntentProfile () /PDFXOutputConditionIdentifier () /PDFXOutputCondition () /PDFXRegistryName () /PDFXTrapped /False /CreateJDFFile false /Description << /ENU (IPC Print Services, Inc. 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