reviews.p65


166  College & Research Libraries March 2003
guage, beginning with a brief summary
of the basics of U. S. copyright law and
its implications for the profession. This is
the most technical section of the book;
however, it does an excellent job of de-
scribing the substance and nuances of
these confusing sections of U.S. code, as
well as the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act, and a range of legal issues relating
to technology, access, and potential legal
changes with emerging technologies.

In the section entitled �Working
with Patrons,� the two chapters address
the importance of protecting the privacy
of patrons and the implications of the
Americans with Disabilities Act on library
and electronic resources access. Library
security expert Bruce Shuman discusses
levels of security and ways to ensure that
those who work in and use public build-
ings enjoy a secure environment.

Although legal issues of immediate
significance dominate this work, an im-
portant section deals with the somewhat
more immutable subject of ethics and ethi-
cal behavior in the life of the information
professional. One chapter limits its focus
to ethics in the virtual realm of e-com-
merce, whereas a second places classical
ethical norms of truth, justice, and free-
dom within the context of professional
decision making on issues such as pri-
vacy, intellectual property, information
quality, and information access. The third
chapter in this thoughtful section deals
specifically with putting professional eth-
ics into practice.

This book is written as a handbook to
help information professionals under -
stand legal issues. It concludes with a sec-
tion on drafting and implementing poli-
cies as well as a list of resources. It is im-
portant to note that no work can serve as
a definitive guide to the shifting land-
scape of laws regulating museums, ar-
chives, and libraries, and none can sub-
stitute for an attorney�s legal advice. The
most one can hope for in a book like Li-
braries, Museums, and Archives is that it will
offer a detailed overview of current play-
ing field. This fine volume does that ad-
mirably.�Gene Hyde, Lyon College.

Sauperl, Alenka. Subject Determination
during the Cataloging Process. Lanham,
Md.; London: Scarecrow, 2002. 173p.
alk. paper, $47.50 (ISBN 0810842890).
LC 2001-57698.

This reviewer, who finds it difficult to
dislike any book, was disappointed by
this one. Based on the author �s doctoral
dissertation (University of North Caro-
lina, 1999), the work reports on a study
made to identify and examine the cogni-
tive processes involved in the assignment
of subject headings through a case study
of catalogers. The thought processes that
go into subject cataloging have received
sparse attention, and the topic is deserv-
ing of scholarly exploration. This study
makes a definite contribution to the quite
limited body of literature. Sauperl�s fail-
ure to explain certain aspects of her re-
search methodology frequently cause the
reader to become puzzled, however, if not
frustrated. The printed text itself could
have been improved by careful editing
and some rewriting.

 The work is organized into seven
chapters. An introduction discusses the
purpose of the study and very briefly
describes the research strategy. The sec-
ond chapter reviews the treatment of
subject determination as presented in
cataloging and indexing textbooks and
discusses the previous research con-
cerned with subject analysis and index-
ing. The inclusion of indexing research
strengthens the study and is to be ap-
plauded. The third chapter describes the
research methodology. Chapter four,
�Twelve Personal Approaches to Subject
Cataloging,� presents the case studies.
Being ninety-five pages in length, it
forms the core of the book. Chapter five
summarizes what was learned from the
case studies. Chapter six presents a
model for subject analysis. Chapter seven
discusses the author �s findings in rela-
tion to earlier studies and the implica-
tion of those findings for cataloging edu-
cation and cataloging in libraries. The
section concerned with previous research
has a fair amount of redundancy with
chapter three. Although repetition of this



Book Reviews  167
nature is not uncommon in dissertations,
less detail in one chapter or the other
would have been preferable in the book.
A bibliography and an index conclude
the volume.

 Sauperl�s case study participants were
twelve experienced original catalogers
from three academic libraries in the
Southeastern U.S. Each institution had
�more than a million volumes � several
branch libraries and large central catalog-
ing departments with several catalogers
performing original cataloging. All the
libraries used OCLC.� Each participant
performed original cataloging for three
books of his or her own selection. Except
for the first case study, however, partici-
pants only �describe cataloging of one of
the three items.� The reason for impos-
ing this limitation in a study, that by its
very nature is already quite limited, is not
stated.

 Six catalogers were observed by
Sauperl, who used the �think-aloud
method � to capture the cognitive pro-
cess of the catalogers during their work.�
The other six were interviewed. The re-
spective methodologies are discussed, but
the rationale for their dual employment is
nowhere stated. Sauperl does comment
that the different methods had a substan-
tial impact on the reports of the case stud-
ies. �While the observed catalogers actu-
ally cataloged books during the observa-
tion session, the interviewed catalogers
only talked about their cataloging ap-
proach. This means the stories of the ob-
served catalogers are much more detailed
and based on evidence from the observa-
tion, whereas the stories of the interviewed
catalogers are quite brief and skeletal.�

 Interviewed participants were asked
to describe some recent work they had
cataloged, given the opportunity to ex-
plain their philosophy of cataloging, and
so on. The interviews were structured
inasmuch as individuals were asked to
respond to and discuss, as they deemed
appropriate, the relation of a number of
factors to subject cataloging.

 Each participant was presented with
several factors that �were selected from the

observation session of one or two catalog-
ers in another library in the study.� Par-
ticipants were therefore not responding to
a uniform set of factors, a circumstance that
Sauperl leaves unexplained. The responses
given to the variables were interesting and
informative. This reviewer believes the
study would have been stronger had a
comprehensive set of variables been de-
veloped and each participant in the three
groups presented with the same identical
factors to prompt discussion.

 There are several problems with the
handling of the variables. Given their im-
portance to the interviews, Sauperl�s fail-
ure to discuss them in a separately labeled
section of the text must be faulted. She also
must be faulted for explicitly stating the
complete set of variables for just one in-
terviewee group. No comparable sets are
provided for interviewees in the other two
groups. One learns the factors used to
prompt discussion with these interviewees
only in the text. Variables or concepts pre-
sented to the first group included such
expected elements as authority file, local
catalog, title page, record for a previous
edition, tentative heading and subject
heading, as well as such factors as time and
cost. Participants in this group were not
asked to comment on the importance of
the author�s intention, skimming the work,
and thinking of the library user as a part
of the process when choosing subject head-
ings, variables included as prompts to an-
other group of interviewees. Cooperation
with colleagues and �saturation point �
that feeling when you had to stop� work-
ing with a given book, were among the
other variables.

 Despite its shortcomings, this is not
an unimportant work. Scholars of subject
cataloging will obviously be its primary
audience. The study provides a base for
future research and, given its moderate
price, should be owned by any library and
information science collection that sup-
ports serious scholarship. The book is
worth consideration as supplementary
reading for cataloging courses. Catalog-
ers should at least skim the work, espe-
cially those at entry level and mid-career.



168  College & Research Libraries March 2003

Index to advertisers
ACRL 133
Annual Reviews 110
AIAA 99
Archival Products 162
Biosis 100
CHOICE 123
Haworth Press cover 2
Library Technologies 103
R.R. Bowker cover 3
ScienceDirect cover 4

 By way of conclusion, it seemed only
appropriate to check WorldCat to look at
the subject headings assigned to this
work. A title search (done on August 9,
2002) retrieved five records, two for the
book and three for the preceding disser-
tation. The record for the book in hand
(OCLC: 48588266) had two subjects: �Sub-
ject cataloging� and �Subject cataloging�
United States�Case studies.� A second
record (OCLC: 50100464), which had an
identical bibliographic description except
for pagination being noted 192 (versus
173 for the copy in hand), gave the single
subject: �Subject cataloging.� The record
for the printed version of the dissertation
(OCLC: 42810541) had three subjects:
�Subject cataloging,� �Subject headings,�
and �Catalogers�United States�Atti-
tudes.� The final records were for micro-
form versions of the dissertation. The
records for both the microfilm
(OCLC:44492710) and the microfiche
(OCLC: 44161585) gave the two identical
headings: �Subject cataloging� and �Sub-
ject headings.� The subjects given all seem
appropriate, even if they are not entirely
consistent. This reviewer would suggest
adding another subject heading to bring
out the cognitive aspects of the study. But
that�s just a thought.�James W. Williams,
University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign.
Warner, Julian. Information, Knowledge,

Text. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2001.
150p. alk. paper, $49.50 (ISBN:
081083989X). LC: 00-067055.

How did humans make their way from an
oral tradition in Homeric or pre-Homeric
times to the language of computer pro-
grams today? That is exactly the question
that Julian Warner addresses in his 2001
book, Information, Knowledge, Text. On the
faculty of the School of Management and
Economics, The Queen�s University of
Belfast, Warner may seem an unlikely can-
didate to find his way to a topic steeped in
the academic study of information but, in
fact, he has written extensively in this area.
Library Literature and Information Science
lists forty-two citations for his work, in-
cluding many book reviews of related
studies. His approach is thorough, aca-
demic, credible, and quite interesting. The
bibliography at the back of the book is ex-
tensive and wide-ranging. The chapters
have, as Warner states in the preface, all
�previously undergone editorial and �
full peer review as either journal articles
or conference presentations.� Warner
made appropriate revisions to the origi-
nal articles to �avoid repetition and in-
crease coherence.� He has looked well af-
ter his new readers, as the chapters do
provide a coherent collection. Regarding
repetition, however, this reader could have
done with fewer references to Bacon�s fa-
mous statement, �Writing [maketh] an
exact man.� The book finishes with repub-
lished reviews written by Warner of books
that allow him to continue his exploration
of the symbology and significance of writ-
ing. There is no index included at the back
of this book, an omission this reviewer
found unfortunate.

 Taken individually, the chapters stand
on their own. In the first chapter, �Study-
ing Writing,� a careful analysis of Roy
Harris�s The Origin of Writing (1986) and
Signs of Writing (1995), Warner begins to
persuade the reader that the route from
spoken to written communication was sure
and inexorable. The chapters that follow
build on exactly this argument. The semiotic
approach to language and its relationship
to signs throughout human history is per-
suasive, if not always easy. By the third
chapter, �Not the Exact Words�: Writing,
Computing, and Exactness,� Warner has