reviews.indd Book Reviews 557 in the writing of this book. The authors ex- plain that they were not interested in bean counting; instead, they identified a num- ber of themes that appeared frequently in the responses and from these they drafted seventeen “conflict scenarios” intended to be used as case studies. The intention was to convey information about the nature of conflict and the paths to resolution while never losing sight of the personal nature of these stories. Each scenario begins with a descrip- tion of the type of library in which the conflict occurred and the area/department within that library. The story itself then follows, after which two “confl ict experts” (consultants who work outside the library framework, but who have experience working with libraries) weigh in with their assessments. Finally, the authors round out the story by providing their comments on what went wrong and how the problem might be prevented. I must admit I was a bit skeptical about the whole notion of scenarios until I read the first one and discovered that it was squarely within the realm of my own experience in the workplace: the case of the internal candidate whom most em- ployees (including the candidate) believes will be the logical person to fill a vacancy; but then the administration fills that va- cancy by hiring an outsider. The internal candidate is angry and feels betrayed; the external candidate walks into a job not knowing there is immediate resistance from staff as well as from the rejected Index to advertisers Annual Reviews 516 Archival Products 495 Choice 485 EBSCO cover 4 Element K 526 Elsevier Science Direct cover 2 Idea Group Publishing 481 Iimage Retrieval 487 IEE Publishing cover 3 Libraries Unlimited 482 internal candidate, and administration does nothing to help either party. Many of the scenarios that followed looked equally familiar: the staff person with private problems, the micro-manag- er, the office romance, the “dead wood.” I suppose there is some comfort in knowing that one is not alone in the library world in terms of working with these types of problems. Whether a few pages on how to solve them is useful, except to the most socially and managerially inept amongst our ranks, is another question. This book reminds me a little of the things my grade-school teachers used to say to the class again and again: “Grow up,” “Act your age,” “Stop fighting,” “Say you’re sorry,” “Quit picking on him or her,” “Show some courage.” Yes, the world is more complex as an adult, but the directives for employees and administra- tors are consistent: to practice some cour- tesy, emotional intelligence, and courage in confronting and sorting out problems. Can a book of this sort help inculcate such common sense? I think it’s a start. The voices of my grade-school teachers echo throughout the pages, but in a much more sophisticated way. Perhaps this book’s true value lies in reassuring us that we are not the first to encounter these types of problems and that the hardest thing to do in our efforts to resolve them may also be the simplest.—Nancy McCormack, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Thelwall, Mike. Link Analysis: An Infor- mation Science Approach. Amsterdam and Boston: Elsevier Academic, 2004. 269p. $69.95 (ISBN 0120885530). Given the number of erudite individuals who use and contribute to the Web, it was just a matter of time before someone coined the phrase “I link, therefore I am” to describe the Web’s core characteris- tic—the ability to hyperlink ideas, texts, Web pages, or anything else that can be posted to a server. This Cartesian concept is central to the Web, as Web architect Tim Berners-Lee describes in Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny 558 College & Research Libraries of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor (San Francisco, 1999). When designing the Web’s linking, Berners-Lee wanted com- puters to emulate the human brain’s abil- ity to follow random associations. He also found inspiration in the organizational tools of research—tables of contents, bibli- ographies, and indexes—that linked ideas together in a reasoned fashion. Random association and careful orga- nization: any attempt at link analysis must grapple with these seemingly disparate facets of linking. Fortunately, link analysis is really not that difficult to understand, as detailed in Mike Thelwall’s Link Analysis. In this well-organized book, Thelwall ap- plies information science concepts and methodologies to explain link analysis. The result is a succinct work that focuses on academic Web use and scholarly com- munication aspects of linking. The book is divided into five major sec- tions. The first provides information on basic linking theory and an explanation on how Web crawlers and search engines function, followed by how these tools count links and how these counts can be interpreted. The second section discusses the Web as both an abstract graphic model and a collection of general and academic content sites. The third section deals specifically with academic aspects of the Web, examining the structure and link- ing patterns to and from university and departmental-level Web sites, as well as to academic journals and articles. With the fourth section, the book moves from theory into descriptions of actual applications in practice, describ- ing in detail five link analysis studies of academic networks, business Web sites, and personal Web pages. These case studies provide working models of methodologies and data analysis, com- plete with results and conclusions, and provide illustrative examples on which to hang the conceptual hat woven in the earlier sections. “Tools and Techniques,” the aptly titled fifth section, supplements Thelwall’s text with an accompanying Web site November 2005 (http://linkanalysis.wlv.ac.uk/) and an as- sociated link analysis soft ware program, SocSciBot. This section includes directions on using commercial search engines, the Internet Archive, and other programs and applications for link analysis. Thelwall’s examples are clearly presented, and read- ers complete the section with a good sense of how to run their own link analysis. Over the course of the text, readers will encounter some formulas and descrip- tions of algorithms, along with illustrative graphs and tables. Each chapter presents objectives and introduction, well-de- fined thesis, summary, and references. The supporting Web site provides more documentation. Many parallels exist between citation analysis, bibliometrics, and link analysis. In his introduction, Thelwall notes that efforts to apply bibliometrics to Web link analysis date from 1996, when Ray Larson presented “Bibliometrics of the World Wide Web: An Exploratory Analysis of the Intellectual Structure of Cyber- space” at the annual American Society for Information Science and Technology meeting in Baltimore (http://sherlock. berkeley.edu/asis96/asis96.html). Since then Thelwall and others have contrib- uted to this growing body of literature. Thelwall’s book is noteworthy in that he successfully presents theoretical perspec- tives, Web site mechanics, case studies, and hands-on exercises in a single, un- derstandable narrative. The result is a text that not only explains the intellectual underpinnings of link analysis but also provides the tools and techniques for any librarian or researcher to engage in their own analyses. Linking is a necessary and complex feature of the Web, and the Cartesian allu- sion above, despite its pithy nature, serves as a wonderfully succinct description of the Web’s basic nature. As scholarly com- munication becomes more Web based, link analysis is emerging as an important tool in understanding how the Web deliv- ers information. Mike Thelwall’s book is an excellent resource for understand- http://sherlock http:http://linkanalysis.wlv.ac.uk ing—and using—this crucial tool.—Gene Hyde, Radford University. The Bodleian Library: A Subject Guide to the Collections. Eds. G. P. M. Walker, Mary Clapinson, and Lesley Forbes. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2004. 240p. $37.50 (ISBN 1851240799). This is the first comprehensive overview of the subject collections of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the oldest and largest academic library in Great Britain. Each chapter relates the history of manuscript and print collecting in a specifi c subject area and concludes with a list of more detailed bibliographies and catalogs of specialized collections. Chapters are devoted to Classical Studies, British History and Politics, English Literature and Language, Children’s Books, Theol- ogy, Philosophy, Social Sciences, Law, Geography and Maps, Music, Science and Technology, German Studies, French Studies, Italian Studies, Hispanic Stud- ies, Russia and Eastern Europe, Near and Middle East, South and South East Asia, East Asia, North America, Australia and New Zealand, Sub-Saharan Africa, Printed Ephemera, Pictorial Resources, Bindings, and the History of the Book. Because the narrative format makes it diffi cult to fi nd specific bits of information in the guide, an index of names and sub- jects is provided. Forty-eight color plates illustrate the range of materials in the collections, from a third-century papyrus to an anti-Apartheid poster. Also included are a guide to the arcane Bodleian shelf marks and an alphabetical list of princi- pal-named collections, such as the papers of J. R. R. Tolkien and the Opie collection of 20,000 works for children. Among the Bodleian’s incomparable holdings are the collection of primary and secondary materials on the English Civil War and Interregnum and the vast collection of maps, from early charts to electronic tools. The library also has impressive, if uneven, foreign-language collections, including German scientific dissertations, Italian bank books, Japa- Book Reviews 559 nese local histories, Russian works on indigenous languages, Hebrew manu- scripts, early Yiddish books, and papers of Mendelssohn, Kafka, and Wittgenstein. The collections were amassed through a combination of personal interest, dona- tions by private collectors, purchase, and foreign exchange. As a depository library, the Bodleian has always been entitled to copies of British publications, although not all are accepted or catalogued. The Bodleian has had a complicated relationship with departmental and col- lege libraries at Oxford, suff ered periods of neglect and underfunding, and nowa- days struggles to support everything from scientific periodicals to foreign law reports to digitization projects. Its shelf marks are like geologic strata recording the vicissitudes of the library through the centuries, just as its international collec- tions reflect the history of the British Em- pire. Patterns of rifts and irrationalities are clearly visible in collection management over the centuries, reflecting the interests of individual faculty, a changing univer- sity curriculum, and shifting priorities of library administration. The proud tone of the guide is laced with touches of sardonic humor, for ex- ample, an allusion to “an uncatalogued collection of materials on coconuts, deposited by Reginald Child, author of a standard work on that subject.” An- other amusing anecdote is the story of the origins of collecting in Hispanic Studies: Thomas Bodley and his librarian, Thomas James (“a fiercely Puritan polemicist”), were eager to get an index of works con- demned by the Spanish Inquisition to use as a desiderata list. The guide lacks any serious critical analysis, perhaps inevitable in a work that pays tribute to donors and patrons. It is a rather uncomfortable hybrid of reference and coffee-table book. A museum-like in- terest in the book as object is not entirely successfully combined with a praise- worthy attempt to profile collections for educational and research use. Digital col- lections such as the Witt genstein archive