reviews.indd 300 College & Research Libraries May 2009 cultural information ethics. Each section begins with a contextualizing discussion of the particular issue, followed by a brief bibliography and a series of cases with questions to consider for discussion. This volume is meant as both a class- room and a staffroom text. Buchanan and Henderson give both historical and contemporary context to their discussions of each issue, and this framing of ethical debate will prove particularly useful to LIS students. For example, the chapter concerning intellectual freedom discusses both historical approaches taken by professional associations in the United States and Canada as well as some of the more common contemporary measures, including the PATRIOT Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and efforts to make Internet filtering mandatory in public libraries. Those working in librar- ies will already be familiar with many of these debates, but the clear and concise explanations will serve as quick and thor- ough refreshers to those of us whose daily labor threatens to overwhelm our ability to think critically about the values that guide our actions. Each issue discussion is followed by 25 case studies that use imaginary situations to prompt concrete discussion of abstract ethical principles. The case studies, real strengths of the book, engage different angles or approach inherent ethical questions, demonstrating the enormous range of real-life situations that require professional librarians to grapple with ethical principles. Cases are set in public, special, and academic li- brary settings, and many will be instantly recognizable to practitioners: the student photocopying reserve materials one chapter at a time, in potential violation of copyright; the suspiciously hovering older man in the children’s room whose right to privacy must be balanced with safety concerns; the demand by a faculty member to know who has checked out the video he needs for class right this very sec- ond. For many of us, these situations are so common that we may not even consider the need to engage in debate about our responses. Buchanan and Henderson’s collection is both a cogent reminder and a practical workbook for taking up this professional demand anew. Most of this book is written by Bu- chanan and Henderson, but they oddly chose to reprint a chapter on the emergent field of intercultural information ethics by Rafael Capurro, a German LIS theorist. His chapter on intercultural information ethics presumes a working knowledge of debates in contemporary East-West philosophy and is written in a dense prose style that will be unfamiliar to most library professionals. Capurro’s focus could not be more important or more relevant. He asks us to consider what professional ethics mean in an increas- ingly globalized and globally connected world. For example, how does the U.S. professional commitment to intellectual property square with competing cultural commitments in China to free flow of in- formation? Capurro invites us to engage in a conversation about our ethics that acknowledges cultural diff erences and encourages the formulation of a new kind of ethics produced through intercultural dialogue. It’s a worthy call, but one that is difficult to heed when it is this diffi cult to understand. The reader wishes Buchanan and Henderson had taken up the task of translating this highly theoretical lan- guage into the clear and direct approach that makes the rest of this volume such a compelling addition to our educational and professional collections.—Emily Drabinski, Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus. Kelty, Christopher M. Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Soft ware. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. 378p. alk. paper, $23.95 (ISBN 978-0-8223-4264-9). LC 2007-049447. Little did Christopher M. Kelty, an as- sistant professor of anthropology at Rice University in Houston, Texas, expect to become an active member in the culture he set out to investigate—that of Free Software, or Open Source software. Kelty is an anthropologist, after all, not a coder. He struck out to research the phenomenon known as Free Soft ware but ended up studying those who participate in the culture and, more important, the cultural significance of Free Software. Part history, part anthropological study, and part ethnographic study, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Soft ware reveals the whys and wherefores of the Open Source culture and the geeks who inhabit and participate in it (and not necessarily by contributing computer programming skills and code). For Kelty, Open Source, also Free Software, is both an end product and a culture. As a product, it is computer software for which the source code used to compile the application is freely avail- able for perusal, consumption, adoption, and reuse (and free in terms of cost). As a culture, it describes the organization and customs of those who participate in the creation of the software. Unifying the culture and its product, Kelty identifies Free Software as a “recursive public,” intentionally evoking the mathematical concept (recursion) commonly employed in computer programming. A recursive function is a programming routine that “calls” itself, the output of which is used by, or feeds, the calling routine, which, in a recursive function, is the same routine. Kelty desired to impart a sense of the profound depth of Open Source culture, which is far more than software code, and extends to legal and organizational issues, in addition to technology. “Public” denotes that Open Source culture exists beyond (but also within; it is not insular) political, economic, and ethnic boundaries and that many indi- viduals (entrepreneur, programmer, edu- cator, librarian) coexist within this public. Technology is an instrumental component of this recursive public, for it is through technology that geeks, those who consti- tute this culture, express themselves. This is not to suggest that geeks are all one- dimensional programmers, but that the technology enables geeks to realize and Book Reviews 301 form this culture in the first place, which they continue to develop and expand, by creating new code, drafting legal licenses, or authoring software manuals. Develop- ment and growth are vital elements in the Open Source culture. Two Bits is divided into three parts. The first part, “The Internet,” situates the people—the geeks—that constitute this culture. International in nature, Kelty demonstrates that geeks are gener- ally very skilled, learned actors deeply engaged in Free Software who are not, as it might seem sometimes, blinded by ideology. Quite the opposite oft en; on average, geeks tend to be practical, uni- fied by a common belief that technology is inescapable and malleable, to be put toward human uses. The second part, “Free Software,” is essentially a history of open source software culture, but Kelty convincingly relates the discussion to how Free Software is a recursive public and something that can be witnessed from the earliest days of soft ware collaboration (and the Internet). One aspect that reveals itself from the historiography is how Free Software is modular, intentionally flexible for future development and customiza- tion. Indeed, “openness and modifiability are core values” to Open Source soft ware and geeks, and the third part, “Modifi- ability,” addresses these values beyond soft ware. In it, Kelty expands the discussion to consider related endeavors: Creative Commons and Connexions, the latter is a project and community at Rice University to provide the space and means to col- laboratively author textbooks for students of all ages. It can be related to the Open Access principle in scholarly publishing and MIT’s OpenCourseWare—both focus on sharing, at little or no cost, with the aim to further knowledge and learning. Connexions, though not strictly a soft- ware project, is a recursive public, akin to the culture of Free Software. The proj- ect shares many of the same issues that any software project might encounter: legal and licensing hurdles, collaboration 302 College & Research Libraries challenges, and, of course, technological design issues. But the concept, like Free Software, calls upon the members of a community to engage and contribute, not only to sustain the endeavor but also to reach a point where it is self-sustaining by its community. But Two Bits is only partly about geeks, code, technology, or software. It’s also about the cultural significance of those elements and how they’ve infl uenced, and will continue to impact, the ways people work, organize, collaborate, and even think. The reader, however, must come to his own “policy prescriptions,” as such aims are beyond the scope of Two Bits, which Kelty acknowledges is more a work of history and anthropology “in the hopes that it is more lastingly usable.” Kelty’s fine book provides an anthropological basis to investigate our own practices and community. Not only do academic libraries, and their parent institutions, often rely on Open Source software solutions, but they also initiate and support a substantial number of Open Source projects, manag- ing, therefore, the technological hurdles and legal pitfalls, and organizing and facilitating community collaboration and communication. Libraries are, if not historically, increasingly becoming recur- sive publics, especially as more and more institutions (libraries) begin to tackle the technological needs of libraries today: VuFind and Scriblio in the field of OPACS; Koha and Evergreen in the Integrated Library System sector; digital library and institutional repository software; and numerous other smaller projects. These are software applications and tools de- signed by libraries for libraries to be used in libraries, often by librarians, who then develop modifications, and so on. This is all very recursive, and infectious. Along his way, Kelty found himself embroiled in the very issues he was researching—a participant in the Open Source culture, a geek of sorts. Not only did Kelty participate early on with Con- nexions, but also Two Bits, att ractively May 2009 published by Duke University Press, is available under a Creative Commons license at twobits.net.—Kevin M. Ford, Columbia College Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. College and University Archives: Read- ings in Theory and Practice. Eds. Christopher J. Prom and Ellen D. Swain. Chicago, Ill.: Society of Ameri- can Archivists, 2008. 360p., $54.95 (ISBN 1-931666-27-X). LC 2008-015631. This new collection of essays off ers an exceptionally clear, concise, and well- organized overview of how certain higher education trends are affecting the archival profession, and how archivists might respond. Some of the trends include the need to assess and document institutional effectiveness (especially in the realm of student learning), new standards and training in digital technology, and in- creasing user expectations for access to digital information. There are thirteen chapters in all, grouped into four cat- egories: “Redefining the Role of College and University Archives,” “Capturing Campus Histories,” “Managing Efficient Programs,” and “Serving Our Users.” The editors and contributors tend to be archivists or special collections librarians at major research universities, as well as members of the Society of American Archivists (SAA). As the editors point out in their pref- ace, there are three specific themes that run through most of these discussions of how archivists should address their challenges: the opportunities created by new technologies (which also bring new challenges), the need for collaboration with other campus units and throughout the profession, and the value of being pro- active and innovative. So, for example, as Nicholas Burckel wonders in the opening chapter, could institutional eff ectiveness assessments be strengthened by collabo- ration among the members of the SAA to identify best practices in documenting student learning, followed by the devel- opment of guidelines and strategies for archivists to carry out such documen-