600 College & Research Libraries November 2011 myriad exceptions to policy. An accom- panying CD-ROM contains real-world collection development policies from various-sized academic, public, school, and special libraries, as well as a useful classified list of vendors. Care is taken in noting shortcomings in any brief treatment, but these few aspects merit notice. Electronic resources are at times treated as new, different, intrusive, rather than the now dominant format in most CM work. There is no mention in the collection evaluation discussion of the brief tests methodologies or Howard White’s work. Distance learning, now comprising half of the graduate popula- tion in some universities, is given one paragraph. Approval plans and the “big deal” are only briefly discussed. The price, at $75, is high for a paperback text marketed to poor graduate students. Where Evans and Johnson offer many pro/con positions on some topics, this work is understandably less developed beyond a presentation of core collection development issues. This and most CM texts are more monograph-centric than libraries will ever be again. Books and their trade were once central to CM work, but no more. The CM terrain is changing quickly, and it is difficult to treat this morphing in an all-in-one CM text. Dramatic journal marketing changes; the end of the paper journal; and the rise of the big deal (a term Gregory misapplies to aggregator packag- es) have redistributed the monograph/se- rials budget ratio in the direction of 30/70 or beyond. With the seismic movement of academic CM expenditures toward elec- tronic resources, the CM librarian’s work is only occasionally concerned with the details of paper materials. Departmental book fund allocation lines have become about the table scraps left after e-serials feast on the budget with their 1000+ title, often-undifferentiated, single-invoice journal packages. Are the many paragraphs here and elsewhere devoted to past CM and ac- quisitions processes needed to educate contemporary CM students and incom- ing practioners? For decades, selection processes changed slowly, and a review of evolutionary process and practice history may have been informative. With the disruptive and revolutionary changes brought by the overwhelming shift to a digital CM environment, why revisit and explain how libraries once did things if there is not a clear lineage to the present practice and methods? To let one example suffice: is any discussion of the Farmington Plan needed? It is not that this is not important, but there is so much to current collection management and such topics may best be left to courses in library history with its recountings of mediated Dialog searching and illustra- tions of Kardex check-in files. Gregory’s text completes what may be the end-of-days for the all-in-one col- lection development and management textbook. It is a good, easily read, intro- ductory overview of the major issues and topic areas in the discipline. Future CM texts would benefit from a single type of library focus with exploration of the is- sues of concern to those libraries.—John P. Abbott, Appalachian State University. R. David Lankes. The Atlas of New Librari- anship. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press; Chicago: Association of Col- lege & Research Libraries, 2011. 408p. alk. paper. $55 (ISBN 9780262015097). LCCN: 2010-022788. Over the last two decades, the profes- sion of librarianship has found itself confronted by a rapidly changing infor- mational environment that many in the field perceive as holding both promise and peril. On one hand, the emergence of new digital technologies has greatly increased the number of tools that can be harnessed to enhance library service. On the other, as venues for information seeking beyond the library continue to proliferate on the World Wide Web, there is considerable unease about the position of libraries in an increasingly crowded and chaotic informational landscape. In Book Reviews 601 the face of these opportunities and un- certainties, it is appropriate that librarians dig deep and (re)consider the bases of their profession. What is the raison d’être of librarianship? What should librarians be doing to ensure its continued vitality? Fundamental questions of professional self-definition such as these stand at the core of R. David Lankes’ ambitious new book, The Atlas of New Librarianship, in which he sets out a panoramic vision of librarianship for the future. Lankes, who is a professor at Syracuse University’s School of Information Stud- ies and directs the Library and Informa- tion Science Program there, calls his envisioned form of librarianship “new librarianship.” This formulation is telling. Lankes is well aware that librarianship is heir to a rich historical legacy that has shaped its contours, and he acknowledges that a number of aspects of this legacy will continue to have value for the future: he thus duly allows for elements of continu- ity in the profession. He also maintains, however, that, if librarianship is to be a truly progressive profession in the pres- ent and into the future, it needs a richer and more expansive understanding of its mission than it has hitherto possessed. Such a shift in worldview, he avers, requires significant changes in the way that librarians conceive of themselves, their tasks, and their tools. The model of new librarianship presented in the Atlas is intended to foster these changes: indeed, it offers nothing less than a blueprint for redefining the conceptual foundations of librarianship in order to renew it. The aims of new librarianship are encapsulated in the statement that “the mission of librarians is to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities.” This mission state- ment sounds several thematic leitmotifs that continue to reverberate through- out the book. For one thing, it focuses squarely on the agency of professionals (that is, librarians) rather than on insti- tutional structures and document collec- tions (in other words, libraries). Second, it identifies the improvement of society as the summum bonum toward which the work of librarianship must tend. Third, it specifies the particular modality by which librarians are to contribute to social amelioration—facilitating knowledge creation within their communities. On a superficial reading, it may seem that such a mission does not differ appreciably from that of traditional librarianship: after all, ever since the late 19th century, librarians have viewed themselves as members of a profession that contributes to the bet- terment of society by providing access to sources of knowledge that can further the (self-)education of information seek- ers. The idea of facilitating knowledge creation within communities, however, goes considerably further than that of providing access to sources of knowledge; and it is in Lankes’ development of this notion that the distinctiveness of his ap- proach becomes evident. Lankes’ understanding of knowledge is rooted in conversation theory, an ac- count of learning originally developed by the cybernetician Gordon Pask. As its name implies, this theory holds that knowledge is generated in the course of conversations, wherein the conversants (or participants in the conversation) seek to reach agreements about the matters under discussion. The understanding of the mat- ter under discussion that each conversant brings to a conversation is based on his or her experience and participation in past conversations; over the course of a con- versation, it can either modify the under- standings of one’s interlocutors or, in turn, be modified by them. Lankes terms such understandings, which are expressible as conceptual definitions and proposi- tions, “agreements.” Agreements are not isolated but rather stand in relation to one another within conceptual networks or, to adopt the parlance of conversation theory, entailment meshes. A conversant’s knowledge, then, consists of agreements articulated into an entailment mesh, the various nodes of which are constantly implicated in conversations. On this view, 602 College & Research Libraries November 2011 knowledge is dynamic and dialogically constructed in a conversant’s encounters with his or her fellows: to be in conversa- tion is to engage in knowledge creation. A number of consequences flow from Lankes’ conversation-based un- derstanding of knowledge, of which only two particularly salient ones can be considered here. First, his application of conversation theory underwrites a sharp departure from what he characterizes as the traditional focus within librarianship on the creation, organization, and main- tenance of document collections. Stating that it is a categorical mistake to identify documentary “artifacts” with knowl- edge itself, Lankes argues that librarians should move from an artifact-centered to a conversation-centered model of profes- sional activity. Such a shift would involve greater emphasis on the construction of tools and creation of environments—be they physical, digital, or hybrid—that promote knowledge-creating conversa- tions, whether these be between authors of documents and their readers, reference librarians and members of the community served by the library, or members of the community within the context of a library: connection, not collection, would become the primary focus of professional activity. Lankes’ critique of an artifact-based ap- proach to librarianship and his advocacy of a conversation-based one informs his treatment of such core bibliothecal areas of practice as collection management and information organization, both of which, in his estimation, stand in considerable need of reform. The critiques are bound to stir controversy at a number of points, while the discussion of how these areas of activity would look under the dispensa- tion of new librarianship will offer readers much food for thought. Second, conversations are dynamic processes and, if they are to bear fruit, demand active participation on the part of the conversants. Accordingly, Lankes calls on librarians to take on an active professional role in the lives of the com- munities within which they serve. This entails the tailoring of library services— both physical and digital—in ways that align them to the needs of the members of the communities that they serve. It involves finding innovative ways of outreach to draw more members of the community into the ambit of the library and to connect them with conversation partners, be these documents or persons, who can empower them through knowl- edge creation. It demands that librarians engage in dialogue with, and learn from, community members. And it requires that librarians actively project their own core professional values—which Lankes identifies as a commitment to learning, openness, intellectual freedom and safety, intellectual honesty and transparency, and ethical action—into their conversa- tions with people and institutions beyond the library. In short, new librarianship is to be participatory, open to change, action oriented, and, indeed, activist in its na- ture. Again, Lankes applies these general tenets of new librarianship to a number of specific issues within the profession; his proposals for reconfiguring LIS educa- tion will be of special interest to readers of this journal. The premises of conversation theory not only saturate the content of Lankes’ vision of new librarianship; they have also conditioned the form in which he presents it. The Atlas is articulated into three sections. The first of these consists of six extensive chapters, which Lankes calls “threads.” These chapters, which correspond to six key elements in the mission statement for new librarian- ship (“mission,” “knowledge creation,” “facilitation,” “communities,” “improve society,” and “librarians”), map out, through prose text and accompanying illustrations, the tenets of new librarian- ship and give examples of how it can be instantiated in different sectors of the profession. The second section takes the form of a foldout sheet representing the contents of the threads as an extensive circles-and-arrows diagram: here, Lankes’ exposition of new librarianship is visual- Book Reviews 603 ized as an entailment mesh, in which key concepts and propositions (circles) are connected to each other by relationships (arrows). This provides readers with a comprehensive, yet compendious, over- view of the territory being mapped. The third section comprises an alphabetical listing of each of the concepts or propo- sitions—that is, “agreements”—that appears in the diagram. In this listing of agreements, each entry includes a picture of the fragment of the diagram in which the agreement appears, information for locating the agreement in both the threads and the diagram, and, in many cases, a brief essay that supplements the discus- sion of the agreement in the threads: in short, it functions as an analytic index that allows the reader to enter into Lankes’ representations of new librarianship at a number of different thematic points. Finally, let us note that Lankes’ articula- tion of new librarianship is very much an ongoing project: accordingly, he has set up a supplement to the book in the form of a Web site (www.newlibrarianship. org/wordpress) that contains supporting materials and promises to incorporate, over time, new additions to the model of new librarianship. Taken as a whole, Lankes’ Atlas is a remarkable work of synthesis that inte- grates a plethora of insights into a coher- ent general philosophy of librarianship. The book is addressed to all persons inter- ested in the profession of librarianship, be they practitioners, academics, or students. To write for such a diverse intended audi- ence requires considerable skill in expo- sition: the matter must be presented in such a way that it conveys complex ideas clearly without oversimplifying them. In this, Lankes has succeeded brilliantly: his explanations and arguments are models of lucid and effective exposition, often leavened by humor, that will get his message across to all segments of his au- dience. The book, however, is more than a work of analysis; it is also very much a work of evangelization. Lankes passion- ately believes in new librarianship and so has written the Atlas in a deeply personal style that seeks to entice, persuade, and, indeed, inspire the reader to take up the banners of his vision. It is true that the rhetoric sometimes becomes overheated and enters the realm of bathos; neverthe- less, many readers will draw inspiration from the engaged and affirmative tone of Lankes’ prose. Whether one agrees with all details of Lankes’ vision or not, one cannot but profit from perusal of the Atlas, the contents of which will doubtless contribute to many conversations about the Wesen und Werden of librarianship.— Thomas M. Dousa, University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign. Transforming Research Libraries for the Global Knowledge Society. Ed. Barbara I. Dewey. Oxford, United Kingdom: Chandos, 2010. 208p. $75 (ISBN 9781843345947). In an environment where public uni- versity budget allocations for research libraries are increasingly recouped as a stratagem to forestall the current crisis of the political economy, academic adminis- trators charged with reducing costs and services may look to Transforming Research Libraries for the Global Knowledge Society to find justification for the dwindling sup- port for library programs. After a close analysis of the heterogeneous essays contained here, however, I am confident that such a reading mistakenly vacates the core findings of this book. Self-doubt is expressed. Will the library exist? Ought the library exist? But these questions, staged as they are in familiar ways, do not make the book remarkable. They are deployed as if to satisfy a polemic our professional literature seems to demand, to announce the authors as 21st Century/ Next Generation librarians. After due formality, the text moves beyond the garb of library obsolescence to forward some serious new thinking on the enduring cause of academic libraries, by offering grounded ideas and strategies to position today’s libraries as institutions capable of adapting and transforming again,