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, 



604 College & Research Libraries November 2011

not only the universities they serve, but 
the global knowledge environment they 
helped to create.

Editor Barbara I. Dewey gathers an 
impressive assembly of senior research 
library and information professionals to 
take on the challenges of the present while 
thinking broadly about what it will take to 
nurture, encourage, and facilitate the next 
wave of academic innovation and schol-
arly discovery. Divided into four parts, 
which cover administration, research ser-
vices, public programing/outreach, and 
scholarly publishing, her collection can 
be best summarized as a rapid-fire tour of 
recent library initiatives drawn together 
to help jump-start creative thinking about 
emerging possibilities. 

The book opens with essays that seem 
aimed to scare and dare librarians into 
action. We hear familiar calls, to innovate 
or die, and to collaborate or wither. We are 
admonished to develop strategic leader-
ship programs, cultivate more intensive 
relations with researchers, embrace the 
latest communication technologies, and 
harness systems to exploit an economy 
of scale. The tone and timber is diverse, 
ranging from James Neal’s stimulating 
“Powerpoint” style, to Jennifer A. Young-
er’s more deliberate discussion of strate-
gies for incremental change. Beneath the 
surface rhetoric of library liquidation, 
we hear a sober but urgent call to plan. 
Without an affirmation of the research 
library, however, one wonders whether or 
not some of the planning called for here 
is not simply a call for a more efficient 

displacement of the library centrality in 
the university mission. Graham Jetcoate 
provides some thoughtful speculation on 
how research libraries will figure in the 
future academy, but even his affirmative 
vision does not seem to rise above the 
timid. Yet, if these opening essays err on 
the side of vagueness or equivocation, 
each approach also effectively animates 
timely discussions among research li-
brarians about values and goals. They 
certainly had this effect in my office. 

The one outlier in this section is Antho-
ny W. Ferguson’s well-conceived essay on 
“The Transformation of Academic Librar-
ies in China.” I suppose the editor inserts 
it here as a means to further dislodge any 
residual parochialism by way of inserting 
a measure of global thinking. Ferguson 
does provide a thoroughly descriptive 
account of the ongoing transformation 
of Chinese academic libraries, one that 
confirms the global reach of the chal-
lenges facing North American libraries, as 
well as the potential that might be had by 
way of a deeper attention to international 
strategies of library development. Its 
placement, however, leaves one desiring 
a more sustained treatment of the global 
forces shaping the new international 
public sphere. 

The second section, “Organization 
and University Context,” consists of two 
grounded case studies that focus in on 
how the university library might recon-
nect with the university it serves. It opens 
with University of Connecticut Vice Pro-
vost Brinley Franklin’s description of how 
organizational change models taken from 
the corporate environment can be applied 
to the academic library. Franklin docu-
ments how Leeds University deployed 
David Kaplan and Robert Norton’s “Bal-
anced Score Card” formula and suggests 
the successes at Leeds advocates for a 
wider adoption of the program. Jeffery 
G. Trzeciak follows with a similar essay, 
“Building Key Relationships with Senior 
Campus Administrators.” This time, 
one learns how McMaster University in 
Hamilton, Ontario, applied something 

Index to advertisers
ACRL 609
Annual Reviews cover 2
Archival Products 514
CHOICE 508
Cold Spring Harbor Lab. Press 558-559
Digital Libr. Sys. Grp. cvr 4, 511, 513
OECD cover 3
Palgrave 507



Book Reviews 605

called “Human Performance Technol-
ogy,” a systematic process to discover and 
analyze institutional goals, and measure 
their outcomes. Both chapters are detailed 
hands-on accounts summarizing how 
these alternative methods can be used 
to critically evaluate the various facets of 
our complex institutions. A third chapter 
in this section, one that objectively weighs 
the successfulness of each strategy, would 
be welcome. As it is, the reader must be 
satisfied with each author’s claims. An 
even more ambitious project might ad-
dress the foundational issues behind the 
contemporary demand for new metrics 
capable of measuring the value of library 
services. Without such an analysis, it is 
difficult to determine if these types of 
organizational transformation programs 
are productive.

The third section makes perhaps the 
most important contribution to the vol-
ume. In two chapters, it focuses first on 
the university library as a center for col-
laboration and second on the opportuni-
ties afforded by developing collaborative 
spaces. In “Partnerships and Connec-
tions,” Nancy Noe and Bonie MacEwan 
advocate for an expansive notion of the 
research library. It is conceived as more 
than an instrument to collect, organize, 
and disseminate knowledge. In their vi-
sion, the library includes (on site or off) 
computing centers, tutoring and writing 
centers, faculty governance assemblies, 
university development personnel, 
literary agencies, and more. To achieve 
better partnerships, they advocate closer 
relations between the library and other 
academic faculty, reporting positively 
on projects that embed librarians into 
academic departments as instructors or 
writing tutors and bringing faculty more 
concretely into library governance. The 
second chapter in the section, “Com-
mon Spaces, Common Ground: Shaping 
Intercultural Experiences in Learning 
Commons” by Allison S. Bolorizadeh and 
Rita H. Smith, explores the concept of the 
commons as it deployed in the research 
library. It calls on libraries to take an ac-

tive role in creating campus knowledge 
communities, by bringing the classroom 
into the library and taking the classroom 
into the world of information and cultural 
performances. The commons, as their title 
suggests, is a site of intercultural contact, 
a place to develop the context of academic 
projects and critically assess information 
in relation to other cultures of inquiry. 
The library is conceived by Bolorizadeh 
and Rita as a laboratory, one that grounds 
knowledge in the process of discovery 
and critical evaluation. Rather than view-
ing reference as a simple exchange of 
information, these chapters show it for 
what it is: a place to teach progressive 
information literacy and provide custom-
ized research assistance. It is a practice 
deeply connected to the mission of the 
research university, because the univer-
sity today cannot be satisfied with simply 
transferring today’s information or skills. 
It must invest in and nurture tomorrow’s 
critical and creative thinkers. 

In the last section, we are treated to 
another aspect of this volume’s call to 
envision libraries as part of an expanded 
field. It contains three articles on scholarly 
publishing. Gunilla Widén discusses how 
libraries can prepare the way for new 
modes of scholarly publishing, which 
include the development of a scholarly 
social Web and other interactive tools. The 
second, by Linda Phillips, is on the return 
of the University Press and the library’s 
role in creation of scholarly peer-reviewed 
publishing. The third essay in this section, 
by Fred Heath, Christian Keller, T-Kay 
Sangwand, and Kevin Wood, documents 
the possibilities and opportunities made 
available for the research community by 
the library’s involvement in data curation. 
Each of these chapters documents the 
application of these new library-based 
publishing initiatives.

By the conclusion of this book, one 
begins to see the academic library less as 
an institution squeezed into obsolescence 
as its function between researchers and 
end users diminishes. Instead, the real-
life stories and struggles here show the 



606 College & Research Libraries November 2011

research library engaged in the effort 
to become more productively involved 
in the entire life cycle of knowledge: its 
creation, critique, and dissemination. If 
the library, following Carlyle, once found 
itself at the heart of the university by 
virtue of its manifestation as a collection 
of books, the library of the future, accord-
ing to these authors, is better understood 
as a place of conversation; a place for 
discovery, reflection, and play; a genera-
tor of creative associations between the 
notes of the author and the notebook of 
the reader.—David Michalski, University of 
California, Davis.

Ksenija Mincic-Obradovic. E-books in 
Academic Libraries. Oxford, United 
Kingdom: Chandos, 2011. 203p. $80 
(ISBN 9781843345862).

Written by Ksenjia Mincic-Obradovic, E-
books in Academic Libraries is based on the 
author’s experience with e-books at the 
University of Auckland Library. Chapter 
1, the Introduction, discusses the e-book 
collection at the University of Auckland 
library and offers a synopsis of the re-
maining chapters.

In chapter 2, “The (Magical) World of 
E-books,” the author discusses the evolu-
tion of e-books, what e-books are, types 
of e-books, and how e-books function in 
academics. Some of the advantages of e-
books she mentions include that they can 
be accessed from anywhere, anytime; they 
save space in the physical library; users 
can conduct full-text searches; and they 
are enriched with other media. This chap-
ter concludes with some disadvantages 
of e-books such as the need for a device 
and software; the variety of formats; 
ability for users to read on a computer 
or device screen; compatibility with cita-
tion management software; and technical 
requirements such as keeping up with the 
latest versions of software and hardware.

The next chapter, “Between Publish-
ers and Library Needs,” looks at a host 
of issues dealing with “the complexity of 
e-books as a medium.” For instance, there 
are a number of e-book publishers and 

a variety of publishing practices among 
commercial providers. In addition, free 
e-books are often produced by individual 
authors, government agencies, and li-
braries. One section focuses on libraries 
as publishers of e-books, while other 
sections look at pricing and purchase 
models and copyright and digital rights 
management.

The meat of the work is in chapter 4, 
“Developing and Managing E-book Col-
lections.” As the author notes, academic 
libraries are generally moving from print 
to electronic resources and are shifting 
more of their budget to e-resources. As 
the “e-book environment is pretty much 
unstable and unpredictable” and “it is 
difficult to create and apply an e-book col-
lection development policy,” the author 
provides some options for how to handle 
e-books in terms of selecting and buying; 
providing access; cataloging; interlibrary 
loan; and preservation. Mincic-Obradovic 
provides a checklist of questions to ask 
when considering e-book purchases; and, 
in the cataloging section, she discusses the 
need for catalog records for e-books and 
talks about the pros and cons of single, 
separate, and provide-neutral records. 

Chapter 5, “Connecting with Users,” 
and chapter 6, “New Opportunities,” 
will especially appeal to public services 
librarians. In chapter 5, the author men-
tions several surveys, including two 
conducted at her own institution, that 
looked at e-book use. With the University 
of Auckland surveys, the author wanted 
to see what users knew about e-books and 
what their perceptions were. In chapter 6, 
Mincic-Obradovic looks at the potential 
of e-books in teaching and learning and 
highlights some e-books developed to 
support university courses. Each is en-
riched with audio, video, and the like.

Mincic-Obradovic concludes the book 
with “Future Considerations”: barriers 
to adoption; e-books in relation to study 
and research; lack of relevant content; and 
opportunities e-books bring to academic 
libraries. Among the barriers to adop-
tion are lack of standards, lack of user