102 College & Research Libraries January 2013

the content will remain relevant as more 
and more information literacy instruction 
moves into those formats. Though much 
of the discussion is theoretical, numerous 
citations (many annotated) provide the 
instruction practitioner with an entry 
point into the intimidating literature on 
teaching theory and practice.—Timothy 
Hackman, University of Maryland.

Elizabeth H. Dow. Archivists, Collectors, 
Dealers, and Replevin: Case Studies on 
Private Ownership of Public Documents. 
Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2012. 
144p. $65 (ISBN 9780810883772). 
LC2012-008889.

Imagine this scenario: you’re an archivist 
at a state university charged with the 
archival responsibilities for the papers of 
current and past university presidents. 
While looking through a catalog from 
a manuscript dealer, you see a set of 
documents created by one of your former 
university presidents in the early 20th 
century. The documents deal with a con-
troversial issue and have historic value, 
and you have always wondered why your 
collection was missing these manuscripts. 
Suddenly, you’ve found them, and they 
are in the hands of a dealer. The selling of 
historical documents isn’t uncommon—
indeed, Sotheby’s reports selling between 
5,000 and 8,000 such documents each year. 

This scenario begs several questions: 
who owns government documents that 
have, for one reason or another, slipped 
into the hands of private dealers and col-

lectors? Should they be available in the 
private market, or should they revert back 
to the government agency/archive where 
they, historically, might belong? What are 
the legal and ethical issues involved?

Elizabeth Dow addresses this compli-
cated issue in this new volume, Archivists, 
Collectors, Dealers, and Replevin: Case Stud-
ies on Private Ownership of Public Docu-
ments. (Replevin is a legal action brought 
by one party in an effort to recover specific 
items, such as manuscripts or documents, 
from another party.) Dow cites a personal 
interest in the topic: after she witnessed 
a certain amount of acrimony between 
archivists and manuscript dealers, she 
discloses that she’s not only an archivist 
and archival educator, but she’s married 
to a manuscript dealer with strong ties 
to the professional dealer network. It is 
from this perspective that she successfully 
argues both sides of this question. 

Dow takes a systematic approach, be-
ginning with an historical overview of the 
collecting and care of documents by state 
and institutional agencies, followed by 
tales of theft and neglect that cast untold 
numbers of documents adrift from their 
institutional homes, where they would 
end up in the collector ’s market. For 
example, prior to the mid-20th century 
development of legislation and reten-
tion schedules designed to keep public 
documents in the hands of government 
agencies, it was common for government 
officials to keep public documents and 
treat them as personal property. 

The book then describes both the emer-
gence of the archival profession and the 
nature of the collectors’ market, providing 
a succinct table that outlines the curatorial 
differences between individual collectors, 
government archivists, and nongovern-
ment institutional curators. 

Having set the stage and introduced 
the characters, Dow then outlines specific 
cases involving replevin, how the courts 
decided these cases, and how complex 
and varied individual state laws are 
concerning replevin and government 
documents. 

Index to advertisers
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Book Reviews 103

As Dow notes, the “conflict between 
archivists and dealer/collectors comes 
down to a matter of perspective,” and 
she devotes an enlightening chapter ex-
amining the different perspectives and 
theoretical backgrounds of each group. 
She then creates a series of 17 case studies 
based on actual events and hypothetical 
situations, offering questions for consid-
eration for each case, along with advice 
on how each case should be approached

The volume concludes with a chapter 
on avoiding conflict and replevin, re-
minding archivists to adhere to archival 
best practices for security and documen-
tation of their collections. Finally, she 
wraps up with advice on how to avoid 
replevin and, if it becomes necessary, how 
best to approach a replevin case.

This book does an admirable job of il-
lustrating many aspects of a complicated 
legal situation, providing archivists, col-
lectors, and dealers with insight, analysis, 
and practical advice. Well-written and to 
the point, this volume is highly recom-
mended for archivists and dealers alike.—
Gene Hyde, Radford University. 

Interdisciplinarity and Academic Librar-
ies. Eds. Daniel C. Mack and Craig 
Gibson. Chicago: Association of Col-
lege and Research Libraries, 2012. 238p. 
alk. paper, $62 (ISBN 9780838986158). 
LC2012-018651.

It is not often that one encounters a col-
lection of essays so thoroughly aligned 
in their approach and perspective as to 
merit reading the collection from cover 
to cover; yet such is the nature of this 
recently published collection in ACRL’s 
Publications in Librarianship series (no. 
66). Edited by Daniel C. Mack, Head of 
the George and Sherry Middlemas Arts 
Humanities Library at Penn State, and 
Craig Gibson, Associate Director for Re-
search and Education at the Ohio State 
University, this work brings together 
14 authors from across the landscape of 
academic librarianship, including admin-
istrators, department heads, catalogers, 
technologists, reference and instruction 

librarians, subject specialists, and profes-
sors of library science. Each author brings 
his or her unique perspective to the effects 
that interdisciplinary work has wrought 
on higher education and, specifically, 
academic libraries; and each essay seem-
ingly builds upon the foundation laid by 
those that came before it, a credit to the 
editors’ choice of organization.

Mack introduces the collection by de-
fining interdisciplinarity and its related 
work: multidisciplinarity, cross-discipli-
narity, and transdisciplinarity. A number 
of significant factors have led to the rise 
of interdisciplinary work in higher edu-
cation and thus merit the importance of 
forming this collection of essays, namely: 
the internationalization of the academy, 
the increasingly global perspective of the 
university, the growth and proliferation of 
external partnerships, the conglomeration 
of electronic resources across disciplines, 
the evolution of search and retrieval 
systems that must account for multiple 
approaches to knowledge management, 
the rise of born-digital materials and 
cloud computing, and, perhaps most 
important, the desire of institutions of 
higher education to solve the world’s 
“grand problems.”

The first two chapters discuss the in-
herent nature of academic disciplines and 
how interdisciplinarity rises within them. 
Roberta J. Astroff (Chapter 1) focuses on 
many of the policing functions (such as 
epistemological, administrative) that keep 
disciplinary boundaries in check. Jean-
Pierre V.M. Herubel (Chapter 2) continues 
this discussion with a concentrated ex-
amination of specific fields of knowledge 
and the interdisciplinary turn those fields 
took in recent decades. 

Each of the following chapters inspects 
a specific aspect of library work and 
the effect interdisciplinarity has had on 
each. Jill Woolums (Chapter 3) looks at 
scholarly communication—the players, 
the opportunities, and the threats—and 
concludes with a list of roles for librar-
ians in the new scholarly landscape. In 
Chapter 4, Ann Copeland discusses “the