Information Services in an Electronic Environment, The International Yearbook of Library and Information Management 2001/2002

Citation

Oppenheim, C. (2002), "Information Services in an Electronic Environment, The International Yearbook of Library and Information Management 2001/2002", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 58 No. 5, pp. 590-591. https://doi.org/10.1108/jd.2002.58.5.590.3

The International Yearbook of Library and Information Management is a new idea from Library Association Publishing. Each volume takes an overall theme and has a series of contributed chapters by experts in that field. This 400‐page book comprises 14 chapters, together with details of the Editorial Advisory Board (whose precise role is unclear), an editor’s introduction, biographical notes about the contributors and an extensive index. The contributors are primarily from the USA and UK. One unfortunate feature is a failure to actually take an international perspective, and instead focus on the author’s country alone. This is in sharp contrast with a similar annual contributed chapter series, now ended, entitled “Librarianship and information work worldwide”.

The primary theme of many of the chapters is the impact of IT on library services. The chapters vary in quality, from the outstanding (e.g. the three chapters by Cullen, Hartley and Powell), to the moderate. Most take the form of evaluative literature surveys, though some are more along the lines of “how we do it well in our library”. I have never found such articles very interesting or useful unless broad generalisations about lessons learned are drawn out; in this book, they are not. One author (Banwell) appears to have lifted much of her chapter from a previously published report.

There were many topics I would have liked to have seen covered, but were not. These included:

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  intelligent agents;

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  the financial implications of electronic information for the library manager;

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  the personnel issues raised by electronic information;

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  the impact of lifelong learning on electronic libraries; and

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  the role of libraries in offering universal access to all citizens.

There are extremely few typographical errors, but a number of authors make bold assertions without providing supporting evidence. One author implied that an article was heavily cited (“the article by Kasacus and Aguilar is still the most cited work in this field to date”) when in fact it has been cited just eight times in the last 13 years. There were a few minor factual errors, such as calling Library and Information Science Abstracts an indexing service. Full bibliographic citations to references cited were surprisingly often missing. There was an over‐emphasis on higher education libraries, and virtually nothing about private sector libraries or information units. Most of the chapters are up to date, though Watkins’s on copyright is already showing its age. Her chapter, incidentally, is misleadingly titled as it covers more than just inter library loans. I disagreed with the book’s authors on the topic of “information literacy”. The authors of this section all took the view that this was equivalent to library instruction, when I regard it as much broader than simply being able to use a library effectively. The authors also were unaware of Sheila Webber’s important work in the field. One final quibble: the claim that “as recently as 25 years ago, libraries of the wealthier universities could aspire to collect within their own walls all publications that were deemed relevant” is nonsense, for if true, there would have been no use of inter library loan systems then.

Overall, it was not clear to me who the book is aimed at. The most obvious targets are educators and students. Library managers in higher education will also find it of use. Library and information managers in the private sector will find a minority of the chapters useful. Overall, I think Hanson and Day’s Managing the Electronic Library remains the text to rely on, but this will be a useful addition for some.