Book Review: Marie R. Kennedy and Cheryl LaGuardia, Marketing Your Library’s Electronic Resources: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians

Abstract

Is the material ‘organized in a logical fashion’? Arrangement is by 39 numbered chapters, which are listed alphabetically according to the broad headings that constitute their titles. The individual items are numbered sequentially (to 1594) throughout the book. Within most of the chapters there are two sequences: the first, main sequence, has annotations by the compiler for each entry; the rest are entitled ‘Additional resources’, and have no annotations. Books come first, followed by periodicals and websites, the latter usually being very few. The distinction between the main works and the so-called ‘additional resources’ is far from clear, although Bemis tries to explain it in the Introduction. One suspects that in reality it was largely a matter of convenience of access to the compiler, because in most cases, if they appear at all, British sources are in the additional section. Considering that Bemis presumably had free rein in choosing the chapter subject headings, several of them appear bizarre and unhelpful. Why choose ‘Libraries, History of’ instead of just ‘History’, for example? In fact, the sequence of four chapters called ‘Libraries, General’, ‘Libraries, History of’, ‘Library Science, General’, ‘Library Science, History of’ is unhelpful, and it is sometimes hard to see what the distinction is supposed to be. There is even a chapter entitled ‘Miscellaneous’. The chapter ‘Patron services’ is the sole one to be further subdivided by subject, while ‘Special, academic, and school libraries and Librarians’, which surely cries out for such treatment, is treated all as one big mass. ‘Programming’ clearly has a different meaning in America, for it concerns story-telling to children, while ‘Readers’ advisory’ consists solely of guides to various kinds of fiction. The chapter ‘Philanthropy’ contains one item only, on how to deal with donations. This could surely have been incorporated into ‘Collection management’. There is no specific section on public libraries at all. Overall, I find this alphabetical arrangement unhelpful, and should have much preferred to see some kind of simple classified arrangement. Despite the Facet imprint the book was originally published by the American Library Association and is overwhelmingly American; British publications are very much in the minority. This is particularly apparent when one looks at the Library of Congress Subject Headings which are given as examples at the top of each chapter. In no case do these include any ‘Great Britain’ subdivisions. This is acceptable for the original edition, but not in a book of this nature purporting to have a British imprint. One would have liked to see, for example, Library and Information Science Abstracts, The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain, or PR Harris’s History of the British Museum Library to balance some of the other material. On one occasion (item 374) we are told: ‘Chandos is a British publisher’. Some sections contain no British material at all. The annotations give brief summaries of the items and draw attention to any unusual features. Occasionally Bemis mentions that a book includes an index, but it can hardly be the case that all the others do not, so one questions the point of this. The book is printed digitally using print-on-demand technology. Typographically the layout is topsy-turvy, for, although the item numbers and authors are printed in bold, the rest of the bibliographic descriptions is in a very light type. The annotation which follows is then in bold type, using a different typeface, and this causes the annotation to outweigh and overwhelm the bibliographic details. These follow The Chicago Manual of Style, which means that they are Full of Capital Letters such as will Irritate an exCataloguer. Another peculiarity of this system seems to be that although the date of publication normally precedes the ISBN, in cases where there are two publishers and two ISBNs the date follows both. There are a few minor errors: GE Gorman, for example, appears correctly four times, but also appears once as Corman. Several items seem to be in the wrong chapter. Two appendices deal with the American Library Association and all its sub-bodies, and international and national professional associations of other countries. The latter includes CILIP and all its Special Interest Groups. There is a comprehensive index of authors and titles, but not of subjects, which means that unless the title of the book starts with the right word it is difficult to track down specific topics. There are, for example, works on the use of volunteers and student assistants, but these cannot be found from the index. All in all, there is useful material in this book, and I can understand why Facet decided to add it to their stable – they could do so with minimal effort – but if they wished it to sell in the United Kingdom they would done far better to commission a properly British edition.