“Every profession”, says the publisher's blurb on the back of this book, “needs an introductory text to its core body of knowledge”. And the authors' preface reiterates that this is a book first and last for librarianship students, though lecturers do get a mention. No covering of bases by suggesting that it will serve the interests of practitioners, researchers, or students in other disciplines; a commendable focus, and not common.
Books written by multiple authors are not always the most successful creations, but here the four authors seem to have done well in achieving a consistent “voice”, and depth of treatment of the topics. There is no separate author attribution to any of the 26 chapters, and – while the reader may have fun guessing who wrote what – the text seems reasonably seamless.
The number of chapters gives away the potential problem with the book; that it covers a large area in a relatively short text, and inevitably cannot be detailed or comprehensive in any respect. The authors acknowledge this, in giving as their aim the condensing of the essence of each subject into a chapter giving an overview and basic background, while enabling the reader to go deeper by following the references given. Although “basic” is indeed the operative word in some cases, they succeed quite well.
The book is divided, after an initial introduction, into seven parts. The first, under the heading “libraries and information services: evolution or revolution”, deals with library history, types of library service, library design and the future of libraries. The last of these, at just over two pages, and largely based around the writings of one author, is so limited that one must wonder at the wisdom of writing it at all.
Part 2, dealing with resources and services, covers storage and delivery, library services, collection management and development, preservation and digitisation. Part 3 follows an equally well‐worn path, in covering classification, cataloguing, subject indexing and information retrieval, under the heading of information organisation and access. Perhaps it is my own familiarity with some of these latter issues that makes me wonder if the treatment is not just a bit too basic, albeit carefully judged.
Part 4 deals with library users and society, covering the library as a social institution, services to users and legal and policy issues. This part of the book seems to show the strains of the multi‐author multi‐chapter approach, and the relation between this and the contents of the first part are not always clear. Library technology is dealt with in the four chapters of part 5, and management issues in the same number of chapters in part 6. Here, although there is much more to be said about all the issues, the authors have done a particularly good job of condensing. Education and research issues are dealt with in the two chapters of part 7, and the book ends with a short epilogue. There is a glossary, and reasonably good index, and a set of web and printed resources, which – surprisingly, considering the publisher – are not all in a full or consistent format.
On the whole, the authors have done a good job in producing a wide‐ranging basic text, which should indeed serve students and lecturers well. It may also be useful to those who come into library work without formal training in the discipline, and want both an introduction to what they are doing in the workplace, and an indication of whether they want to study the subject formally.
The obvious comparison is with another Facet book, the second edition of Peter Brophy's The Library in the Twenty‐first Century (London, Facet Publishing, 2008). Brophy's book is less wide‐ranging, less introductory, more focused on certain issues, more polemic, and more the product of a single voice with its own strong opinions. Together the two books form an excellent set of reading for any student of the librarianship discipline.
