College and Research Libraries in decline, in ascendance, at a standstill- gives credibility to the encyclopedia by acknowledging the varying viewpoints of industry analysts, scholars, and prac- titioners. The second part of the encyclopedia considers the state of publishing from the perspective of six regions-Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America-and selected coun- tries (about thirty, including South Africa, Japan, Russia, Nigeria, and Canada). Al- though there is no formula for style or coverage, the reader can reliably expect the historic, demographic, and sociopo- litical background of each country to be explored and relevant current statistical information about publishing to be pro- vided. These country-based essays de- scribe at length the cultural context that characterizes book publishing. Even the most cosmopolitan of readers will have something to learn: why some experts guard against African indigenous pub- lishers "leapfrogging" over conventional book production methods directly to new electronic technologies; the lack of trained publishing professionals in devel- oping countries, such as copyeditors in India; how the distribution system in Ja- pan, which is based on consignment sales, affects book selling; the significance of "komiks," derived from the American comic book, in the Philippines; or why Great Britain and France have displaced Mexico and Argentina as the leading countries importing books from Spain. The shortcomings of the encyclopedia are few; however, the following are wor- thy of mention. Among world regions, Africa and Asia receive the most exten- sive consideration. Europe lacks the over- view essay that other regions receive- an instance where the significance of the European Union as a publisher might have been articulated. The Middle East consists of merely three essays and only the contribution on "Israel" by Irene Sever is new. "The Arab World" and "Egypt" figure among seven reprints in Book Reviews 91 the encyclopedia, three of which are from Altbach's Publishing and Development in the Third World (1992). The contribution on the United States is largely a financial statement, devoid of philosophical or cul- tural context. The other regional essays are so informative that the reader longs for comprehensive geographic coverage. Topics lacking treatment include eth- nic publishing in the United States and an overview of official and intergovern- mental publishing. Most subjects are suf- ficiently introduced within the typical double-column, six- to twelve-page, length, but others are perhaps too com- plex to explore within these confines. Al- bert Greco's "Mergers and Acquisitions in the U.S. Book Industry, 1960-89" falls short of a satisfactory examination of eco- nomic concentration in the publishing in- dustry; the reader expects more precise documentation for some of the tables and would be grateful if the appendix of mergers took into account the seminal work of Elin Christianson, "Mergers in the Publishing Industry, 1958-1970," Jour- nal of Library History (1972). Through the range and diversity of topics and countries covered, common themes emerge-discussions about the stakeholders in international copyright debates from various regional perspec- tives; the importance of autonomous in- digenous publishing; and the value of the book as a cultural asset weighed against its viability as a commercial product. In- ternational Book Publishing: An Encyclope- dia is greater than the sum of its parts and should stimulate further research.-Mar- tha L. Brogan, Yale University, New Haven, Conn ecticut. Reference and Information Services: An In- troduction . 2nd ed. Eds. Richard E. Bopp and Linda C. Smith. Englewood, Colo .: Libraries Unlimited, 1995. 626p. $47.50 cloth (ISBN 1-56308-130-X); $35 paper (ISBN 1-56308-129-6). If the year 1876 counts as the Big Bang of United States librarianship, arguably the 92 College & Research Libraries major force unleashed by the explosion was that of information, research, and educational services to users. This auspi- cious year brought (in addition to the founding of ALA) publication of the Bu- reau of Education's Public Libraries in the United States of America chapter on 'Works of Reference for Libraries" and Samuel Green's pioneering "Personal Relations Between Librarians and Readers" (Library Journal, 1876). The subsequent quarter century produced a literature that estab- lished the repertory of goals, categories, and issues for reference work as text- books like Reference and Information Ser- vices teach us that repertory now. Combining features of such bibliog- raphies of reference publications as Alice Kroeger's Guide to the Study and Use of Reference Books (1902) and such how-to's on the rudiments of library research as Margaret Hutchins's A Guide to the Use of Libraries (1925), the general reference textbook lineage proper begins with James I. Wyer's A Reference Work (1930) and, contrary to the implications of the present editors' ''belief" that their first edition (1991) filled "a need for a refer- ence text that would go beyond the study of the tools and interview techniques used at the reference desk," descends with considerable scope and consis- tency of approach through its succes- sors, Hutchins's Introduction to Reference Work (1944) and William A. Katz's two- volume Introduction to Reference Work (1969; 6th ed., 1991). The new Reference and Information Ser- vices looks back at this history and its own first edition from the vantage of another Big Bang, the explosion of the Internet, a development signaled by the expansion of a couple of pages from the old chapter 5 into a new chapter on net- worked information. The new edition is approximately 150 pages longer than the first and continues its bipartite division of topical chapters on "concepts" (that is, the various dimensions of reference service) and "source" chapters on types January 1996 of publications. The subject index has been helpfully expanded, and coverage of children's and Canadian materials has been increased. The text has been rede- signed so that sections and subsections are now better distinguished typographi- cally, and it has been thoroughly revised. Revisions range from tinkering with paragraphing and word choice to gen- eral augmentation (chapter 1) to thor- ough reworking (chapter 10, former chapter 2) to updating with sources, for- mats, and services not available to the first edition. In summarizing a field's knowledge, a textbook both instructs the neophyte and reminds the practitioner while act- ing for both as a guide to the literature. The revised Reference and Information Ser- vices, succeeds in these roles. While of- fering much information in highlight- able, outlined form, it reports the variety of opinion on disputed questions, and lards its pages with notes and chapter bibliographies from which students might develop papers or presentations and librarians might review what they think they already know. Students should be warned, however, that reference librarianship is more inter- esting than this text makes it out to be. Because of the need to summarize, text- books often are clearly written but struggle to be interesting. With their func- tional, usually simple prose and their gray expanses of material arrayed in test- able format, they tend to drain a topic of the blood of everyday reality; moreover, the form encourages such portentous or merely vapid generalizations as "The learner does the postulating, analyzing, and, ultimately, learning" in the present chapter on instruction. No one will con- tend that this book is a good read, for, although the editors have largely harmo- nized the discord that can creep into multiauthored works, one misses voice and color in this book's blandly utilitar- ian displays of information and analy- sis. About this highly personalized activ- . ity of reference service, about personal qualities and behaviors, the people who offer and use reference services, it has less to say than it might. Unlike its predeces- sors, it is reticent about the affective as- pects of service, the interpersonal dy- namics, pleasures, and satisfactions of the work; in general, the hard glint of clini- cal abstraction lingers in its gaze. Thus, no Bopp and Smith librarian would feel the "interest, amounting to fascination, [the] thrills, amounting at times to ec- stasy" that Wyer sees as the librarian's occupational reward. If capable of it, the Bopp and Smith information hound would raise an ironic eyebrow at Hutchins's narrative of a young librarian who returns "flushed from the periodical indexes" to the desk, where she is flus- tered to encounter a student whom she and colleagues are transforming into a library-competent scholar; nor would the student, days later, feel a pang of disap- pointment in not finding her at her post. Those who lament the absence of theo- retically minded "dead Germans" in li- brarianship will find no comfort here ex- cept perhaps in the rather eccentrically cast chapter 10, which, with chapter 1, might have paid more attention to the economic and political trends that cur- rently threaten egalitarian library service. The editors might have reconciled chap- ter 6 on instruction, and indeed the en- tire history of reference librarianship, with the statement in chapter 7 that "[r ]eference librarians rarely see them- selves as educators." An uneasy tension pervades the text's participation in the transition from print to electronic ser- vices. OCLC and RLIN are still quaintly labeled "nontraditional" reference sources; cards introduce bibliographic control and printed pages periodical in- dexing; the encyclopedia chapter dis- cusses multimedia but gears search strat- egies to printed versions. Granted the difficulties of using electronic interfaces to demonstrate these points, might the text not be reconceived to do so? Book Reviews 93 Bopp and Smith situates its workman- like bulk squarely in the century-old United States tradition of reference ser- vice and is eminently usable in all the ways its predecessors have been. Because Katz (new edition scheduled for 1996) covers similar territory in similar ways, personal preference may ultimately de- termine whether a general reference course requires one or the other. Minor differences of emphasis aside, Bopp and Smith is rather more conscious of itself as a survey of the reference literature, whereas Katz, like Wyer and Hutchins, is more interestingly written. Bopp and Smith smells rather of earnestly cheerless "learning sessions" in airport Ramadas, whereas Katz smells a little more of the reference desk-Robert Kieft, Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania. Literary Texts in an Electronic Age: Schol- arly Implications and Library Services. Ed. Brett Sutton. Urbana-Champaign, Ill.: Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Univ. of Illinois, 1994. 207p. $25. (ISBN 0-87845096-3). This book, which publishes the papers presented at the 1994 Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, focuses on fairly recent developments in the area of electronic texts. Its attempt to address the impact of these developments on both scholarly research and library services is not always successful. Although the eleven papers are appropriately wide- ranging, their quality is very uneven. Because a significant number of librar- ies have started to provide access to elec- tronic texts in a serious fashion, a thor- ough examination of the impact of these texts on library services has recently be- come possible and necessary. As a result, libraries have begun to grapple with a number of issues, such as the develop- ment of selection criteria, licensing and copyright regulations, changes within the MARC format to allow for description of and access to electronic/internet re- sources, and fundamental decisions on