reviews Book Reviews 75 oversight has to do with their failure to ex amine the legal distinction between “best effort” and “reasonable effort.” The former commits a library to meeting certain re quirements regardless of financial consid erations, whereas the latter may be am biguous as the authors claim but thus has the advantage of not having a strict legal definition with major budgetary implica tions. The appendices are especially useful. Appendix A is a list of questions that should be asked about every license agreement. Are the parties correctly iden tified? Are authorized users identified appropriately? Are fair use and copyright privileges intact? And so forth. Consid ered without the analyses offered in the book, the answers to these questions will not by themselves guide someone as to how to respond to the proposed terms. But armed with the knowledge gained in the first four chapters, the checklist en sures a thorough review of the most sa lient issues involved in a license agree ment. Appendix B provides excerpts from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 that apply to libraries and archives, and Appendix C offers a philosophical view: the International Coalition of Li brary Consortia’s “Statement of Current Perspective and Preferred Practices for the Selection and Purchase of Electronic Information.” Readers of this book will not be pre pared to understand every possible clause that might be found in a license agree- ment—this is not the authors’ intention. But they will achieve the authors’ three goals as stated above. The book brings together the most relevant information, and organizes and explains it very well. The price seems a bit stiff for a slim pa perback, but it is a great place for a nov ice to begin navigating through the licens ing thickets.—W. Bede Mitchell, Georgia Southern University. Crawford, Walt. Being Analog: Creating Tomorrow’s Libraries. Chicago: ALA, 1999. 245p. $35 (ISBN 0838907547). LC 98-40764. Walt Crawford works at The Research Libraries Group Inc., and has published numerous books and articles on libraries, technology, and personal computing. Be ing Analog is an excellent addition to this corpus. In this book, Crawford continues his examination of favorite themes, in cluding the future library, the role tech nology will play in that future, and why we will still need to be aware of our pa trons’ needs, both analog and digital. The book is arranged in four sections: Being Analog, Libraries and Librarians, Re sources and Users, and Creating Tomorrow’s Libraries. Each chapter in the book is designed to make library profes sionals think about libraries, the types of materials libraries house, and how the materials affect the ways we serve our patrons. Crawford critically examines the as sumption that, in the future, all print media will be replaced by digital prod ucts. (He points to the current growth of the print industry as one reason why this all-digital future will not happen.) The libraries of the future will most likely be composed not only of bits, bytes, and data streams, but also of a combination of digi tal and analog media. Crawford’s words of advice to those who see an all-digital future as the end of librarianship are: “Calm Down. Plan your future. The revo lution has either been postponed or aban doned.” It is important to point out that Crawford is not antitechnology but, rather, believes that technology as well as many other types of media will have their place in the library of the future. A key player in the library of the fu ture, as in the past, will be the user. As Crawford puts it: “Tomorrow’s librarians must continue to pay attention to the most important aspect of library service: people.” Without the user, there would be no reason for the library’s continued existence. And users are unique individu als who have different needs and differ ent preferences. Crawford wants us to be aware that the library of the future is a complex and in tricate place. Now more than ever before, 76 College & Research Libraries we are building libraries that allow pa trons access to a mixture of analog and digital materials, both on- and off-site. And as more universities and colleges become involved in distance education, their libraries will need to provide even more services to remote users. Crawford predicts that the provision of library ser vices to remote users will increasingly rely on partnerships with other academic and public libraries. Remote services are not limited to the academic world; the public library, which already takes its collections to patrons via the bookmobile and answers scores of daily reference questions over the phone and through e-mail, also is developing new online services for remote users. The public library will continue to play a ma jor role in the future; it will be a place where people can have access to a wide range of materials, from mystery novels to online resources. Moreover, the public library of the future will continue to be a place where new readers are developed through activities such as story hour. What is the role of librarianship in the future? According to Crawford, “Real librarianship isn’t about catch phrases and paradigm shifts. Real librarianship applies consistent professional philoso phies and continuously evolving skill sets to the increasingly complex landscape of tomorrow’s libraries and library-related needs.” For libraries to provide the high quality of service users have grown to expect, librarians must become lifelong learners and develop an understanding of the increasingly complex nature of in formation resources. By understanding how the complex mix of resources work together, we will be able to communicate with our users and guide them to the re sources, digital or analog, that best serve their needs. Crawford writes: “Libraries serve people. Libraries will prosper in the future by serving people’s diverse inter ests and needs, not by asserting that li brarians know what people should want and how they should acquire informa tion, knowledge, and recreation. People require a mix of analog and digital re- January 2000 sources to serve their preferences and abilities; libraries should honor those re quirements.” Walt Crawford’s vision is of a more complex library in which librarians give higher priority to learning about, under standing, and assessing media of all types. Even if readers do not agree with everything Crawford has to say in this book, it will give librarians and informa tion professionals a great deal to think and talk about as the future becomes the present.—Timothy F. Daniels, University of North Carolina at Asheville. Informationsversorgung “Politik und Strategie”/Information Provision-Politics and Strategy: Proceedings of the Interna tional Seminar 1999. Wurzburg: Akademy Frankenwarte/Deutsches Bibliotheksinstitut, 1998. 445p. Seldom considered in the deliberations of librarians in the United States are the dif ficulties encountered by our colleagues around the world in our common effort to provide information through libraries. Whether the clientele are specialized by profession or interest, or not specialized at all, each library must overcome ob stacles caused by infrastructure, funding, administrative disinterest, and many other factors. This review concerns the published proceedings of an institute that pulls together the experiences of librar ians in East Asia; Russia; Central, South ern, Northern, and Eastern Europe; Great Britain; as well as one from the U.S. The twenty-six papers presented here may be eye-opening to complacent librarians with comparatively well-supported pro grams in place. Each paper is published in both English and German versions, and each describes an institution-specific project or a national effort in the library context. It is impossible to give a fair review of this publication without mentioning the difficulty of reading the translated texts of the papers. Elizabeth Simon, writing in the introduction, frankly apologizes for the poor translations: “Most authors have written in a second language,” meaning