Reviews.indd 388 College & Research Libraries in Edinburgh, tracing the history of the partnership over a sixteen-year period (1819–1835). Ian Beavan contributes a brief appendix to Isaac’s study, offering evidence that the partnership extended as late as 1843 and discussing the failed attempt of a rival Glasgow firm to secure distribution rights from John Murray’s son in that same year. Alice Ford-Smith follows with an essay on the fascinating, if macabre, subject of the trade in execution broadsides (i.e., broadsides reporting on the trials and executions of criminals) in Nottingham and Birmingham, incisively analyzing the contents, circumstances of publishing, and general social context of these curious documents. The book’s final two essays take us into the high Victorian period and early twentieth century. Stephen Colclough re- examines W. H. Smith’s rise to dominance in the bookstall business along the London and North Western Railway, throwing new light on the socioeconomic profi les of the book and newspaper vendors whom Smith displaced and analyzing the busi- ness strategies that Smith’s company used to sell printed materials at railroad sta- tions. Graham Law deals with distribution of a different sort, discussing how three minor, but popular, regional authors of the Victorian era—David Pae, James Skipp Borlase, and J. Monk Foster—made use of syndication to ensure the wide circulation of their serial novels in Scottish and north English newspapers: these serial novels, he argues, “both reflected and contributed to a sense of a broad ‘Northern’ cultural identity” in the face of the powerful trend toward a “national” and increasingly imperialist English identity promoted by the all-influential London press. Although the summaries presented above do not begin to do justice to the wealth of information and insight con- tained in each essay, they should amply indicate that, as a whole, Printing Places is a very good book indeed. The broad range of themes it covers and the variety of methodologies its authors employ should appeal to scholarly readers inter- July 2006 ested in fields as diverse as the history of the book and book trades, English literature, and English social history. All the authors make excellent use of primary and secondary sources and their careful documentation of these will provide re- searchers with much grist for their mills. Some of the essays employ illustrations, including facsimiles, graphs, and tables: in general, these are well chosen and enhance the authors’ presentations of their subject matter. This is not to say that the book’s presentation is fl awless in all respects: weak points include a rather skimpy index restricted to proper names and the occasional presence of typograph- ical infelicities, some of which may give the reader cause for perplexity. However, such blemishes do not vitiate the overall value of the book, which should fi nd a place on the shelves of any academic or rare book library collecting in the history of the book and related fields.—Thomas Dousa, Indiana University. Metadata : A Cataloger’s Primer. Ed. Richard P. Smiraglia. N.Y.: Haworth (published simultaneously as Cata- loging & Classification Quarterly; v. 40, no. 3/4), 2005. 303p. alk. paper $59.95 (cloth) $39.95 (paper) (ISBN 9780789028006;9780789028013). LC 2005-9646. After reading this book I felt like Mick Jagger, not because I couldn’t get any “satisfaction,” but because I had “mixed emotions.” I really felt that some of the chapters were so clear, informative, and even fun; and yet found other sections al- most unreadable. The book is arranged in two parts. The first section deals with the theoretical foundations of metadata struc- ture and creation. The second part is con- cerned with some of the actual metadata schemes used today, such as Dublin Core and EAD (Encoded Archival Description), and how a “cataloger” would apply them. The text also includes an understandable and instructive introduction that actually contains a quick, fun, and thought-pro- voking exercise that teaches you how to mark up a simple document in HTML. The articles include brief abstracts and concise bibliographies. A thorough index completes the work. The first half of the book consists of six chapters on the “intellectual foundations” of metadata. I found parts of this section difficult to understand and relate to as a cataloger. I have been a professional cataloger for over fifteen years, and yet I found myself reading and rereading paragraphs in an attempt to understand some of the jargon used. I felt as if this section was not really a primer for cata- logers but, rather, a primer for professors of cataloging. Many of the articles lacked a sufficient number of concrete examples for a cataloger to be able to understand the theories being presented. I wonder if this section would have made more sense if I had read it after the second part, which focused on the actual metadata schemes in practice. That having been said, there were a number of outstanding chapters in this section. In the chapter, “Metadata and Bibliographic Control,” Lynne C. How- arth presents a precise comparison of metadata and library cataloging, includ- ing their respective histories, similarities, differences, and possible convergence in the future. Richard P. Smiraglia in the chapter, “Content Metadata—An Analy- sis of Etruscan Artifacts in a Museum of Archeology,” presents a metadata scheme for artifacts. His numerous examples make clear the importance of the structure and language used in metadata schemes. Finally, in the chapter, “An Exploratory Study of Metadata Creation in a Health Care Agency,” Leatrice Ferraioli off ers a thought-provoking look at how we all col- lect, file, and store data. The chapter made me think of my own personal fi les, both paper and media, that I have collected and assembled according to my own system over the years. It is in the second part of the book that this volume lives up to its title. This sec- tion is suppose to cover “how to create, apply, and use metadata,” and it does that Book Reviews 389 very well. Four chapters, each on a diff er- ent metadata scheme, present a new way or structure to catalog certain materials. The instructions are, for the most part, so precise that you feel as if you could start cataloging in this new scheme today—and yet, the authors are careful to remind us of the many complexities involved in some of these metadata schemes. The chapters cover: Dublin Core, a metadata scheme originally developed for electronic mate- rials; EAD and EAC (Encoded Archival Context), a scheme for archival materials; XML (Extensible Markup Language), a scheme for the Internet; and METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard), a scheme for encoding and transmitt ing metadata. The chapter on Dublin Core is so clear that it made me want to catalog in Dublin Core immediately. The chapter makes perfect sense to a cataloger, as the author constantly relates the Dublin Core values to known cataloging concepts. The chap- ter on EAD and EAC is more complicated, but the author obviously has a fi rm grasp on how the archival world needs to struc- ture information. In this chapter, however, most of the examples are in an appendix and I felt they would be much more useful if they had been inserted throughout the text. The chapter on METS is also rather hard to follow and would benefi t from some more examples of METS records. In contrast, the chapter on XML is my favorite chapter in the entire book. It covers a complex topic in a brilliantly clear and very straightforward way. The chapter goes into XML in some depth, but the author walks you through each step making it all comprehensible. The final chapter, “Planning and Implementing a Metadata-Driven Digital Repository,” is not really geared toward the average cataloger, but is meant more for managers and department heads. In summary, I suppose that if I didn’t always get what I wanted, I sure found some chapters that gave me more than I needed.—Isabel del Carmen Quintana, Harvard University.