Editorial

508

Our journal is mostly about articles. 
We consider around a hundred article 
manuscripts a year, and from those sub-
missions, we select about thirty—we 
hope the best—for publication. These 
peer reviewed articles, running 3,000 to 
6,000 words in length, usually report the 
research results of a focused study on a 
particular process, procedure, or policy 
stance in academic librarianship. In this 
current issue, for example, you will find 
interesting and useful reports on as-
sessing library scholarship, corporate 
annual report collections, the impact of 
library training on graduate student 
performance, proficiencies for instruction 
librarians, who are “authorized users” in 
electronic resource licenses, and library 
applications for mobile devices. These 
types of articles are our main business, 
and their like make up the bulk of schol-
arly communications in the social sciences 
and even more so in the sciences. How 
often these articles are cited, as measured 
by citation indexes, can make or break 
the reputation of a researcher or a jour-
nal. Our journal, thanks to its influential 
articles, has one of the higher citation 
“impact factors” in the field of librarian-
ship. You can read most articles quickly 
in one “sitting.”

While journal articles occupy most of 
our pages, I want to remind readers that 
we do book reviews too. Ably managed 
by our book review editor, Geoffrey D. 
Smith, who by day is the Head of the 
Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at 
the Ohio State University, this section 
at the end of each issue offers five to six 
cogent reviews on a variety of new books 
in librarianship, publishing history, and 
information science. In this issue you 
will find reviews on books about book 
selling since the fifteen century, mistakes 
in library management (one we should 
all read), book makers (the legitimate 

Bookish Librarians
kind), jazz, and magic. Writ-
ing a concise and insightful 
book review is not easy, and 
I thank Dr. Smith and his 
book reviewers for their good 
efforts. Most of the letters 
to the editor I receive, and I do not get 
many, are in response to book reviews. 
An author or a publisher takes exception 
to a comment made by a reviewer. I am 
glad to get these, for they show someone 
is carefully reading, and sensitive about, 
what we write. 

I like reading book reviews. Maybe it 
is a throwback to my days as a bibliog-
rapher, my favorite job in librarianship. 
Trying to stay on top of the subject lit-
erature of my field, American and British 
literature, I was an inveterate reader of 
book dealer catalogues, publisher lists, 
selection forms, and book reviews. I was 
very well read at the citation and abstract 
level! Of course, reading a book is much 
better than reading about it, but who has 
the time? Apparently fewer and fewer of 
us, if measured by declining books sales 
in recent years. Unlike an article, a book 
cannot be read in one “sitting,” and some 
books require extended concentration 
and time. 

Most nonfiction books have never been 
read cover to cover, or what do we call it 
now, from digital beginning to end. We 
skim, we browse, we delve into chapters 
or sections; we use the table of contents 
or index to find what we need. However, 
some books are meant to be, and deserve 
to be, read slowly with concentration from 
beginning to end, often over multiple sit-
tings. Belles lettres, histories, biographies, 
and significant books in many disciplines 
need to be read sequentially and carefully. 
Carlin Romano, a professor of philosophy 
and humanities at Ursinus College, re-
cently wrote about this in The Chronicle of 
Higher Education (“Will the Book Survive 



Generation Text,” August 29, 2010). Roma-
no believes that reading a book “requires 
concentration, endurance, the ability to 
disconnect from other connections.” Can 
we “disconnect” from our wired, multi-
tasking way of life to concentrate on a book 
from start to finish anymore? Romano 
worries that in the academic curriculum of 
the future we may find “the death of the 
book as object of study, the disappearance 
of ‘whole’ books as assigned reading.” That 
would be a shame. 

Back in 1983, Paul Metz from Virginia 
Tech wrote a book entitled The Landscape 
of Literatures: Use of Subject Collections in 
a University Library (Chicago: American 
Library Association). I read it cover to 
cover when it came out. I marked it up, 
cited it many times, and have kept a copy 
on my office bookshelf these many years. 
For me it was one of the classics in the 
field of library collection management 
and warranted my concentrated reading. 

Mr. Metz has now updated his seminal 
work, and our journal has accepted it for 
publication. You can find “Revisiting the 
Landscape of Literature: Replicating and 
Change in the Use of Subject Collections” 
(posted August 2, 2010) on our Preprints 
service. This new article took me back to 
his great book.

Finally, let me recommend one more 
book I just read cover to cover, savoring 
every word. (What librarian can resist rec-
ommending books?) Janet Soskine’s The 
Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers 
Discovered the Hidden Gospels (New York: 
Knopf) came out last year, and it is a won-
derful historical biography. I suppose you 
could skim it or sample different chapters, 
but then you would miss the fascinating 
development and arc of success in the 
lives of these two pioneering women 
scholars. Soskine calls her heroines “ad-
venturers,” and she also describes them 
as “bookish.” I see no contradiction there.

Joseph Branin, Editor

Editorial  509