Academic Librarianship in the 21st Century. Eds. Garcia, Claudia M., and Teresa A. Flores. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2009. xi, 107 pp. $69.00. ISBN-10: 1604568658; ISBN-13: 978-1604568653. Index. Hard Bound.

Ashby Crowder, University of Maryland

The contents of Academic Librarianship in the 21st Century are more narrowly focused than the book's title suggests. The editors announce that this volume of collected essays "explores some of the roles and challenges that academic libraries face in the 21st century" (vii). Still, this book is neither an introduction to nor an overview of academic librarianship today, but a collection of six essays on specific issues or problems relating to the contemporary academic library. These contributions share two threads in common. First, the essays focus on electronic/systems related issues in academic librarianship. Second, the contributions illustrate some different ways that the Internet has transformed librarians' and users' behavior and expectations. Some contributions take the view that search engines such as Google are libraries' competition for customers—a notion some librarians find simplistic and professionally insulting. However, in the individual studies included in this volume such a view does not come across as unreasonable.
	The volume's four high quality essays include Stacey Bowers' examination of database licensing agreements, Maria Anna Jankowska's look at the changing needs of users as more become online library customers, Angela Weiler's consideration of fair use in e-reserves, and Susan E. Russell and Jie Huang's study on improving search results through reform of subject and keyword search capabilities in cataloging. 
	Bowers observes that the restrictive terms commonly found in database licensing agreements are at odds with the broad goals of access expressed in academic libraries' mission statements. Subscribing to a database is legally quite different from subscribing to a set of print periodicals. For the benefits of database journal service libraries must sacrifice control over the information they offer. Rather than advocating a neo-Luddite solution that would forfeit the many benefits of electronic access, Bowers calls on librarians to pay careful attention to licensing agreements and to put the negotiating power in their court by establishing a united coalition against licensors. 
	Jankowska, presenting and analyzing the results from a Libqual + TM survey, suggests ways for academic libraries to recapture their role as information providers from commercial services such as Google, Wikipedia, and Amazon. Jankowska observes that commercial services are actually quite poor at directing users to scholarly information, but academic users nevertheless begin their searches with search engines rather than at the academic library's Internet home page. Libraries should, therefore, create, offer, and market well-designed academic search services where commercial alternatives fall short. Jankowska missed an opportunity to consider a curious contradiction in her survey results. Users indicated that they want academic library online services to help them find services on their own without personal help, but they also claimed that the human aspect of library services was one of the academic library's greatest strengths. What explains this inconsistency, and what does it reveal about the needs and desires of today's academic library users?
	Weiler reviews developments in fair use in electronic reserves. She observes that publishers and publishing industry organizations have tried to mislead and intimidate academic librarians into believing that fair use is much narrower than the law states. Librarians, therefore, should not be too cautious in their fair use determinations. They should make their own educated judgments rather than relying on percentage or chapter guidelines that are arbitrary and conservative. Weiler holds that the high regard libraries have among the public and among legislators gives them more power to combat publishers' accusations of copyright abuse than academic librarians realize.
	Russell and Huang hypothesize that the search engine method of locating unstructured information has transformed the way users search the library catalog for structured information. Their study finds that keyword searches comprise the majority of academic library catalog searches. Rather than rigidly insisting that users must be educated in Library of Congress system, the authors argue that catalogers should improve upon the LCSH system by allowing more keyword access points through the use of cross references. Improving catalog searching can help combat users' and potential users' belief that search engines are easier to use than library catalogs.
	Aurathai Wareesa-ard's contribution on the use of bibliographic management software in Thailand seems out of place in a volume that is otherwise distinctly North American; had the editors or other contributors had a more comparative outlook this essay could have been a better fit. More curious is Angel Borrego, Candela Ollé, and Marta Somoza's contribution. Consisting of a few brief observations about open access journals in the field of library and information science, this chapter contains no argument or analysis on par with the others in the volume, leading it to seem out of place too. 
	The editors, whose credentials and professional positions are nowhere noted in the volume, have done both their readers and their contributors a disservice by compiling a shoddy introduction. In place of the synthesis and discussion of contributions one would expect, Flores and Garcia have simply cut and pasted—without attribution—the first one or two paragraphs from each chapter. Only later, upon sensing that one is reading something for the second time, does one realize what made the introduction seem so disjointed. Elsewhere, too, the reader has the sense that the volume was assembled in a hurry. In several instances the font size and type change mid-sentence or mid-paragraph, leading some pages to resemble a ransom note.
	Despite the editorial untidiness and the uneven quality of contributions, the majority of the essays in Academic Librarianship in the 21st Century are first rate and highly relevant.