426 The Review Section

articles focused on special libraries, four on public libraries, and one on school libraries. Seven articles did not restrict themselves to any particular type of library. Two thirds of the papers took a general perspective in terms of offering comment and advice for libraries within a sector, while the other third offered the narrower perspective of a single library's experience.

Performance measurement literature has a long history in libraries, although the terminology changes in accordance with management fads. Currently in vogue are terms such as "quality management," "total quality management" (TQM), "benchmarking," "performance measure- ment," and "performance indicators." I had expected that 40 papers on performance measurement in libraries would contain much repetition. However, I found that there was limited overlap in this collection and that it did not engender boredom, but provided useful revision of basic concepts, trends, and events. Each author came to the topic from a slightly different angle or background and had something worthwhile to contribute to the broader discussion.

Because this is such a well-established topic in the profession, I wondered whether there would be anything significant that this conference could add to the substantial corpus of professional knowledge in this field. Again, I was pleasantly surprised to find a currency and freshness in the treatment of topics by most authors. New technologies open new options for collecting, analyzing, and utilizing performance data (e.g., MIS, DSS), and highlight new issues, such as measuring performance in a networked environment (LANs, WANs, CWIS, Internet).

Recent management and organizational trends raise new imperatives: "using contracts to improve quality," "quality-driven service agreements as performance indicators," etc. There are other approaches to measurement that were previously ignored, for example, the use of absence and sickness rates as indicators of staff morale, use of upward appraisal as a tool for improving managers' skills, use of focus groups for performance feedback, adopting a "stakeholder approach to the construction of performance measures," and labeling databases to indicate quality.

One outcome of the conference was the recommendation for a follow-up in two years, and the second conference is proposed for September 7-11, 1997. I look forward to another valuable review of the state of the art in this important field.

PII S0364-6408(97)00025-2 Kerry Tanner Senior Lecturer

Department of Information Services Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

GPO Box 2476V Melbourne, Australia 3001

Internet: kerryt@ rmit.edu.au

Interlibrary Loan Practices Handbook. 2nd ed. By Virginia Boucher. Chicago: American Library Association, 1996. 249 pp. softcover. ISBN 0838906672.

Interlibrary Loan Policies Directory. 5th ed. Edited by Leslie R. Morris. New York: Neal- Schuman Publishers, 1995. 828 pp. $120.00 softcover. ISBN 1555701981.

To operate efficiently, interlibrary loan (ILL) offices need to have well-established policies that are compatible with the policies of other ILL offices, and they need to have access to the policies of these offices. Although the fundamental terms have been developed into a national code, there

The Review Section 427

is still much room for variation. With the volume of ILL traffic increasing annually, ILL practitioners have little time for gathering information regarding other libraries' policies and practices. For this reason, ILL offices must continue to operate on the basis of the existing common understanding, and using the few sources of information on ILL. Two such sources recently have been updated in new editions: Virginia Boucher's lnterlibrary Loan Practices Handbook and the Interlibrary Loan Policy Directory.

Boucher's second edition maintains the format and much of the same content of the popular first edition. The clear, concise language and logical arrangement of information in the Handbook make it a valuable tool to its primary intended audience, "those without interlibrary loan experience." The Handbook could well serve as a do-it-yourself guide to setting up an ILL system. The work is arranged in three main sections, the first of which is practical aspects of ILL: Chapter 1 provides instructions for borrowing; Chapter 2 does the same for lending; and Chapter 3 takes on the challenging subject of copyright law. The author wisely avoids any philosophical discussion of copyright and ambiguities of the law currently being debated. Instead, she offers direct information, taken from the text of the law itself, the CONTU guidelines, and federal regulations.

The next three chapters comprise the second section of the work. Chapter 4 deals with dissertations and theses, Chapter 5 takes a look at cooperative agreements, and Chapter 6 covers international ILL. The author's approach in this section is to provide references to resources and examples, rather than the detailed instructions carefully outlined in the first section. The final chapter, "Management of Interlibrary Loan," offers specific instructions for operational matters, and brief, general summaries of broader issues. Each chapter begins with an overview of topics covered, directs readers to useful sources of information on the topic, and often provides a bibliography for further reading. In addition, the appendixes include concrete examples and resources for use in operating an ILL office, including the National Code and copies of forms and policies.

The author has updated this edition to include many new electronic and online resources that were not available at the time of the previous edition. Unfortunately, these updates have not remained current with the rapidly changing ILL environment. Although Boucher devotes several paragraphs to the services of UMI in her discussion of dissertations and theses, she does not mention the new Dissertation Express service and its associated Web page. This is most likely due to the time lag time in publication and is an example of the type of information that an ILL novice might miss by relying too exclusively on the handbook.

With its extensive coverage of basic practice, Boucher's Handbook will be most useful as an instructional and training tool for new ILL employees, and as a guide to developing ILL services for the first time. The lengthy bibliographies and 27 appendixes make this a useful reference tool for those with experience in the field, as long as the incomplete coverage of online sources is recognized.

In addition to well-planned procedures, an ILL office must have access to the policies of its counterparts in other institutions in order to function efficiently. Unfortunately, print resources are dated by the time they arrive on the market and therefore are unreliable. Morris' Interlibrarv Loan Policies Directory, which presents the ILL policies of 1,425 institutions in North America, was an ambitious effort that failed. Although the format of the information is useful, the content is often dated, incorrect, or missing. Providing special lists of library fax numbers, e-mail addresses, and willingness to lend media is a good idea; but the reality is that many libraries appearing in the general policy information section do not appear in these special sections. The editors put effort into compiling lists of library OCLC and RLIN symbols, but the usefulness of these lists is questionable, because libraries that are members of these groups already have this information. And

428 The Review Section

again, the accuracy of the information is faulty; the list does not include all of the symbols for each institution, and no distinction is made between the various libraries within some institutions.

Even the general policy information section is problematic, as the information was gathered by survey. It does not appear that any effort was made to verify the policy information after compilation from the survey, and this has led to many errors. For example, the entry for Brown University incorrectly shows that Brown ILL accepts coupons for payment, when in fact this was phased out in 1994. Furthermore, although Brown's fax number appears in the general policies, Brown does not appear in the fax number list or in the OCLC symbol list. These are only a few of the problems that were detected in a cursory review of the lists, and it is likely that many such errors appear in the work.

A small library with no access to OCLC or RLIN and no Internet connection might find the Policy Directory somewhat useful as a means of obtaining basic directory information, including phone numbers, postal addresses, etc. The work is not a dependable source of information on charge policies, fax policies, or any other information that is likely to change over the course of a few years. It is hard to imagine circumstances in which an ILL office would find this title worth its high price.

PII S0364-6408(97)00024-0 Joan Thompson Brown University

The Library Box I

Providence, RI 02912 Internet: joan. thompson @ brown.edu