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is selective, focuses on the man and his administration, and does not offer government and other literature on the presidential library system. On the whole, the photographs are most disappointing; there are no aerial photographs or layouts of the facilities. Coverage of each library in Government Information Quarter/y (GZQ, 11 (1) and 12 (1)) contains a better selection of

photographs. As well, GZQ offers better and more current coverage on planning the Bush Library Center.

The guide to the libraries offers one to three short paragraphs on the collections. The reader does not get a true sense of the holdings and importance of presidential libraries. In summary, this high-priced book is not recommended.

~ivatizing Government Information: The Effects of Policy on Access to Landsat Satellite Data. By Kathleen M. Eisenbeis. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1995. 327 p. $42.50 (cloth). ISBN O-8 108-2934-7 (cloth). LC 94-27576.

Reviewed by Evan McKenzie, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60607 <mckenzie@uic.edu>.

The Land Remote-Sensing Satellite (Landsat) program, Eisenbeis tells us, consists at present

of five satellites launched by the Federal government from 1972 through 1984. The satellites carry sensors called “Multispectral Scanners” and “Thematic Mappers,” which “record and measure

electromagnetic energy reflected from scenes or objects on earth” and transmit them to receiving stations on the ground. These data can be turned into photographic images or other graphical formats for use in “applications in agriculture, forestry, fishing, mineral exploration, land and water resources, management, hydrology, geology and mapping, pollution monitoring, and

coastal zone management.” The data are used primarily by agencies of the Federal government, state and local officials, foreign governments, researchers, and selected private companies.

By 1984, five Landsat satellites had been placed in orbit. In 1993, Landsat 6 was launched, but it was “lost” at a cost of over a quarter of a billion dollars. Landsat 7, Eisenbeis tells us, will not be sent into space before 1998. This case study covers the years 1972 through 1989, during which time both Democratic and Republican administrations tried to privatize the program. The

most dramatic development along these lines was the Reagan-era Landsat Remote-Sensing Commercialization Act of 1984 (the Landsat Act), but the entire saga is very complex and involves numerous agencies and actions in Congress, directly under the President, and in the Federal

bureaucracy. Eisenbeis’ basic argument is that this p~vatiz~tion effort was irrational, inefficient, and ill-

considered; ideologically motivated; and inconsistent with expert opinion on the subject. ln

essence, it appears from her analysis that all along, the Landsat data were primarily needed and used by a number of government agencies to carry out their functions, and by academic researchers, with only a limited market for commercial applications. The book portrays Landsat as a relatively small and cost-effective program when seen as a way of paying for a public good. But its existence as a Federal budget item was nonetheless constantly questioned by Congress, which could only see it as a private good in the making. Legislators seemed to begrudge it every dollar and chafe impatiently, waiting for the day when it could be “transferred . to the private sector for operation.” This would have amounted to the government paying billions of dollars for gathering information it needed and then transferring the system to private corporations, which would then sell that information back to the government at a profit. Academics would

presumably find the increased cost excessive and use the data less in their research, depriving everybody of the fruits of their efforts.

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Such a bizarre privatization effort, Eisenbeis shows, was doomed from the outset, and indeed it was reversed by the Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992, which repealed the 1984 Landsat Act. The book’s epilogue deals rather summarily with these subsequent developments. Yet, that is not the end of the story, because now the annual struggle for adequate funding from Congress will continue. The book ends by noting that the costly loss of Landsat 6 “does not inspire the taxpayer’s trust that public funds are wisely spent for something that appears to offer so little in return.”

This work is a revision of Eisenbeis’ award-wining doctoral dissertation, and it has the characteristic merits and shortcomings of that particular genre. Eisenbeis, a librarian by profession who has served as an adviser to NASA and is described in the preface as “alternating between roles of participant and spectator” on this subject, has gone to great lengths to be thorough,

and grounds virtually every paragraph in relevant literature. The book is 327 pages long, but

the primary text is by 155 pages, followed by the epilogue, a literature review, five appendices,

and a bibliography. There is also a list of 81 governmental and technological acronyms used relentlessly throughout the book, including jawbreakers such as like “IWGDMGC,” which represents something called the “Interagency Working Group on Data Management for Global Change,” whose Executive Secretariat includes Eisenbeis.

Each chapter is densely packed with detail of various types that is sometimes inadequately digested. These data include summaries of other studies on the subject, lengthy extracts from

legislative hearings, descriptions of various laws and policies, a recounting of Eisenbeis’ methodology in collecting and analyzing 58 questionnaires from academic users of Landsat data (the sampling frame is the membership of the Remote Sensing Specialty Group of the Association

of American Geographers), and passages of technical description. Unfortunately, this style of writing, while entirely appropriate for a dissertation, limits the

book’s appeal. Researchers interested in a meticulous analysis of the topic embodied in the book’s subtitle-policy decisions dealing with access to Landsat data-will be amply rewarded. On the other hand, those attracted by the book’s title-“Privatizing Government Information”-may

feel that the author’s efforts to link this episode to issues of more general concern are less successful.

This is not to say that the case study is unrelated to these larger issues, because it is. However, the book’s tone and format often obscure its deeper significance. Indeed, Eisenbeis seems a bit unfocused at times on what the significance is. She trenchantly endeavors to mine the book for

insights about the study of policy analysis (undoubtedly the book’s weakest aspect). More pertinently, she says the work is “a case study in government information policy” that “has shown how the policies adopted in the Landsat Act reflect the National Commission of Library and Information Science’s Principles of Public Information. She further tells us that “the heart” of

the story is the effort to “assess the effect of the congressional policy action on the academic users of this special scientific data acquired from space.” She concludes by saying that “Landsat data advocate[s] will be working on Congress to come up with funds to continue the flow of

data so that global environmental research based on observing the condition of the Earth from space will continue. Our future depends on it.”

This dramatic final sentence clues the reader to something that Eisenbeis understands but seems to assume the reader know equally well: why the government should provide Landsat data as a public good. Were it not for an eloquent seven-page preface by John H. McElroy, Dean of Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington, the reader could leave this book without fully understanding why the study is worth reading. McElroy writes:

As in the classic Greek tragedies, where the seed of a person’s ultimate destruction is found within the person’s own character or psyche, the problems of Landsat are

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found within its gestation. The program was oversold as a future commercial success, and the Federal managers failed to advocate the role that information has as a public good; indeed it was not recognized-or least not stated-that for years to come the principal customer (directly or indirectly) for the data would be Federal agencies, with true commercial customers representing only a marginal market. (p. xii)

The responses of data users to Eisenbeis’s questionnaire amply support this conclusion, which, it seems, is far and away her most important finding. But not until the end of the study is the argument clearly articulated that Landsat data are best handled as a public good, rather than as a private one whose supply and demand can be accurately set by market transactions. Indeed, the book and its discussion of policy formulation would benefit from a more nuanced discussion of the different meanings and gradations of “public” and “private,” which are treated too simplistically here using the ideologically loaded metaphor of separate and distinct “sectors.” This artificial and unrealistic distinction is especially problematic given the complex and ambiguous relationships among government agencies, quasi-governmental entities, and profit- making corporations that characterize the policy process in general, and the space program in

particular. Accordingly, McElroy’s high opinion of this work as “a powerful indictment of the ineptness

of our policy making practices” would be easier to agree with if these and other main points were less dependent on inference and interpretation by the reader and better developed by the author. Yet, Eisenbeis has given us a case study from which we can learn a good deal about the curious inability of contemporary American policymakers to appreciate the value of government information as a public good.