tive ideas on balancing collections and suggestions for indepen- dently produced titles, vendors, and selection tools.

One weakness of the book, as it pertains to the academic library, is that much of the content is most applicable to the pub- lic library. Issues of “access,” “challenged materials,” “market- ing the collection,” and “display” are more minor points for the academic media librarian. Most areas covered, however, can be used in any situation. Although the descriptions are brief, they still serve as a useful overview to the varied and incongruous video business.

The style is clear, concise, and easy to use. The information within is accessible to those just learning about motion media collections, but even the experienced media librarian will find this a handy reference tool.-Rick Provine, Media Librarian, Clemons Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903-2498 <provine@virginia.edu>.

The Economics of Information in the Networked Environment, edited by Meredith A. Butler and Bruce R. Kingma. Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1996. 217~. $15.00. ISBN O-918006029-5.

The Economics of Information in the Nehwrked Environ- ment is the conference proceedings of “Challenging Market- place Solutions to Problems in the Economics of Information,” held in Washington, D.C., September 18-19, 1995, and spon- sored by the Council on Library Resources, SUNY Albany, the libraries at SUNY Binghamton, Buffalo, and Stony Brook, the Association of Research Libraries, the Coalition for Networked Information, and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges. The purpose of this conference was “to examine issues related to the development of the knowledge infrastructure and their economic impact on higher education.” Indeed, it is a real relief to see articles that discuss the economic realities of mounting and maintaining networks and information resources in libraries and higher education. Once one gets beyond utopian visions of social reform brought about by the information economy, one still inevitably comes down to the bottom line: budgets, costs, and funding.

Several of the articles cover areas of economics that have more to do with traditional libraries than with any networked environment. For example, “Building the Distributed North American Library Collection for Foreign Languages” deals pri- marily with the mechanics of and funding for creating a multi- lingual, multinational research library. The fact that a network would be required to make a system such as this work is men- tioned only tangentially. For another example, “The Economics of Access Versus Ownership: The Costs and Benefits of Access to Scholarly Articles via Interlibrary Loan and Journal Sub- scriptions” explores the cost-effectiveness of research libraries owning specialized journals, versus making them available via interlibrary loan. This is certainly not a new issue in the litera- ture of librarianship, but improved networking technologies, and their application to interlibrary loan networks, necessitate new analyses of this old issue. It seems that, in many of the cases presented in these proceedings, the issues raised by the existence of new technologies are not new at all; it is merely that new technologies add new aspects to the old issues, and thus throw them into sharper relief.

Indeed, some of the issues raised during this conference are not new even to information science. Take, for example, the sec- tion entitled “Can E-Journals Save Us?” Two speakers address this issue: “A Publisher’s View” and “A Scholar’s View.” While

it is certainly welcome to have two perspectives juxtaposed so neatly, the issue itself has been addressed in many forums in the past. (A particularly thorough treatment of the topic is Desktop Publishing irz the UniversiQ).’ Essays have been written on the advantages of electronic publishing to the scholarly community since electronic journals were invented back in the early 1970s. In this area, at least, this conference was not breaking any new ground; however, even an old issue must be brought before the public eye before any social changes can take place.

On the other hand, this conference did address one issue that. while perhaps not ground-breaking, has rarely been addressed in print: realistic plans for designing and funding electronic col- lections. Several of the articles provide outlines of plans that are already in place to provide information in electronic format to organizations of various types and sizes, from research consor- tia (“Funding Social Science Archiving and Services in the Net- worked Environment”), to the Library of Congress (“Economic Considerations for Digital Libraries: A Library of Congress Perspective”). Additionally, third-party information providers are addressed (“JSTOR and the Economics of Scholarly Com- munication”). All of these articles address not only the mission statements of the organizations in question, but also pragmatic budgetary concerns and proposed and working solutions.

It is for these solutions that these conference proceedings are truly useful: as a preventative against the reinvention of the wheel. Future providers of academic information can learn from the experiences of the first entrepreneurs in the field. While these early comers may be visionary, creating a new field of academic research, visions still must ultimately come down to the bottom line. These conference proceedings prove that being visionary can be economically feasible.-Jeffrey Pomerantz, Manager of Information Technology, Graduate School of Library & Information Science, Simmons College, 300 The Fenway, Boston, MA 01225 cjpomerantz@simmons.edu>.

Reference 1. Joan N. Burstyn, ed. Desktop Publishing irz I/W Uni\ler.sit\:

(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University, School of’ Education, 199 1).

Foundations of Full Text Electronic Information Delivery Systems: Implications for Information Professionals, by Harry M. Kibirige. New York: Neal-Schuman, 1996. 22 I pp. $45.00. ISBN l-55570-208-2.

Kibirige has written a text “for information professionals and information users” (p. xi), and more the former than the latter. The second sentence (in the preface) asserts that “access to full text information, containing text, images, and in some cases, sound, is becoming vital to decision-making for organizations as well as individuals” (p. xi). Kibirige goes on to say that the first part (more than half) of the book is intended to provide enough of a background for an intelligent discussion (in the remaining chapters) of the issues in electronic full-text delivery.

Kibirige starts with a broad overview, setting the scene with a look at “cybertrends’‘-increasing PC power, developments in fiber optics and digital imaging, the emergence of “cyber- sources,” and the evolution of end users and virtual communi- ties. This is followed by four very well developed and nicely illustrated chapters on communications technologies and infra- structures (moving from cabling and bandwidth through open systems to institutional and national networks). Remaining chapters look at gateways to information systems, national information policy and infrastructure, selecting electronic delivery services, transborder information flow, and the

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