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College and Research Libraries
January 2005, Vol. 66, No. 1

Book Review

Libraries without Walls 5: The Distributed Delivery of Library and Information Services. Eds. Peter Brophy, Shelagh Fisher, and Jenny Craven. London: Facet, 2004. 269p. £44.95 (ISBN 1856045110).

Libraries without Walls contains the proceedings of the fifth Libraries without Walls Conference held in Lesvos, Greece, in September 2003. This and previous conferences have been designed to bring together participants from around the world to discuss, from an international perspective, access to materials and services by patrons external to the actual bricks-and-mortar library. As the editors of this volume note, when the conference was first held in 1995, participants concerned themselves primarily with issues of distance learning and related matters. Eight years later, however, technological advances have changed the focus of the conference to the provision of services or materials to people who used them "remotely," which, paradoxically, often means within the very site of the library itself.

The book contains twenty-four papers grouped together under five main topics or "themes." Theme one deals with the integration of library services and virtual learning environments. A variety of issues is addressed, including how to provide staff with the skills and training required to deal with new library services in support of e-learning. How the library as a whole might work collaboratively in this relatively new environment also is considered.

Theme two discusses the relationship among user needs, information skills, and information literacies. The papers here examine the pros and cons of generic versus customized information skills packages delivered via e-learning. Also addressed is how to respond to the needs of traditional and nontraditional students in this setting.

Theme three looks at usability and accessibility of digital library services. The papers in this section are quite diverse, moving from a broad and general examination of the characteristics of the truly usable and accessible digital library to far narrower studies involving barriers to library use by Nigerian professionals and digital library services at the Italian Health Institute library. Theme four is similarly structured. Its focus is on designing the information environment from the national and institutional perspective, and, again, the papers vary in content, from an examination of broad principles involving researchers and resources to specific studies such as those involving Web services in Portuguese public libraries and Denmark’s electronic research library.

The last section focuses on the creation of digital resources by user communities and the provision of "usable" repositories for others. These communities can be large or small—for instance, the general public that might wish to participate (aided by museums, libraries, or archives) in the sharing of cultural heritage information online or the "closed" community of a university where an "open archive" is established to store an institution’s scholarly output such as papers (published or not), data, reports, and so on.

The diversity of papers in this volume is indicative of a number of major ways in which libraries and librarians are changing. Technology is occupying a tremendous amount of our time and energy, and "knowledge workers" are not afraid to experiment, customize, and play with various products and resources. Nor, if these papers are accurate, are we reluctant to specify when the results have been less than stellar: Great emphasis is now placed on pinning down and defining the ingredients that make up a successful service, project, or product via the use of social science research methods. Our profession seems hungrier than ever for statistics on anything and everything that can be measured, looking for the answer to such elusive matters as: What makes this thing tick, run, work, succeed? What doesn’t? What characteristics are we looking for? How should we quantify this? Is it quantifiable? Could we do this again somewhere else? Do we really want to?

Nevertheless, until the day comes that librarians work from their homes in front of computers—in the same manner as the programmers and other computer workers we hear about who simply roll out of bed, make coffee, and start their day in front of the computer in their home office—libraries will continue to be places with walls. Accordingly, the idea of space, place, and geography in these papers is real and palpable even when discussing patrons not using the resources located within the actual building itself. The character of a physical institution—a place with walls from which projects and ideas emanate—is overwhelmingly evident in every single paper in this volume. And that rootedness in place is, quite frankly, the real joy in reading a collection such as this.—Nancy McCormack, Queen’s University.