Convergence and Collaboration of Campus Information Services. Eds. Peter Hernon and Ronald R. Powell. Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2008. 240p. alk. paper, $50.00 (ISBN 9781591586036). LC 2008-029356.

This collection of essays provides thorough case studies emerging from a population consisting of diverse academic libraries sharing one commonality: namely, an innovative approach to intricately connecting libraries with their larger institutions and user populations. Each library, then, has initiated convergence and collaboration strategies to promote campus information services, as the title of this timely book asserts. The authors hale from eleven quite diverse university libraries: Yale, Brown, Columbia, Emory, Albion, Georgia Tech, University of Connecticut, University of Georgia, University of Michigan, University of Massachusetts, and Wayne State. Significantly, the authors describe successful strategies for guaranteeing relevance and promoting change, so that libraries can adapt to the ever-evolving brave new world of technology.

What constitutes "convergence and collaboration"? Each essay provides a set of approaches, providing definitions, illustrations, and suggested courses of action to demonstrate what the editors mean by this phrase. In the first essay beyond the Introduction, Carol Ann Hughes offers an insightful piece entitled "Innovation Is an Ongoing Process: Collaboration at the University of California Irvine." She states that library administrators at that institution must first pay particular attention to the ways in which users seek information. "Librarians," she maintains, "should focus less on further enhancement of library-based services and take note of how users are actually working." Only then can convergence occur in collaborating, for instance, with Webmasters from IT, with departments offering undergraduates research opportunities, and with the Writing Center to support peer tutoring. Working with various university departments, the library succeeds in developing and maintaining its relevance to the institution as a whole. Hughes’ point, echoed by all of the subsequent essays, is that library administrators need to cultivate active, universitywide relationships.

Other essays emphasize the fact that library administrators must be vigilant about realizing and implementing collaboration with university departments to capitalize on virtual learning opportunities such as distance learning. In fact, in their essay entitled "From Isolation to Engagement: Strategy, Structure and Process," Barbara J. Kriigel and Timothy F. Richards maintain that administrators must vigorously promote the library and its critical services. IT and AV departments are obvious departments that would derive mutual benefit from close collaboration with the library.

Another prevalent practice for many of the libraries represented in this book is the need for reorganization or restructuring of library staff to reflect the new networks of interdepartmental connectivity. Indeed, such reorganization may naturally evolve from the library’s increasing involvement with other campus information services.

In "Libraries and Convergence at Yale," Alice Prochaska advocates that libraries expand their mission to include larger communities beyond the university itself. Moreover, in the Conclusion, Peter Hernon, Ronald R. Powell, and Amy F. Fyn synthesize the arguments of the book as a whole, drawing attention to the fact that, beyond collaboration involving technology, libraries can dedicate "space to an activity such as a poetry center that builds on historical links to an academic department."

Ultimately, this collection of provocative essays has much to offer library administrators, whose vision can impel their libraries to redefine their missions. Every library administrator, then, could benefit from reading Convergence and Collaboration of Campus Information Services. If, as Flannery O’Connor, writes, "everything that rises must converge," these "rising" collaborations will, in the end, converge for the benefit of the academy as a whole.—Lynne F. Maxwell, Villanova University School of Law.