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Libraries & Culture 37.3 (2002) 296-299



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Book Review

Library Automation in Transitional Societies:
Lessons from Eastern Europe


Library Automation in Transitional Societies: Lessons from Eastern Europe. Edited by Andrew Lass and Richard Quandt. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. xv, 451 pp. $55.00. ISBN 0-19-513262-9.

After the fall of Communism in 1989, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation became aware that the research libraries of Central and Eastern Europe had been sorely neglected during the Communist period. The foundation decided to support a development project, concentrating its resources on a plan to automate research libraries in this part of the world. Eight years later, an assessment of the project's success was undertaken and was presented at a conference on library automation, held in Warsaw from 16-18 October 1997. The papers presented at the conference were edited by Andrew Lass and Richard Quandt, who were both involved in the project from its initial stages.

Andrew Lass is no stranger to this area of Europe. He spent his early life in Prague, which he left four years after the Soviet invasion in 1968. It was his attention to the condition of the post-Communist Eastern European libraries that was fundamental in determining the Mellon Foundation to provide its support for the modernization of these libraries. As an anthropologist as well as a former resident of Prague, Lass was undeniably qualified to manage a project in which libraries, handicapped by their ties with bureaucratic Communist policies, would be reluctant to adopt and implement change. He was assisted in his efforts by Richard Quandt, senior research economist (emeritus) at Princeton University and senior advisor of the Mellon Foundation. [End Page 296]

The contributors of the thirty-five essays included in this volume are credited librarians and library directors from Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Estonia, and Latvia, the last two added to the program in 1996. The papers relate first-hand experiences, day-to-day events arising from the automation process, as well as the broad spectrum of challenges that individual institutions faced in order to bring this project to fruition, thus representing instructive case studies useful for other libraries in the region embarking on the road of automation of their services. The economic and political contexts of the post-Communist societies in transition to an open market economy and customer-oriented services were factors that played a significant part throughout the implementation of the project. The introduction to the book provides an overview of the library scene under the Communist system. The essays are organized in four sections.

In part 1, entitled "Library Policy and the State," the authors of six essays express similar concerns regarding obstacles that prevent a smooth implementation of automation in Central and Eastern European libraries. Adam Manikowski points out three of the most important constraints to innovation in Polish libraries: "the system of subordination of libraries to various administrative agencies of the state"; "the undervaluing, or even neglect, of the development of libraries by universities"; and "the tightness of library circles and their conservatism" (24). Jurand Czermin:ski analyzes the impact of various types of state policies on the process of automating Polish libraries from a financial viewpoint. From an entirely different outlook, Jela Steinerová sees the difficulty of the development of libraries not only because of changing from the traditional to the electronic system but also because the Central and Eastern European libraries have to struggle for survival in a social, cultural, and economic transitional environment. She believes that the people working in libraries are suffering the most, and thus she focuses on the human and social context of the library.

Part 2 includes eight essays under the title "Case Histories." These contributions sound more positive and encouraging than the previous ones, maybe because the second stage of the process has begun. BĂ©la Mader surveys "the revolutionary" rather than "the evolutionary" history of automation in Hungary's academic libraries and their survival despite uncertain funding, high costs, and traditionally oriented library structures. In chapters 10 and 11...

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