Brief Reviews

One Culture: Computationally Intensive Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Christa Williford, Charles Henry, and Amy Friedlander. Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2012. 44 p. $20.00 Free online: http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub151 (ISBN 978-1-932326-40-6)

One Culture: Computationally Intensive Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences is a report on the first eight recipients of the Digging Into Data Challenge, an initiative led by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which provides funding for computational analysis of large-scale text corpora. The eight projects cover both the humanities and the social sciences. The print version of One Culture focuses on lessons learned from the projects as a whole, while the online version includes individual case studies. After two years of interviewing participants and making site visits, the authors provide recommendations for researchers, administrators, scholarly societies, publishers, libraries, and funding agencies for facilitating the scope and effectiveness of future large-scale digital projects. They conclude that a rethinking of both scholarship and the institutional structure that supports it are necessary if this new area of research is to flourish. (FR)

The Associate University Librarian Handbook, ed. Bradford Lee Eden. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012. 232 p. $80 (ISBN 978-0-8108-8381-9)

Similar to university presidents, the heads of university libraries spend much of their time engaged in fundraising and public relations. This generally leaves overseeing day-to-day operations of the library and much of the budgeting and planning process to one or more associate university librarians (AULs). Yet there is a real dearth of literature that addresses the responsibilities and career pathways of AULs. The Associate University Librarian Handbook, an edited volume by Bradford Lee Eden, dean of library services at Valparaiso University, is intended to remedy this. Covering such topics as change management, funding, career choices, and leadership, Eden's fourteen contributors provide a rich overview of this important university library position. (FR)

Teaching for Critical Thinking: Tools and Techniques to Help Students Question Their Assumptions, Stephen D. Brookfield. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012. 280 p. $38 (ISBN 978-0-470-88934-3)

Stephen Brookfield, Distinguished University Professor at the University of St. Thomas, has been teaching and writing about critical thinking for decades. He defines critical thinking as the ability to think analytically about one's assumptions, beliefs, and actions, to see things from different viewpoints, and to apply this thinking to action. To complicate matters a bit, he defines five different critical thinking traditions across the disciplines: analytic philosophy and logic, hypothetico-deductive methodology, pragmatism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory as defined by the Frankfort School. This may sound daunting, but in this accessible book Brookfield explains how critical thinking can be learned and taught through compelling examples, scenarios, case studies, and classroom exercises. Information literacy librarians in particular have much to learn from his explicit theory and practice of the often fuzzy term "critical thinking." (JA)

Transforming Information Literacy Programs: Intersecting Frontiers of Self, Library Culture, and Campus Community, ed. Carroll Wetzel Wilkinson and Courtney Bruch. ACRL Publications in Librarianship 64. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries. 263 p. $62 (ISBN 978-0-8389-8603-5)

This collection of new articles on the information literacy movement in academic libraries is refreshingly candid. Many of the authors speak openly for the first time about problems of definition of the concept, resistance to information literacy and the library's educational role among librarians, and failure to fully implement campus-wide programs. Airing these problems has a curiously positive effect, particularly in the culminating piece, "Information Literacy Reality Check," by Nancy H. Seamans. Taken in the right spirit, this timely volume could give information literacy librarians and advocates the courage to deviate from the established orthodoxy and try new approaches that best suit their institutional environments. (JA)