Briefly Noted

Common Ground at the Nexus of Information Literacy and Scholarly Communication, Stephanie Davis-Kahl and Merinda Kaye Hensley, eds. Chicago: ACRL Press, 2013. 360 pages. $54.00 (ISBN 978-0-8389-8621-9)

Generally, information literacy and scholarly communication are seen as two distinct spheres in academic libraries. Common Ground at the Nexus of Information Literacy and Scholarly Communication aims to alter this understanding by highlighting the ways that the two educational goals support each other. Too much emphasis has been placed on simply finding sources, which often obscures the richness of the research process. Attention to scholarly communication in information literacy instruction provides the necessary context to help students ask the right questions of their information tools and sources. For more advanced students, it also introduces them to the evolving scholarly publishing system to which they might one day contribute. Editors Stephanie Davis-Kahl and Merinda Kaye Hensley solicited seventeen articles on this theme, covering such topics as outreach, open access, plagiarism, copyright, and graduate and undergraduate instruction. This work should be of interest to information literacy instructors and administrators who are looking for ways to adapt instruction for the rapidly changing digital landscape. (FR)

The Fight over Digital Rights: The Politics of Copyright and Technology, Bill D. Herman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 258 pages. $95.00 (ISBN 978-1-10701-597-5)

Bill D. Herman offers a brief and accessible political history of copyright in the digital age that should be of interest to librarians, administrators, and educators. Beginning with the struggles leading to the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 to the recent fight to block passage of SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), The Fight over Digital Rights: The Politics of Copyright and Technology analyzes the stakeholders, legislative battles, communication strategies, and popular coverage of this important debate. Part II of the book focuses on how two groups, supporters of strong fair use, who oppose the expansion of copyright and call for wider exceptions to copyright, and advocates for strong copyright are represented in Congress, the print media (mainly newspapers), and online. Using an online tool called Issue Crawler, Herman was able to show that strong fair use advocates dominated the online debate. The arguments in Congress and the newspapers were more evenly balanced. In Part III, Herman addresses the efforts to export provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 to other countries through direct lobbying or through trade treaties such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, currently being negotiated by the Obama administration. This is a very good primer on the history and current state of the debate over digital rights. (FR)

The Library: A World History, James W. P. Campbell and Will Pryce. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2013. 320 pages. $75.00 (ISBN 978-0-226-09281-2)

The Library: A World History is clearly a labor of love. To write and illustrate this architectural history of libraries, author James W. P. Campbell and photographer Will Pryce “travelled to eighty-one libraries in twenty-one countries.” The photographs are spectacular, a visual feast for bibliophiles. Libraries and their materials—scrolls, books, music scores, videos, DVDs, and now online digital content—have evolved synergistically with one another and the societies and cultures in which they were built. This synergy is apparent as the reader moves through an architectural timeline of the world’s great library structures in The Library: A World History. Leafing through this book also impresses upon the reader the historic relationship between knowledge and power, both secular and religious, as so few of the people who built these edifices before the twentieth century would ever be allowed to enter and use the libraries’ contents. Anyone interested in the history of architecture or libraries will find this book fascinating and delightful. (FR)

Networked: The New Social Operating System, Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. 376 pages. $29.95 (ISBN 978-0-262-01719-0)

With blurbs from Internet and technology luminaries and authors like Vint Cerf, Clay Shirky, James Fallows, and Manuel Castells on the back cover, this is a book that demands attention. Lee Rainie of the Pew Research Center’s Internet...