Critical Approaches to Information Technology in Librarians hip: Foundations and Applications ed. by John Buschman

Abstract

TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE Book Reviews 199 notation a development of the mental capacity to understand and use a progressively abstract notion of numbers. It is based on the fact that the first numerical signs mostly signify measures, that is, specific quantities of specific commodities, thus attesting to a nonabstract number notion. Yet at the same time number signs were used for numbers of commodities that naturally did not occur in measures, for example, sheep and cattle. The book is recommended for anyone with an interest in state formation, urbanization, control mechanisms, information and commu­ nication, bookkeeping, food production and processing, as well as to archaeologists, Assyriologists, historians, and anthropologists. Wolfgang Heimpei. Dr. Heimpei. is Assyriologist in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and has a special interest in publications on the mythology, economy, and animal life of the early history of the ancient Near East. Critical Approaches to Information Technology in Librarianship: Foundations and Applications. Edited by John Buschman. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Pp. vii+228; notes, bibliography, index. $55.00. The past fifteen years have seen a significant reappraisal of librarianship from inside the profession. This reappraisal has led to the view that librarianship is a “science” and that librarians are actually information “scientists” or “technologists.” Such a restructuring, and some would say philosophical rethinking, has met both with acceptance and with rebellion by members of the profession (whatever they may call them­ selves). The results of this paradigm shift and its impact on members of the profession—and particularly those whom they serve—is explored in this collection of articles. John Buschman collected twelve essays from a wide range of contribu­ tors from within the library community as well as education, computer science, communications, and engineering. He organized the essays into two groups. The first section, “Foundations,” by the nonlibrarians, is intended to provide background apparatus for a critical analysis of technology. The second section, “Applications,” explores the impact of library technology on such traditional library issues as censorship, the civic role of libraries, labor issues, and the politics of economics. The “Foundations” section covers ground familiar to historians of technology. Norman Balabanian critiques various arguments on the assumed neutrality of technology; MichaelJ. Carbone describes the failed promise of computer technology in schools; Sue Curry Jansen, drawing on the work of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, describes the transformation of information and communication into commodities; computer mediation of labor and the deskilling of 200 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE workers in a digital world is the topic of Shoshana Zuboff’s essay; and Steve Slaby, an engineering professor, critiques the deification of tech­ nology without fully examining its long-term and long-range impact. It is in the “Applications” section that the portrait of the connected, networked, automated-information scientist parceling out knowledge to an information elite via the information superhighway is repainted with the critical approaches outlined in the first section. Buschman’s con­ tributors here depict the subtle and ongoing transformation of librarian from a nonpartisan caretaker of the cumulative knowledge of humanity (if such a beast ever truly existed) to an automata guarding capitalist information commodities. Buschman contributes an essay on how information technology increases censorship capabilities; Carolyn M. Gray outlines the civic role libraries have played in the United States for most of the past two centuries and argues that many factors in the information revolution are undermining that role; Michael F. Winter describes the impact of technology on all levels of labor in today’s libraries; the social and economic impact of the shift from print to electronic forms of information is the topic of James Haar’s essay. Buschman concludes the collection with a summation of the preceding essays and links the two sections. Like nearly all fields, librarianship has too often rushed into new technologies without considering their full and long-term impact. In an era of decreasing budgets and increasing costs ofjournals and books, the added (and continuing) cost burden of the automation of print resources and access to electronic sources of information needs to be carefully considered. Taken as a whole, the essays in this collection stress the democratic values oflibraries and...