Reader’s Roundup: Monographic Musings & Reference Reviews

Column Editor: Corey Seeman (Director, Kresge Library Services, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan) <cseeman@umich.edu> Twitter @cseeman

Column Editor’s Note: It is a beautiful day in Ypsilanti, Michigan as I write this and enjoy the beautiful sunshine outside my window. Behind me is my pup Runyon, fast asleep on the chair in my home office and Cosmo the cat is asleep on the bed. There are days like this where the prospect of working remotely seems like a real luxury and a blessing. The classical music is playing from Detroit’s WRCJ 90.9 FM. It could seem like there is not a care in the world.

However, as many of us know, what appears to be an idyllic picture might shield an alternative reality that is harder to navigate. Many people struggle with mental illnesses or have loved ones, friends, co-workers or neighbors who do the same. I bring this up because of the theme that developed in this issue’s review. I have always let my reviewers pick the books they would like to review and incorporate the finished reviews when the arrive back to me. So in many ways, the only themes to a typical column is chance and opportunity. But this time, the scope of our own mental issues comes into play very clearly.

Included in these reviews are works encouraging us to incorporate mindfulness in your library, struggling with mental illness in the librarian profession, understanding and harnessing the culture of creativity and exploring the world of artificial intelligence. The common thread of these works captures one of the critical aspects of librarianship, creating a safe and nurturing environment for our patrons, our staff and our community. Maybe these works will fit in nicely on your personal bookshelf or your library collection. Our goal here is to help you find good ways to invest your collection budgets.

Special thanks to my wonderful and patient reviewers who built this issue: Kathleen Baril (Ohio Northern University), Janet Crum (University of Arizona), Carolyn Filippelli (University of Arkansas – Fort Smith), Julie Huskey (Tennessee State University), Jennifer Matthews (Rowan University), and Sally Ziph (University of Michigan). I very much appreciate their efforts to share their reviews with the broader library community. If you would like to be a reviewer for Against the Grain, please write me at <cseeman@umich.edu>. If you are a publisher and have a book you would like to see reviewed in a future column, please also write me directly. You can also find out more about the Reader’s Roundup here — https://sites.google.com/view/ squirrelman/atg-readers-roundup. Happy reading and be nutty! — Corey

Charney, Madeline; Colvin, Jenny, and Moniz, Richard. Recipes for Mindfulness in Your Library: Supporting Resilience and Mindful Engagement. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2019. 978-0- 8389-1783-1 paper. 132 pp. $49.99

Reviewed by Sally Ziph (Instruction/Reference Services Librarian, Kresge Library Services, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) <sweston@umich.edu>

Mindfulness practice has become popular in many circles from mental health to business and to education. The benefits of mindfulness are many, including personal resilience in stressful situations, better heart health, and even changed brain structure. And, according to this book’s authors, mindfulness can also be utilized in ways that support social justice efforts and community engagement.

This book includes strategies and program ideas for academic and public libraries in the area of educating individuals to the benefits of mindfulness. There are fifteen chapters that are divided by the editors into four sections, including: Library as Hub, Innovative Services, Personal Practice, and Teaching Research. Each section includes several chapters written by librarians and other professionals with library or yoga experience. Topics include meditation apps, reflective writing, journaling, and tools for helping students to overcome research anxiety.

The authors are all academic librarians at different schools and with different roles. Madeleine Charney serves as a research services librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Jenny Colvin, MLS, is the assistant director for Outreach Services at Furman University Libraries. And Dr. Richard Moniz serves as the director of library services at the Horry-Georgetown Technical College in South Carolina. Charney and Colvin also share an interest in “contemplative pedagogy.” Colvin is a co-founder of the Contemplative Pedagogy Interest Group within ACRL. Moniz is the author of multiple books on library management and academic libraries.

Given the kind of stress that library staff (and everyone else) have been experiencing over the last two years during the pandemic, I definitely think mindfulness and its practices could be incorporated within library professional development and programming in valuable ways. Mindfulness has so many documented benefits for body and mind that I think library users (academic and public, especially) would welcome this sort of programming in their libraries. For example, the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan had an active inperson meditation group before the pandemic, and meditation has proven to be very popular on the campus at large. This is a well-organized and comprehensive volume of “recipes” that definitely deserves a place on the shelves of librarians interested in programming that promotes the mental and physical health of their users.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this available somewhere in my shared network. (I probably do not need this book, but it would be nice to get it within three to five days via my network catalog.)

Dube, Miranda and Wade, Carrie (editors). LIS Interrupted: Intersections of Mental Illness and Library Work. Sacramento: Library Juice Press, 2021. 9781634001083 346 pages. $35.00. Please see http://litwinbooks.com.

Reviewed by Kathleen Baril (Director, Heterick Memorial Library, Ohio Northern University) <k-baril@onu.edu>

The library world, like the larger society it reflects, is only recently beginning to examine how inclusive it is as a profession. Most works analyzing the library profession’s inclusiveness have focused on ethnicity and race. Although there have been many studies and works around mental illness and library users, especially in regard to working with the homeless, there is less literature about librarians and library professionals with mental illness.

The editors, Miranda Dube and Carrie Wade, have assembled in this work a large collection of both personal narratives and critical essays. Both authors are librarians, Miranda Dube is the founder of Librarians for Survivors that provides training for librarians to work with domestic and sexual violence survivors and Carrie Wade is a health sciences librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The book is divided into three sections of authored chapters titled “The Process of Becoming,” “Critical Perspectives and Narratives” and “The Situated Experience.” The first section focuses on personal narratives of individuals in the library field with various conditions ranging from ADHD to depression. In this section authors also describe their experiences as library students and/or their experiences in their first positions and how they adjusted. The second section, “Critical Perspectives and Narratives” takes a wider look at a variety of issues related to mental illness and the library workplace including disclosing a mental illness at work, Library of Congress Subject Headings and mental health conditions, and working in public service and mental illness. The third section, “The Situated Experience” focuses on personal narratives from well-established library professionals.

The personal narratives in this book are especially insightful as the authors share the challenges they face every day. For example, in the first chapter by Kaelyn Leonard, she shares the barriers she met when asking for accommodations as an online student with ADHD. When she asked for transcriptions of recorded lectures, she was told note-taking services were only offered to in-person students. In another chapter, Allison Rand writes about coping with PTSD after being near the Boston Marathon bombing and how it affected her afterwards in library school and as she looked for a job. Another writer, Jodene R. Peck Pappas, shares that her depression and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) have made it difficult for her to even write her chapter in this book.

The “Critical Perspectives and Narratives:” section provides wider views of mental health subjects and library work which provide some important perspectives for library practices and policies. One chapter covers when and if you should disclose your mental health condition at work while another examines mental health, emotional labor and working in public services.

Overall this book is an important addition to the library literature and the only complaint would be that this book has only just begun to cover this very large topic.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.)

Issitt, Micah T. Opinions Throughout History: Robotics & Artificial Intelligence. Armenia, NY: Grey House Publishing. 2020. 9781642654813. ISBN. 490 pages, $195.00

Reviewed by Julie Huskey (Head of Cataloging, Tennessee State University, Brown-Daniel Library) <jhuskey@tnstate.edu>

Independent scholar and journalist Micah T. Issitt has authored several other volumes in the Opinions Throughout History series from Grey House Publishing. Here he takes on a topic that, the reader quickly realizes, is inextricable from technology in general. Tools capable of amazing feats have been part of human storytelling almost from the beginning; the author illustrates this in the opening chapter, with excerpts from Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. By Chapter Three of the twenty-eight chronological (but overlapping) chapters, after a brief mention of machines in the Industrial Revolution, the emphasis turns to the twentieth century.

The format is similar to other volumes in the series and opens with an nine page timeline, starting with 8000 BCE and limited to robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI); The “Historical Snapshots” in the appendix is broader, but it is still technologyheavy. Also, the appendix includes a glossary of approximately 160 entries. The volume is heavily illustrated with black-andwhite images, virtually of which all are from Wikimedia.

Each chapter opens with a summary, followed by a short list of relevant terms. Two of the more interesting articles include discussions of Karel Čapek’s 1920 play, “Rossum’s Universal Robot,” and a 2016 article by Gideon Lewis-Kraus from Wired, “Check-in with the Velociraptor, at the World’s First Robot Hotel”). Each chapter concludes with a few questions and a list of works cited, all but a few of which include URLs.

Chapters cover machines in industry, medicine (ranging from artificial joints to robotic surgery), and warfare. Robots as toys and in popular culture are also discussed.

The author sometimes delves into more technical topics in this work. The chapter on quantum computing is the most sophisticated, but even there, it finds it necessary to define “atom.”

Overall, it is a cynical look at the role of robotics and AI ; the overall theme is that they have simply not lived up to their hype, and perhaps they have harmed society more than they have helped. There is much coverage of worker displacement and invasions of privacy.

The index is adequate but not extensive; for instance, the Mechanical Turk receives several pages, but it is mentioned neither in the chapter headings nor in the index. The work would have benefitted from tighter editing; terms are used inconsistently, metric conversions are imprecise, and the index entry for Max Planck appears with the M’s. The layout within chapters is sometimes confusing.

As with most of the other volumes in the series, Robotics & Artificial Intelligence falls somewhere between a textbook and a reference book. It will be useful to high school and undergraduate students, especially in the humanities and social sciences, exploring the history of technology. It is an optional, but interesting, purchase.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this available somewhere in my shared network. (I probably do not need this book, but it would be nice to get it within three to five days via my network catalog.)

Khosrow-Pour, Mehdi (ed.) Encyclopedia of Criminal Activities and the Deep Web. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2020. 978-1-5225- 9715-5 (hardcover); 978-1-5225-9716-2 (eBook). 3 v. (1162 p. + glossary and index), $2450.

Reviewed by Janet Crum (Director, Health Sciences Library, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ) <janetcrum@arizona.edu>

Like most technologies, the Internet began being used for criminal activity almost as soon as it came into existence. The international scope and decentralized structure of the Internet make it an ideal tool for scammers, traffickers, and other criminals to use to ply their trade. According to the FBI’s 2020 Internet Crime Report, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received “791,790 complaints of suspected Internet crime — an increase of more than 300,000 complaints from 2019 — and reported losses exceeding $4.2 billion.”

(See https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/ fbi-releases-the-internet-crime-complaint-center-2020- internet-crime-report-including-covid-19-scam-statistics.) Since the FBI is a United States agency, one can presume that those complaints reflect only a small percentage of cybercrimes committed around the world. Clearly, computer crime is a large and lucrative activity and one that can affect anyone who uses the Internet.

This three-volume encyclopedia from IGI Global attempts to provide comprehensive, multidisciplinary coverage of this important topic. It contains 79 articles by over 130 contributors from 30 countries. The articles are written primarily by academics and government researchers. Articles are organized into five sections that cover the gamut of online nefariousness: Cybercriminal Profiles, Understanding Cybercrime, and the Realities of the Dark Web; Cyberwarfare, Cybersecurity, Spyware, and Regulatory Policies and Solutions; Drug Trafficking, Human Trafficking, and the Sexual Exploitation of Children; Financial Fraud, Identity Theft, and Social Manipulation Through Social Media; and Security Tools and Solutions, Human-Based Cyber Defence, and the Social Understanding of Threats. Each volume also includes a glossary and comprehensive list of references; I will have more to say about those shortly.

This set is a substantive work that provides detailed information, including reports of original research, related to various forms of cybercrime. Many articles are well-written and well-organized, covering their topics with both breadth and depth. Explanations are at an appropriate level for undergraduates with extensive citations to both popular and academic literature. Of particular interest is the work’s global perspective, especially on topics often presented by United States media in US-centric ways (e.g., “fake news”).

Unfortunately, this work has significant weaknesses that make me reluctant to recommend it for purchase by libraries, especially given its high cost. First and of most concern is the uneven quality of the articles and an apparent lack of effective editing. Some articles are too narrowly focused to be appropriate for an encyclopedia (e.g., Human Trafficking and Cyber Laws in Malaysia or An IBE-Based Authenticated Key Transfer Protocol on Elliptic Curves). Others are too poorly written to be useful. In one case, large chunks of the article consisted of quoted passages from other works, cobbled together without the author providing any connecting prose for context or coherence. Some graphics seemed little more than decorative, and several articles were filled with grammatical errors and typos, including misspellings in headers and, in at least one case, the title of the article. Overall, the encyclopedia would have benefitted from more careful, thoughtful editing and proofreading.

Perhaps the most bewildering feature of this work is the fact that each print volume contains a comprehensive glossary, list of contributors, and index. Note that these are not separate, volume-level resources but the same glossary, list of contributors, and index — totaling over 200 pages — repeated verbatim in each volume. This much repetition adds bulk and, presumably, cost, while adding only minimal value.

Overall, Encyclopedia of Criminal Activities and the Deep Web is a useful work that addresses an important set of topics, but I recommend it with significant reservations due to its high price and the aforementioned concerns.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this available somewhere in my shared network. (I probably do not need this book, but it would be nice to get it within three to five days via my network catalog.)

Lotts, Megan. Advancing a Culture of Creativity in Libraries: Programming and Engagement. Chicago, Il: ALA Editions | ALA Neal-Schuman, 2021 978-0838949474 $48.95.

Reviewed by Carolyn Filippelli (Reference Librarian, University of Arkansas – Fort Smith) <Carolyn.Filippelli@uafs.edu>

Author Megan Lotts is the Arts Librarian at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey-New Brunswick. Her publication is a very timely book that will be useful to many librarians figuring out ways to publicize and connect the resources and services of libraries with diverse campus and community clientele. Highlighting the importance and value of incorporating creativity and play as a vital foundation of all ventures, the author provides good advice and details for starting, working through, and assessing projects. It underscores the importance of collaboration, partnerships with communities of interest, promoting library visibility, and assessment. Throughout, the value of creativity and play are emphasized as a foundation for successful efforts to confront current issues facing libraries.

This handbook shares practical tips and novel ideas for engagement and outreach in libraries. The author describes how the use of creative activities and experiments (such as Lego Maker, the Bubbler, zines, button making, makerspaces, etc.) can provide practical and effective means to tackle challenges such as budget cuts, social issues, pandemics, and other issues facing our profession today.

The current large number of advertisements for Outreach and Engagement Librarians and Student Success Librarians is an indication that libraries recognize the importance of making connections with communities and promoting relevance of their resources. With examples and advice provided in this book, librarians now have the tools and encouragement needed to put projects into action. This is just the guidebook to provide the impetus that many librarians may need to get started on projects in their own libraries.

The appendices are valuable tools and resources in this work. Appendix A, “Event, Exhibits, Outreach, and Engagement,” provides a guide for planning, managing, and assessing a project. Assessment, as described here, provides for inclusion of diverse assessment tools and use of both quantitative and qualitative data to demonstrate impact. Appendix B is a Checklist for recording ideas, details, and creative possibilities. The bibliography is very useful for further reading, especially on creativity and the value of play.

Other similar toolkits are available for library outreach projects. However, this book is distinguished by the diversity of projects included, the details and guidelines for planning and assessment, and the encouragement needed for implementation.

Murray-Rust, Catherine. Library Next: Seven Action Steps for Reinvention. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2021. 978-0-8389-4839- 2. 110 p. $54.99 (paper).

Reviewed by Janet Crum (Director, Health Sciences Library, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ) <janetcrum@arizona.edu>

In the two decades prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, libraries faced challenging times and constant— often unpleasant— change. Budgets were cut. Collection costs rose faster than budgets, resulting in wave after wave of cancellations. When staff departed the library, they were often not replaced, leaving remaining staff to do more work for the same salary, because raises were few and far between. Outdated spaces needed renovation, and too many academic administrators who controlled library purse strings questioned the value of libraries in the age of Google.

In Library Next, Catherine Murray-Rust challenges library leaders to be bold and to engage with our communities to create positive change despite these challenges. Or, as she states in the preface, “I am writing this book to help all of us who value libraries to face squarely and come to terms with our uncertain future” (viii).

Murray-Rust describes herself as a change agent and “library disrupter” (viii). She recently retired as Dean of Libraries at Georgia Tech, previously served as Dean of Libraries at Colorado State, and held senior leadership positions at Oregon State and Cornell. While at Georgia Tech, she oversaw the renovation of two campus library buildings and creation of a collection storage facility shared with Emory University.

Her book is organized around seven action steps intended to help library leaders, “navigate these rapidly-changing times and prepare for a brighter future” (viii). Those steps are:

1. Look outside your social circle, profession, and organization for ideas and inspiration.

2. Be curious about the future.3. Make bold, public plans.4. Cultivate relationships with allies and champions.5. Create successful change.6. Implement a framework for action and innovation.7. Focus on impact.

Each step gets its own chapter. In each of these chapters, that particular step is illustrated with examples drawn from the author’s career. Chapters end with a summary of takeaways, a table showing how leaders can shift their approach (e.g., from, “waiting for allies and champions to appear,” to, “seeking out allies and champions” (60), and a list of suggested activities to implement the action step.

Murray-Rust writes in a clear, engaging style and is an effective storyteller. The result is a unique combination of library memoir, advice from an experienced mentor, and leadership guide. Aspiring, new, and experienced library leaders will find the book thought-provoking and useful.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.)

Guide to the ATG Reviewer Ratings

The ATG Reviewer Rating is being included for each book reviewed. Corey came up with this rating to reflect our collaborative collections and resource sharing means and thinks it will help to classify the importance of these books.

• I need this book on my nightstand. (This book is so good, that I want a copy close at hand when I am in bed.)

• I need this on my desk. (This book is so valuable, that I want my own copy at my desk that I will share with no one.)

• I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.)

• I need this available somewhere in my shared network. (I probably do not need this book, but it would be nice to get it within three to five days via my network catalog.)

• I’ll use my money elsewhere. (Just not sure this is a useful book for my library or my network.)