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: I need to be brief this issue, so we will cut to the chase!

This issue is more focused on library-related monographs with a wide range of works including coverage of working with nonprofits, working with Google and working through disasters. I very much appreciate the work of the reviewers who really dig into the work and provide context that may be missing elsewhere. Thank you to my reviewers for this issue: Kelly Denzer (Davidson College); David Gibbs (California State University, Sacramento); Shanna Hollich (Guthrie Memorial Library, Hanover, Pennsylvania); and Jennifer Matthews (Rowan University). As always, I want to thank them for bringing this column together.

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 (new site name) — https://www. squirreldude.com/atg-readers-roundup.

Happy reading and be nutty! — Corey

Bryant, Tatiana and Jonathan O. Cain (editors). Libraries and Nonprofits: Collaboration for the Public Good. Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press, 2020. 9781634000574, 259 pages. $35.00

Reviewed by Shanna Hollich (Director, Guthrie Memorial Library, Hanover PA) <shollich@gmail.com> Note: Shanna is also an instructor for Library Juice Academy, a partner company of Library Juice Press.

Libraries and nonprofit organizations have been collaborating for decades to better serve their communities. We have seen the scope of library work continually grow and evolve over the ages, and libraries of all types are now responsible for providing an ever-increasing array of programs and services for their target populations. Information comes in all forms, and libraries must adapt to continue connecting people with the resources that they need, regardless of whether those resources are printed books, online, or provided in a community resource center down the street. Working together with other mission-driven organizations, libraries are able to better deliver high-quality services and opportunities for their patrons.

Editors Tatiana Bryant and Jonathan O. Cain are both academic librarians with backgrounds in research, nonprofit management, community organizing, and outreach. This makes them particularly well-suited to their editorial role here, in a collection that emphasizes the need for librarians to focus on community and outreach. Libraries and Nonprofits is organized as a series of 16 case studies, each written by library and nonprofit professionals with direct involvement in the projects that they’re writing about.

The case study approach is an appropriate one for this topic, and it makes for a versatile book. There’s value both in reading the work from cover to cover, as well as in scanning the table of contents to focus specifically on chapters that seem most relevant to whatever projects and partnerships the reader is especially interested in. There is a good variety here in terms of both the types of projects that are represented but also the types of libraries and organizations, with a mix of academic, public, and community institutions. The case studies here represent both urban and rural communities, including one case study from outside the United States. Each case study follows generally the same format but with variations that provide interest for the reader and also allow each author to focus on the aspects of their projects that they found to be the most worthwhile.

Overall, this volume is approachable and readable, making it useful for any library worker who is looking for practical examples of community partnerships that they might be able to replicate. Unfortunately, there are a few minor issues that detract from the work as a whole, including what appears to be some lack of detail on the part of the publisher. The index is not particularly usable — including entries as generic as “grant[s],” as less useful as “Google Docs,” and as confounding as having both “board of directors” and “board of trustees” listed separately. By page 5, there were multiple typos, including an unfortunate reference to “Libaries” in the Table of Contents. Both of these are signs that the volume needed better copyediting, which can make readers concerned about quality.

Additionally, this book would have been enhanced with the addition of a few chapters that were more grounded in theory. These case studies are useful, but there’s no overarching framework to help contextualize the work that is portrayed here. There is no acknowledgement, for example, that both libraries and nonprofit organizations are generally underpaid and understaffed, which makes collaborations like the ones shown here even more difficult. Many of the libraries and organizations included here are large and operate on city-wide, county-wide, or even national scales. This can make it hard for smaller libraries and organizations to imagine how to take these initiatives and scale them down to work within their own particular constraints. Bafflingly, the final case study (Case Study 16: Growing Access to Books: Supplementing Library Services to Rural Students) has no library involvement at all.

Despite these shortcomings, there is a lot to love about this book, particularly for those who are willing to look past the minor quality control issues. The readers will find a practical handbook with real-world examples of how libraries can partner with other nonprofit organizations for the betterment of their communities. There are many useful examples here for library workers of all types who might be looking for better ways to engage and partner with the other organizations in their area.

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.)

Drake, Kimberly, editor. Richard Wright. (Critical Insights series) Ipswich, Massachusetts: Salem Press, 2019. 9781682179178, 260 pages. $105.00

Reviewed by Kelly Denzer (Collections Strategist and Discovery Librarian, Davidson College, Davidson, NC.) <kedenzer@davidson.edu>

The Critical Insights series explores popular and complex works of literature and its author that provide students new ways of approaching the subject matter. Critical Insights: Richard Wright provides an introduction to the author’s life and writing in the traditional Critical Insights format including an outline by the editor on the focus of each essay followed by the editor’s own discussion on Richard Wright. This volume includes four essays on the critical context of Wright’s work, with the bulk of the volume being critical readings of Wright’s work. Included at the end is a chronological outline of Wright’s life and his literary work followed with the bibliography and suggested further readings.

Many of the included essay’s focus on Wright’s two most well-known writings, Native Son (1940) and his autobiographical novel Black Boy published in 1945. Volume editor Kimberly Drake, chair of the Writing and Rhetoric major at Scripps College (Claremont, California), contributes essays around Wright’s early work and his focus on social justice as the FBI was creating their composite of the author. She also discusses Native Son and Black Boy using interpretations of feminist theory and psychoanalysis. Student’s of Wright’s work will appreciate the introduction to the author through this lens as a way of further understanding his interest in Freud’s writings and what he saw as the activist association with psychoanalysis. This interest eventually led Wright to partner with psychiatrist Frederick Wertham to open a clinic in Harlem (New York City) in 1946.

Another focus throughout the volume is his interest in Communism from 1933 through 1942, shortly after the FBI began investigating Wright. In 1944, Wright wrote an essay for the Atlantic Monthly titled “I Tried To be a Communist” in which he describes his early interest in Communism and his eventual disillusionment with the movement. Readers of the Critical Insights series will recognize the author of two essays written around this article, Robert C. Evans. Evans is a Distinguished Teaching Professor at Auburn University at Montgomery and editor of several volumes in the Critical Insights series. In this volume, Evans offers a Critical Contexts essay and Critical Readings essay discussing the context and critical responses to “I Tried To be a Communist.” The complexity of an African American male embracing Communism, and later rejecting its authoritarian thinking is addressed in these essays in such a way that students looking for clarification or context will find the writings and references in this volume helpful.

This collection of essays begins with Drake quoting from a “Synopsis of Facts” as compiled in the FBI file on Richard Wright in 1943, and points out the inaccuracies of the “facts.” What follows are discussions of Wright in the context of a writer finding their voice through experimenting with the scientific and literary developments of their time, establishing a following among other significant writers, including Ralph Ellison, and animosity among others, including James Baldwin. Drake’s concluding essay addresses the split created by Baldwin when he published Notes of a Native Son (1955). In Notes, Baldwin criticizes Wright’s stereotypes in Native Son involving the violent, black male charter Bigger Thomas, who murders two female characters. The diverse viewpoints taken up in the essays makes it an important addition to the undergraduate library in particular, but this would be a welcome volume in any academic research library.

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.)

Flaherty, Mary Grace. The Disaster Planning Handbook. Chicago, IL: ALA Editions, 2022. 9780838937990. $54.99

Reviewed by Jennifer Matthews (Collection Strategy Librarian, Rowan University) <matthewsj@rowan.edu>

Disaster planning is one of those topics that many librarians would like to avoid, but each of us knows we cannot. Events that can affect the daily business of a library can be due to natural disasters or other events, such as the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995. The critical element throughout Mary Grace Flaherty’s handbook is that libraries not only address the possibility of disasters but also know what agencies to coordinate with when the disaster occurs.

The Disaster Planning Handbook is a resource to aid librarians in developing, or updating, a plan for their emergencies. Throughout seven chapters, the author guides the reader through tools, templates, and activities on how to develop a plan, what organizations to build relationships with, how the library can serve its community during a disaster event, and what to consider throughout the preparation for such an event. Additionally, the handbook is clear on what it also does not cover.

Events such as technological security challenges and war are listed as outside the purview of the handbook.

The writing throughout the handbook is quite approachable and includes the perspectives of multiple libraries (public, academic, private, and special). The focus is truly on how to look at the human element in disaster planning and consider various elements in advance of the unforeseen event. There are various tables and case studies throughout to demonstrate to the reader what is being discussed and how to plan for that day all libraries hope to avoid. For instance, in Chapter four, which covers natural disasters, Flaherty has included a field report from a flooding incident at Grace A. Dow Memorial Library in Midland, Michigan, to illustrate some points within the chapter. A template memorandum of understanding for preparedness support that a library could adapt appears in the appendix. A sample interior building inspection schedule that a library could modify to their specific building needs can be found in Chapter five, that covers physical facilities.

At the end of each chapter, the author provides a list of relevant references that relate to the topic, allowing the library to further research and expand on what Flaherty has presented. Flaherty also included a final chapter on future considerations as this handbook could not cover every possible event and situation. While each of us in the field of librarianship hopes to never need a handbook about disaster planning, or a disaster plan itself, we also all know that it is an unfortunate necessity these days. The Disaster Planning Handbook makes the topic approachable and manageable for either beginning or reviewing such a plan.

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 its not checked out).

Marcum, Deanna and Roger C. Schonfeld. Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021. 9780691172712, 214 pages. $29.95.

Reviewed by David Gibbs (Associate Dean, Collections & Discovery, California State University, Sacramento) <david.gibbs@csus.edu>.

In this slim volume, library heavyweights Deanna Marcum and Roger Schonfeld offer up a highly readable account of the Google Books digitization project. It’s the story of a vision deferred, an attempt at an alliance between commerce and the academy that ultimately fell victim to mistrust, conservatism, and inertia.

U.S. Copyright Law has not kept pace with technological innovation. The photocopy machine allowed for nearly instantaneous reproduction of text, and then the Internet allowed it to be shared without any barriers of time or space. When something is easy to do, people will do it, especially when they are either unaware that they are causing damage to another party, or their part in the damage seems insignificant. The age of illegal music piracy evolved into a legal, subscription-based ecosystem, albeit one that seems to have worked out better for consumers of content than producers. With the Google Books project, the company saw an opportunity to create a similar model to enable expanded access to books.

Google sought partnerships with both publishers and libraries on what was then known as Google Print. Publishers, Google realized, were not well-positioned to monetize the long tail of their own backlists. Google saw itself as able to solve at least three problems: the lack of a digitization infrastructure among publishers, the expense of warehousing backlist titles, and the difficulty of tracking down copyright for orphaned works. If Google could offer a pay-per-use or subscription model that would funnel money to content owners (like iTunes and Spotify would do in the realm of music), it would seem to be a win for Google, the publishers, and the reading public. But publishers were enraged when they learned that Google had been secretly working with libraries and had already started digitizing in-copyright works. They were offended by what they saw as the brazenness of the company’s opt-out takedown policy, putting the burden on publishers to remove content rather than Google seeking permission to post it.

Less well known, perhaps, was the resistance of some libraries and librarians, who either mistrusted the motives of a commercial partner, had concerns about the quality of the scans, or were blinded by parochial jealousy of their peers. Some European entities criticized the project as imperialist and Anglophone, perhaps underestimating how broad, deep, and multilingual large American research libraries’ collections are.

In 2005, both authors (in Authors Guild v. Google) and the American Association of Publishers (in McGraw Hill v. Google) sued the company for systematic copyright infringement. Nevertheless, Google continued to work with publishers and libraries while the lawsuit played out. In 2008, after two years of negotiation, a settlement was reached between Google and the publishing industry. Widely considered a win-win for both sides, the settlement would have compensated authors and publishers for Google’s previous digitization efforts, provided them a revenue stream for orphaned works, and presumably encouraged sales of in-copyright books (since readers could only see snippets on Google). Unfortunately, the settlement was rejected. The Department of Justice voiced antitrust concerns, and opponents of the settlement (among them Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, and even some librarians and scholars) objected to Google’s having a monopoly over such a large body of content, along with the ability to monetize it. Others, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, worried about user privacy protection.

Although it failed to deliver an online consumer marketplace for digital books, the Google Books digitization project was hardly a failure. The public can now search the full text of a vast corpus of published works, allowing for previously unimaginable discoveries and scholarship via text mining, word frequency analysis, etc. And those lucky enough to have a subscription to Hathi Trust have access to even more of the text, unrestricted by copyright limitations. Much credit is due (and given) to the University of Michigan’s visionary Provost (and later Dean of Libraries) Paul Courant, who had the foresight to insist that contributing libraries receive their own copies of the digitized files, thus ensuring their preservation beyond the lifespan of a single private company.

A shared repository is not a universal library, but it is much closer to one than anything we had just twenty years ago. Other efforts, such as the Internet Archive, the Digital Public Library of America, and Europeana, have emerged, leading to what our authors call a “potpourri of digital collections, with greater or lesser access, as well as libraries that have individually become digital, more or less” (189). University of Michigan’s Collection Development Officer Mark Sandler speculates on what the scholarly community lost by the Google Books project’s failure to launch when he says, “It could have been a way better world to have in-copyright and out-of-copyright materials, publishercontributed material and library-digitized material, in one centrally managed space, operated at scale by people who actually know something about discovery and could improve it continuously based on user behavior” (153).

The book does assume prior knowledge of the Google Books project and the legal wrangling that ensued. There are many players to keep track of. This reviewer had to consult Wikipedia to piece together a full account of the lawsuits and settlements. The reader would have benefited from a timeline or simple onepage summary of what transpired: the who, what, and when. It also doesn’t seem as though the authors were able to find many participants from Google to interview, which would have enriched their account.

One wonders whether a successful settlement could have done anything to stem the tide of misinformation and disinformation that has flooded the Internet in the past decade. Would highly vetted published content have risen to the top of not just Google’s own search results, but also those of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites? Would users have chosen fresh, green, healthy factual information over the sugar rush of clickbait, bots, and trolls? It seems unlikely, but we’ll never know for sure.

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.)