The Academic Library (2000)

Brophy, Peter The Academic Library 224p. £29.95 (pbk) ISBN 1-85604-374-6 London, Library Association Publishing, 2000

Inevitably reviews exist in part to seek out flaws and gaps. This review will follow that pattern but it would then be only fair to begin with two and a half resounding cheers. The first cheer is to welcome this textbook. There has been no good textbook for academic libraries for over a decade. Thomson & Carr’s Introduction to University Library Administration reached four editions but sadly faded away in 1987. Line’s collective textbook Academic Library Management based on a British Council course was patchy and disappointing and is already over a decade old – a decade in which higher education has changed dramatically. The second hearty cheer is to welcome a monograph with a single author. Most monographs these days consist of edited contributions with a chapter or two by the editors (this reviewer being as guilty as any in that respect) and it is a pleasure to review a sustained piece of individual writing and thinking. The half cheer comes because although this is a solid piece of work, which is solidly embedded in research and theory, there are several nits to be picked. Parinthetically, it is particularly welcome to see Ranganathan’s relevance to the electronic age championed.

The first and most obvious nit is that in what is a textbook describing practice, there is a complete and curious omission of the role of the library in the institutional process and of the critical need to manage that process. Thus there is no serious mention of Library Committees, of Senates or of the need to link the library to departments as varied as Estates, Teaching Quality or Faculty Committees or on balancing the differing needs of research staff and students. Secondly, although this is a textbook, it is very strong on description, but very short on analysis. Even within descriptive passages there are gaps perhaps forced by space considerations. Thus while there is mention of the CLA, there is no mention of other IPR agencies such as the contentious DACS, the Newspaper Licensing Agency and the various sound and film licenses which are the bane of many librarians lives. There is nothing on regionalism (for example the differences in Quality Assurance Systems) or the MANs, on CNI or Australian influences, on serials elections or SPARC or on standards such as BS5454. Some of this may come from the feeling that compared with, say, Thomson and Carr, the range of references cited in the chapter bibliographies is both rather narrow and particular. Thus, and as but a single example, Harry East’s important and pragmatic work over several years on the funding and pricing of electronic services is completely ignored.

There is a need to mention the dog which did not bark. In some ways the most interesting section is a wholly bland description of the impact of electronic libraries in general, of the services currently available and the period post-Follett in particular. Much of the information on the politics of this period has not appeared in print and resides in the heads of Brophy’s peers. This may explain why he treads gingerly through what may have seemed a minefield. There is also some weakness on the early history of library automation with the pioneering work at Newcastle and Southampton in the 1960’s glossed over, thus leaving no sense that library automation is a very mature activity. This wobbly history leads to what is the only(?) factual error, in ascribing the creation of BIDS to the JISC rather than the Computer Board. But a whole series of important issues and battles is omitted: the funding of COPAC as a response to the threat of the British Library to charge for use of its OPAC; the novelty of Follett as a managed research programme; the role of the Computer Board and ISC in setting up library programmes before Follett; the five principles of e-libraries, of which “free at the point of use” is best known, but the only one mentioned; the creation of the national datacentres and the doughnut strategy as a consciously different model from other countries; the driving of a publishing agenda through developments such as ATHENS; the failure to fund and support the Fielden Report on human resource issues; the creation of UKOLN; barely a mention of the NFF programme and nothing on NESLI and its antecedents; nor any mention of the national cache or the Visible Human.

Perhaps what this indicates is the need for a proper recording of the welter of activity, innovation and politics which has characterised the development of electronic libraries in the UK over the last decade. Perhaps Brophy will consider this as his next piece of work. It is clearly easy to provide a list of what is not in the book, but it would only be fair to end on a positive note. What is there is good and well written and this can be recommended as a textbook. However it is to be hoped that the author will explore some of the gaps in time for what one must hope will be the second edition of this timely and welcome work.