This work would be more aptly entitled: "How to Build A Digital Library Using Greenstone Software", since it is largely a primer and manual for Open Source software. The publishers present the work as a book and a website. The website's technology is useful, allowing the reader to search words and phrases.

The choice of example projects for digital libraries given in the opening Orientation section are laudable, centering as they do on the support for human development, improvement of scientific communication, and preservation of indigenous cultures.
The authors provide a valuable cross-fertilization of ideas, which comes from a computer science perspective.

The main focus of this book is the fact that the digital library can be whatever we as librarians envision. A major objective is to use technology to replace repetitive human intervention. Surely this is a most valuable attainment for any organization. There are significant insights throughout the book that deal with user interfaces and how search engines operate on the Internet. Perhaps the strongest and best thread that runs throughout is the role of open standards. Bursting out of the chapter on Standards and Protocols, are excellent, non technical descriptions of major industry and formal standards like TWAIN, MPEG, Unicode, XML, OEBPS, and library standards, like Dublin Core, OAI, and Z39.50 on which the interconnecting webs of library systems are based. The authors, however, have most difficulty describing library standards, for example, MARC and AACR. The authors, however, are most at home with the technical aspects of Greenstone and provide an excellent overview of processes like indexing using optical character recognition, and searching free text using phrases and key phrases. They ask intriguing questions, such as, "Is the digital library an institution or a piece of technology?" though they falter in finding answers on occasion.

The approach of the authors is humorous and humanistic, helping to put technology into perspective within varied disciplines. The approach to communication is personal. Whimsical characters are used to illustrate points, such as, the King of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland

There are factual errors, which illustrate the main weakness of the book and may throw the main theses into some doubt. In stating that the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) scheme originates in England, demonstrate a lack of research on the part of the authors. Their failure to include a librarian as an editor is a definite faux pas. Factoids such as, "A recent edition of the big red books was published in 1998", betray their lack of understanding of conventional libraries. They do not appear to know that the Library of Congress updates authority databases continually and publishes their major products online on a regular basis and in various formats.

They frequently can be seen struggling to provide opaque descriptions of simple library processes and terminology. The understanding of basic concepts of librarianship would have been clearer had the corpus of established library knowledge been consulted more extensively. There are questionable assertions, like "Placing like books together adds an element of serendipity to searching".

They ultimately fail to make the connection between the eminently effective and efficient operation of worldwide library systems and the librarian in her "conventional" library. In fact the technology relies squarely on the co-operative spirit, the strongest, most fundamental characteristic of the librarian. They fail to link the systems with this mainspring of libraries, which facilitates sharing and fosters "interoperability" -- the sine qua non of library systems.

A conclusion they seem to be drawing is that there is no place for the librarian in their vision of the future digital library. This is a provocative question: could they possibly be right? The value of traditional cataloging is questioned.

An inescapable conclusion drawn is that the information set on which the work is based is selective, to say the least, and leads to a narrow and somewhat idiosyncratic view of libraries. There are some strange choices, like the hapless Charles Ammi Cutter, while the bulk of classics of modern technical librarianship are missing. Absent are luminaries of the technical library world, like Mai Chan, Roy Tennant and Henriette Avram. Clifford Lynch is relegated to a single entry in the bibliography.

Although the reader is left to fill in the blanks, the work is good read for those contemplating developing or working in a digital library. The book assists librarians to use technology to do more and do more efficiently. Overall there are important insights for the people who run libraries, however, the work reflects a patronizing view and has serious deficiencies. The reader must use with care to avoid reinventing some basic wheels.

Kathleen Crewdson, Ian Dew, NextLibrary
April 22, 2004