The Vanishing Book Review | Peer to Peer Review
When it comes to expectations for academic book reviews, says Barbara Fister, the goal posts aren't just being moved—they're being blown up.
Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 05/07/2009
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I recently put together a simple survey on how librarians choose books for their libraries for an article on the two cultures of librarians and publishers. Respondents shared what they thought would be ideal conditions for learning about new books that might fit their collections—and what drives them crazy. As it happens, phone calls win the irritation stakes, hands down, but unsolicited information from publishers, whether it's provided in printed catalogs, as flyers, or in e-mails, follows close behind.
What academic librarians would like is a system that would aggregate reviews of scholarly books from multiple sources by subject so that they can identify new books in the areas that interest them. Some imagined a system based on custom RSS feed selection, or a customizable website that combined vendor information, reviews from Choice and scholarly journals, library statistics, and relevance ranking. One librarian even proposed a Facebook app that would pull together new scholarly reviews.
The American Association of University Presses has a website—Books for Understanding—that makes a start. It aggregates books from different university presses on hot topics and is a great collection development tool, but it doesn't include the third-party assessments that help librarians make decisions.
Mapping the terrain
Academic librarians continue to rely on reviews as their most important tool for choosing books. (Faculty recommendations are the second most-cited source for book selection.) Though reviews in journals are important, so is book coverage in the media - with NPR, The New York Times, and The Daily Show given as examples.
Although convenient access to reviews was a constant thread in the responses, librarians didn’t seem concerned about the future of book reviews. Only one librarian commented, "Any system that increases the number and currency of reviews would be helpful."
Its worth pointing out that book reviews aren't just useful for collection development; they also can help librarians keep up with what's going on in the disciplines they serve. As Juris Dilevko and others pointed out in a study reported in the Journal of Academic Librarianship in July 2006, book reviews place new publications in the context of a discipline, pointing out where the boundaries are shifting and the schools of thought are setting up camp, thus providing the nonspecialist with a map of the changing terrain of scholarly fields.
Imagining a future
But writing book reviews is not an activity rewarded by promotion and tenure committees, and journals in the humanities and social sciences are struggling to maintain their existence in the face of shrinking budgets and increased costs of STM journals. More alarmingly, book reviews in the popular media are threatened with extinction, as the National Book Critics Circle has been pointing out for some time in its blog, Critical Mass.
I checked in with Scott McLemee, the Intellectual Affairs columnist for Inside Higher Ed and a board member of the NBCC, to see if he could predict where things were going with book reviews. He has no crystal ball, but the issue is much on his mind. He said in an email:
At the moment, things seem to be in the gray area where even guesswork—let alone long-term planning—seems really problematic. I have often had the unsettling sense that the goalposts were being not so much moved as blown up. The idea that review sections will simply be replaced by an army of bloggers is utopian or dystopian, depending on your outlook, but in any case not a plausible scenario, for reasons it would take a while to unpack.
The challenge now is to find ways to discuss books in ways that draw upon the potentials of the Web rather than just use it as a delivery system for reviews (though frankly there is some distance to go before even the latter potential is fully exploited). Indeed, I suspect that librarians asking critics how this will happen may be doing things the wrong way around. My definite sense is that librarians tend to be far more savvy about new media than most of us.
This seems to me to be an important aspect of the evolution (or is it the collapse?) of both scholarly communication and the news industries. Choice, an ACRL publication that reviews over 7000 books annually, makes a significant contribution, but we need more than one review source, and we need reviews that are more than a paragraph long. [Of course, LJ also reviews about 6000 books annually, for both public and academic libraries; about 20 percent of its subscribers are academic libraries—Ed.]
If books matter to us, then reviews matter to us—and they seem to matter more to us than to most of the public. As we discuss the future of scholarly communication, we should give more thought to the future of the book review. Maybe we can use our new media skills and our passion for sharing information to imagine a future for thoughtful critical coverage of books that matter to our clientele.
Anyone up for writing a Facebook app?
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her next mystery, Through the Cracks, will be published by Minotaur Books in 2010.
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