Interpreting and Negotiating Licensing Agreements: A Guidebook for the Library, Research, and Teaching Professions

the History of Technology (p. 410), “neural networks” are called “neutral networks.” These lapses, of course, rest with the editor, and with not the author. Despite these shortcomings, the book contains a wealth of useful information about a topic that is vital to our modern information society. The extended bibliographical essays, the footnotes, and the glossaries alone could earn the book a positive recommendation. The thoughtful essays on the various meanings of bibliography, the history of the book, and the practice of bibliography add an interesting element to an otherwise dry subject. —Sever Bordeianu, Associate Professor, General Library, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131 . Interpreting and Negotiating Licensing Agreements: A Guidebook for the Library, Research, and Teaching Professions, by Arlene Bielefield and Lawrence Cheeseman. New York: Neal-Schuman, 1999. 162p. $59.95. ISBN 1–55570-324 – 0. LC 98 –55929. Do not acquire this paperback, which has large, easilyreadable type, and lots of white space—23 pages of which were reprinted from two free sources and much of the essential content of which is available from other free Web sources (which I shall name later). It is a shame, because licensing is an important issue to all libraries, and before I learned the price, I would have recommended this book to those who need a very basic introduction to licensing. There are five chapters, a pretty good glossary of terms, an index, and three appendices, two of which are the reprints above. The third is a simple Checklist for Evaluating Licenses, which, inappropriately, lists many items that are selection, not licensing, issues. Chapter 3, in tabular form, lists typical license clauses, with explanations and cautions. Its 50 or so pages are almost half of the text proper and are the best part of the book. Price aside, the book is not without its share of warts. To identify a few, page 4 lists five elements of enforceable contracts. The entry for “ENFORCEABLE CONTRACTS” on page 143 of the glossary lists three, defined on pages 137, 141–142, and 147. Two of the three are not on the page 4 list. That is why we need attorneys, I guess; but the attorney and law librarian authors of this book should have explained this anomaly. The statement on page 26 that “university libraries usually must assure a licensor that only the students, faculty, and administration of that university will have access to the licensed product” is simply not true. All but one (a legal database, interestingly enough) of the hundreds of licensed products in my university library are explicitly available to “walk-in” users of the library, just like our books. In Chapter 4, “Copyright or Licensing Agreement?” the authors (as in Appendix A) inappropriately and simplistically mix licensing issues and collection development issues. Their discussion of selection issues is too superficial to be useful to academic libraries. They provide a good, brief exposition of copyright, but, in its very title, Chapter 4 poses a dichotomy between copyright and licensing that is confusing, as if a library always had the option to reject a license in favor of copyright. They correctly encourage libraries to defend their rights under copyright, but they provide very little real world advice on how to do so. Some true-to-life scenar-

ios would have been very helpful in this chapter. To their credit, they do admonish readers not to accept shrink-wrap or click-wrap licenses as nonnegotiable. Several items in the glossary are not covered in the text. For example, “PAROLE EVIDENCE RULE” (pp. 147–148) is said to be “one of the most significant rules in contract interpretation,” but it is covered only by implication on page 65 of the text. The index is serviceable, but there are a few worthless entries, such as “Access phone lines,” and there are two entries for “EULA.” The following Web sites cover licensing issues for libraries in depth and are better, more up-to-date resources than this book. All of these sites have extensive links to other sites as well: http://www.library.yale.edu/;llicense, http:// www.library.yale.edu/;llicense/table.shtml, and http://www. library.yale.edu/consortia/statement.html. I do not wish to slight any of these other sites by not listing them, but in a book review, space is limited. LIBLICENSE at Yale University Library is the “mother” of all licensing resources, as it were. The second URL listed above presents, in tabular form, typical license clauses, with explanations, which appear to be more extensive than those in Chapter 3 of the book. The ICOLC statement reprinted in Appendix C of the book is maintained at the third URL above. Yale also maintains the LIBLICENSE-L discussion list. (See http://www.arl.org/scomm/licensing/, http://www. arl.org/scomm/licensing/principles.html, http://www.arl.org/ scomm//licensing/licbooklet.html, and http://www.arl.org/ dmca/resources.html.) The Association of Research Libraries offers extensive access to licensing resources on its Web site. The last URL (http://www.arl.org/dmca/resources.html) is a good source for information on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is partially reprinted in Appendix B of the book. (See http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/cprtindx.htm and http://www.ala.org/oitp/copyright.html.) The University of Texas at Austin maintains a noted copyright Web site. The American Library Association Office for Information Technology Policy Web site is another. Whether your library can afford this somewhat thin paperback or not (even at a deep discount), you and your users will be better served if you create links from your catalog or your library Web site to the better, more in-depth resources on licensing that are available free of charge on the Web. —John Webb, Assistant Director for Collections and Systems, Washington State University Libraries, Pullman, WA 99164-5610 . Libraries and Librarianship in China by Sharon Chien Lin. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998. xxii, 241p. $75.00. ISBN 0 –313-28937–9 (Guides to Asian Librarianship). The book consists of 10 chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion. The first chapter is an historical review of Chinese libraries and librarianship. The author adopts a functional approach to the review, dividing the development of the libraries and librarianship into five stages: libraries for book storage (pre-1905), the public (1905 to 1949), politics (1949 to 1976), modernization (1976 to 1992), and market economy (1992 to present). This chapter captures the salient

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