Book Reviews

Libraries: Global Reach – Local Touch. Ed. by Kathleen de la Peña McCook, Barbara J. Ford and Kate Lippincott. Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 1998. 256 pp. US$42.00 (US$37.80 ALA members) soft. ISBN 0838907385 [ALA edition is out of print.]

Libraries: Global Reach – Local Touch was the theme of Barbara Ford’s ALA presidency 1997–98. This volume is one of the concrete results of this presidency, and, indeed, could be called a Festschrift celebrating the concept of the globality and locality of libraries. As such, unfortunately, it shares the fate of so many Festschriften in the unevenness of the contributions. The editors have assembled a wide–ranging group of contributors covering global issues as well as local, institutional, national and regional.

A preface by Peace Corps volunteer Margaret Myers lays out the themes emphasized by Ford herself in her inaugural address to the ALA (also reproduced in this volume): access to technology, information equity, funding, copyright, literacy, ethnic diversity, partnership. De la Peña McCook’s Introductory Notes underscore these further and provide a justification for this Festschrift: “to demonstrate how libraries and librarians have made use of the power of the new technologies to protect and ensure continuation of local cultures” in the face of “McWorld” globalization. Former IFLA president Robert Wedgeworth, on the other hand, establishes a broader global perspective by conjuring forth a vision of “a global library community that is asynchronous, multi–lingual, multi–cultural, geographically diverse, Internet–enabled and technically competent.” But it is precisely this tension between the twin poles of global and local that marks the papers in this collection. Yet, the extent to which the tension becomes clear and captivating enough to lift out an individual paper varies widely.

Individual papers take us on a tour of the world, from Latin America (Mexico, El Salvador, Ecuador, Colombia), and thence, following the sun westwards to the Pacific (Polynesia and Micronesia) and Asia (India, Azerbaijan, Turkey), straddling Asia and Europe in post–Soviet Russia, into Estonia, Romania, the Czech Republic, Poland, and other Slavic countries, dipping southward into Africa and finally across the Atlantic to Queens. The remaining papers return to global topics, from the International Association for School Librarianship to library services to children and young adults, the status of women in international librarianship, information technology in developing countries, freedom of expression in Canada, Mexico and the US, authority control in a diverse world and family literacy, ending with a bibliography of international librarianship. The bibliography includes some inaccuracies, notably in the title and publisher of the international library education journal, Education for Information from IOS Press in Amsterdam (the word library does not appear in the title). And, of course, there is the chronic problem of changing urls. IFLA, for example, now has its own domain, http://www.ifla.org, and no longer uses the National Library of Canada.

Nevertheless, certain of these papers stand out among the stolid accounts of how–it–was–done–in–here in their treatment of this global–local — or glocal — tension. Two of these (discussing public libraries in the South Pacific and African librarianship respectively) struggle with the same predicament: the dissonance for indigenous people between the print world of the former colonizers and the oral communication that was their tradition for centuries (literacy and “oracy,” as Calvert calls it). Indeed, Calvert brings out the African experience as a model for the South Pacific and cites some specific projects, which, he believes, could be emulated in the island countries. Mchombu, on the other hand, is somewhat more pessimistic about the state of African librarianship, considering the economic problems that abound on that continent. Even so, the future is not totally dark for Mchombu: planning and partnership could still turn the situation around.

Partnership in international cooperation and communication was the focus of ALA president Barbara Ford’s theme “Global Reach—Local Touch.” The papers in this collection either provide examples of such cooperation and communication or illustrate the extent to which this kind of partnership is crucially needed in many areas of librarianship. As such, the volume demonstrates its value beyond Ford’s presidency and into the new millennium. It is sad, therefore, that the American Library Association has allowed the book to go out of print and no longer maintains the Global ALA website containing the archives of Ford’s 1998 programs.

Johan Koren is Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Dominican University. email jkoren@email.dom.edu.