In attempting to survey such a wide area there are some descents into platitudes and occasional whimsical musing. Jargon makes its usual appearance, and more infrequently, long passages are given over to statements of current practice, with a cursory final listing of the vital questions for the future. There is a query against the statistics for the number of converged information services managed by librarians as opposed to IT or media specialists, although a lot depends on the definition of convergence and the age of the information. Even worst in this case, the complicated matters of managerial roles and leadership styles in diverse organisations are reduced to head counts. Grygierczyk and Griffin in their contributions use practical examples of the digital library as case studies to answer questions about method, policy and guidelines, and could profitably be read alongside some of the discussions of theory and principle to be found in other contributions.
Barker sets out an analysis of the way in which electronic documents have grown in importance.
This amounts to a survey of technical developments which provides a valuable context for the rest of the book. So it is the human and organisational issues that provide the biggest challenge, and it is these areas that this review will concentrate on. Some of the issues raised in the papers are not new. There have been periods of change marked by mergers, federated systems, closures, changes in the nature of the parent institutions and the bringing together of libraries and media services. The volume nevertheless makes an elevated, balanced and sometimes elegant contribution to the debate.