Terry Hanson & Joan Day (Eds.). Managing the electronic library: a practical guide for information professionals. London: Bowker-Saur, 1998. 742 pp. $A?. hard cover. ISBN 1 85739 184 5.

I imagine the editors or publishers fretted about whether to use 'electronic' or 'digital' in the title. Their book of course, is essentially about managing hybrid libraries: the issues of dealing with combined digital and print collections, and digital and print catalogues for those collections in a university environment.

The editors feel that their concentration on academic libraries provides a basis for comparison with other libraries. Librarians in other environments can certainly draw from the work, however special librarians will find nothing on the exigencies of working in conjunction with records management systems, and public librarians will not see anything about the diversity of their patrons, or the library's interactions with local government systems.

The book is structured with sections having an overview chapter, usually followed by several case studies for exemplification. Both overviews and cases have been commissioned, so there are some forty authors. They are almost exclusively drawn from the United Kingdom academic library community.

The sections are divided into: management issues at campus level; managing change; resourcing and budget issues; management information; and managing respectively the just-in-time-library, reference and information services, user education and training, technical services, library systems and technical support, and specific electronic services. This categorisation is commendable, but inevitably leads to overlap of concepts within individual case studies. For example, the section on change management, does not preclude the concept being addressed elsewhere in the book under topics such as resourcing or electronic services. However, this difficulty is allayed by a useful index.

The user education and training section is typical of the book's organisation. It has an overview by Watson that canvasses issues such as flexible delivery, information literacy and the educational role of the library. This is complemented by independently written case studies of the librarian as educator at the Universities of Newcastle, Hull, and Abertay Dundee. The section on management information is an exception because it includes no case studies. Brophy's overview for this section, based upon the work of his group at the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management, notes that performance indicators for electronic library services are in their infancy. Nevertheless, it is surprising that no-one could be induced to report at least on attempts to extend evaluation techniques for library effectiveness to electronic libraries.

The section on management issues at campus level is of interest to the wider administrative community, in that it looks at information strategy in institutions recognising the convergence of academic support services such as teaching, repositories, and computing.

It's a pity that room could not be found for a section on digitisation projects. The corpus of these in the literature is as yet small, and would benefit from well-reasoned expansion.

The book is well organised for repeated reference. It is recommended to university administrators in general, and academic librarians in particular. It is also of some interest to information managers, irrespective of institution.

Michael Middleton, QUT