Carol Tenopir is one of the most prolific writers in the United States on information center and library databases. This book is a collection of 48 papers she wrote during the 1980s. The articles were written for librarians and other information professionals who must serve as intermediaries between users and online systems. Most of them were published in the Library Journal.

The foreword includes a good summary of how the online database industry grew and matured during the 1980s. I found its statistics, showing that a tenfold growth occurred in the use of online databases during that decade, as useful as any of the articles.

The body of the book contains ten chapters. Each chapter begins with an original introduction that explains the articles selected for that chapter. Subjects addressed include the users of online systems (chapters 1 and 2), existing and proposed hardware, software, and databases (chapters 3 through 6), technical details on evaluating systems and search strategies (chapters 7, 8, and 9), and a history of the industry (chapter 10). The appendix is a complete list of the author’s 101 previous publications.

The author’s stated purpose in writing the book was to respond to requests from many readers for a one-volume collection of her most important articles. She chose to exclude articles coauthored with others and articles that had obviously been overtaken by technology. Where time-sensitive information (such as prices, addresses, and source lists) had been previously published, she made an effort to bring it up to date.

The strength of the book is in its readability and literary style. I found I could skim the articles by reading the first sentence in each paragraph with no loss in comprehension of the contents.

The weakness of the book is its lack of details. Other documents and articles are consistently referred to for more depth on the subjects. Its newsy style of writing contains a lot of summary statistics on the use of existing systems and emphasizes how to be a good database searcher, but it does not explain what capabilities a good library system needs. Also, the articles in the book do not cover the many value-added systems that sell their technical analyses as well as access to their literary bases.

The book does mention that texts on database management systems usually ignore library systems, and points out that most computer system users really do not care about online services. Many of the articles seem to be defenses of why intermediaries are useful or necessary for library systems of today, and they express the author’s concern that such services are not in demand.

The table of contents and index are adequate for finding articles on subjects of interest. I would have preferred longer discussions on many subjects, but since the purpose was to republish previous articles, the discussion was naturally limited. I would recommend the book to librarians and information systems specialists who are seeking pointers on using existing systems. Students and researchers on text retrieval systems could also use the information. I would not recommend it to computer specialists and programmers looking for ways to design better online systems.