Joy M. Greiner

This book is one of the worst that I have read in a long time.

Much of it is undigested transcripts of apparently unstructured interviews conducted in some cases by phone or e-mail or at library conferences. There is little indication of the basis on which the featured libraries were chosen and one suspects that they were mere targets of opportunity.

There was no attempt to extract any conclusions or pull out any common threads or themes of successful libraries. There were no statistical comparisons of things like issues per item of stock or issues per borrower in the catchment area: nor indeed any statistical analysis of any kind.

As an MSc thesis it would get a D. As a book it is unforgivable. Unless you plan to work in one of the featured libraries (there is a potted history of each), forget it… (mehr)