248 College & Research May 2003

The book includes a fascinating chap- Copyrights and Copywrongs is remark- ter on American music and the numer- ably readable, free of legal jargon, and en- ous challenges it has posed for copyright tertaining. It is thoroughly researched and law. “Music more than any other vehicle includes extensive notes. Vaidhyanathan, of culture, collapses the gap that separates a professor in the School of Information idea from expression.” Extensive essays Studies at the University of Wisconsin, on the blues tradition and sampling prac- makes a persuasive argument for looser, tices in rap music provide informative thinner copyright protections that would and entertaining histories of these art benefit both users and creators of cul- forms, but through them Vaidhyanathan tural goods. The original intent of copy- also makes a lucid and compelling argu- right is lost as it becomes increasingly a ment for loose, less ethnocentric interpre- vehicle of property law rather than cre- tations of copyright law. The blues art ativity. The current punitive system fa- form was built on a tradition of borrow- vors established rather than emerging ing and improvisation, an extension of the artists and hinders new creative produc- oral traditions that passed stories and tion. and scientists are losing songs from one generation to the next. the battle to Microsoft and Disney, result- Rap, as it developed in the 1970s and ing in a steady centralization and 1980s, was composed of two layers—vo- corporatization of access to the cultural calizations laid over a mosaic of fused and information goods of our society. sample rhythms and melodies lifted from The author’s arguments are cogent, en- many different records. Thus, both blues lightening, and important to all informa- and rap, by definition, borrow from and tion professionals.—Janita Jobe, Univer- build upon previous work. Rap was trans- sity of Nevada, Reno. formed by legal decisions against artists in the early 1990s, changing sampling Carpenter, Kenneth E., Wayne A. practices. The author argues that the aes- Wiegand, and Jane Aikin. Winsor, thetic tradition of African-based cultures Dewey, and Putnam: The Experi- is ignored by American copyright law, just ence: Papers from the Round Table on Li- one more example of racial and cultural brary History Session at the Sixty-Seventh biases inherent in our system of laws. Council and General Conference of the The final chapter examines a diverse International Federation of Asso- range of copyright issues that have ciations and Institutions, Boston, Massa- sprouted in the digital age, including the chusetts. August 1–25, 2001. Ed. Donald software wars of the late 1990s, develop- G. Davis Jr. Urbana-Champaign: Univ. ment of database protection measures, and of Illinois, Graduate School of Library the rise and fall of Napster. The chapter and Information Science. (Occasional includes an erudite explanation of what Papers, no. 212), 2002. 37p. $8 (ISBN: Vaidhyanathan calls “legislative reckless- 0878451218). ISSN 0276-1769. ness”—the Digital Millennium Copyright Through the nineteenth century, New En- Act of 1998. He credits the DMCA with gland was the capital of American intel- “upending more than 200 years of copy- lectual activity and Boston was its uncon- right law” by taking decision-making tested center. It is no great wonder that power away from Congress, courts, librar- three of the principal figures in the shap- ians, writers, artists, and researchers, and ing of modern librarianship had careers putting it in the hands of engineers and in Boston at the end of the century. The companies who employ them.” Techno- association of these three major American logical innovations, rather than democra- librarians with the city in which IFLA hap- tizing information, have been used, with pened to meet in 2001 provides a tenuous the sanction and authority of copyright rationale for the presentation and publi- law interpretation and new legislation, to cation of these three papers in this pam- further limit public access. phlet, but in reality, these three essays need Book Reviews 249 no rationale. These essays are each excel- vocative “holes” in the fabric of narrative lent, provocative, and readable works that history that may well provide some doc- reflect the deserved stature of their authors toral student with a dissertation in his too- in the field of American library history. brief paragraph on Winsor’s relation to Kenneth Carpenter, recently retired from the governing forces at Harvard. Winsor Library writes on Jus- held little power to act on any policy or tin Winsor, of the Boston Public even procedural matter in the library. It Library (1868–1877) and then Harvard is, perhaps, this situation that led to (1877–1897). Wayne Wiegand’s essay on Winsor’s establishing strict rules of con- covers the years from 1876 duct and rigid work regulations for the to 1883 when Dewey operated his various library staff at Harvard. At least, he could enterprises from Boston. Jane Aikin, who have some control over his employees, if has written an excellent monograph on not his library. ’s career at the Library of Dewey spent only a short time in Bos- Congress, has taken the opportunity to ton from 1876 to 1883, but these were years write on his work at the Boston Public Li- in which he set his career and, to a great brary from 1895 to 1899, prior to his move extent, changed the face of American to the . librarianship. Wiegand’s offering here re- It has long been a major problem in treads some of the ground he covered in American library history that the only com- his masterful biography of Dewey. In Bos- petent biographical treatment of Justin ton, Dewey embarked on numerous en- Winsor has been that of Joseph A. Boromé terprises—the founding of the ALA, pub- completed as a doctoral dissertation at Co- lication of , as well as other lumbia in 1950. Winsor, as the first presi- enthusiasms—spelling reform, the metric dent of the ALA, the founding president of system, and the standardization of library the American Historical Association, and furnishings and supplies. It was in Boston the archetype of the nineteenth-century that Dewey began the course that would scholar-librarian, has been largely ignored make him the prime mover in the Ameri- by potential biographers. The academic li- can library world. And it was from Boston brarians have for the most part been ig- that he set the stage for many of the diffi- nored in favor of men (and women) con- culties that would discredit and disgrace sidered to be more central to the public li- him in the library world. Wiegand’s con- brary focus of the library movement in tribution does not add much to his biog- America in the latter part of the nineteenth raphy of Dewey, but it does make acces- century. The ALA from the beginning has sible to a wider range of readers this cru- focused American librarianship on the ide- cial period in Dewey’s life and the evolu- als, development, and needs of a general tion of American librarianship in a form library in support of a general population that is readable and captures well the spirit rather than the peculiar needs of academic of Melvil Dewey. or special libraries. Even so, Winsor lurked Of the three men treated in this pam- behind the curtains prompting others in phlet, Herbert Putnam is the one only promotion of the public library in America. known solely for his career as a librarian Boromé’s excellent, but unpublished, biog- and is, perhaps consequently, the least raphy of Winsor has been useful over the known in the wider world. Putnam’s term years but has been in need of serious re- at the from 1895 to consideration. 1899 was only a way station in a career Carpenter’s brief contribution here is that culminated in forty years as Librar- not designed to fill this vacuum. He of- ian of Congress. Unlike Winsor at fers a rather sketchy account of Winsor’s Harvard, Putnam at the Boston Public career at the Boston Public Library and Library was given wide-ranging author- Harvard with little fanfare. He does, how- ity by the trustees and used that power ever, present one of those remarkably pro- to modernize the administration, services, 250 College & Research Libraries May 2003 and operations of the library. It was his qualified to write. The Occasional Papers prominence in the profession and his is a series that librarians have found, over achievements in Boston that led to his the years, produces good value for the appointment as the first professional librar- price and this contribution is recom- ian to head the Library of Congress, mended to any collection of librariana or which he transformed over his four de- American history. For eight dollars, you cades there into a modern national insti- get three insightful, provocative, infor- tution. mative, and well-written articles, which This pamphlet represents the contri- is more than most scholarly journals will butions of three outstanding scholars on give you in a year’s subscription.—Lee topics on which they are each uniquely Shiflett, University of North Carolina