D-Lib Magazine. This series tries to serve both specialists and nonspecialists. This book attempts to survey the entire field of digital libraries (DL), not only computers and networks, but also problems related to people, organization, economics, legal issues, and so on. It is organized in 14 chapters that cover libraries, the Internet, publishers, economic and legal issues, user interfaces and usability, information retrieval, object models, digital libraries, and so on, but lacks a bibliography, reading list, and references! The few references in the text are just historical illustrations such as Licklider's (1965) "Libraries of the Future" or Vannevar Busch's article "As We May Think" in Atlantic Monthly (July 1945). These examples are just confirmations of the rule that this book is without references. Because of this omission, my expectation was that this was not a book written for professional information scientists (including myself).
A closer examination reveals, however, that the book is indeed very informative and competently written (and mentions many research initiatives). In a way, the lack of the usual "namedropping" academic style seems almost to be an advantage for this book. It is a broad introduction on the subject, and of course, it cannot go deep into all questions concerning digital libraries. It provides, however, a fine survey of all the most important concept and issues, and its whole content should be known to all informa-