Professional Liability Issues for Librarians and Infor-mation Professionals, by Paul D. Healey. New York:Neal-Schuman Publishers, 2008. 236p. $85.00. ISBN978-1-55570-609-8.
Librarians and information professionals have anunderstandable dread of being sued, or at the very least,they fear that they could be held liable for what they sayor for what they fail to say at the reference desk. Suchconcerns are clearly legitimate, and they merit carefulanswers. In fact, a growing number of librarians andinformation professionals have a sense that they cannotbe too careful in their work. Litigation, in their eyes, maybe just around the corner of the reference desk. Thereasons, they contend, are not difficult to discern. Welive in a litigious society and one that rightly recognizesthe importance of librarians as brokers of information,gatekeepers of knowledge and guardians of the past.Moreover, their own professional literature insists thatlibrarians have the kind of professional relationshipwith their clients that assumes a great deal of respon-sibility and, as a necessary counterpart, a great deal ofliability.
Paul Healey, senior Reference Librarian and Asso-ciated Professor of Library Administration at the AlbertE. Jenner Law Library at the University of IllinoisUrbana-Champaign, tackles all of these assumptionsandmany of these fears in his Professional Liability Issuesfor Librarians and Information Professionals. The volumeis the second in a series from Neal-Schuman Publishers,Legal Advisor for Librarians, Educators, and InformationProfessionals. The book is wonderfully organized andexceptionally thorough. Healey assumes nothing. Hetakes his readers through the intricacies of tort law andthe complexities of liability. He explains legal theory,and offers his reasons for considering librarians as con-sultants rather than fiduciaries. He includes chaptersthat deal with the peculiarities of medical, legal andspecial libraries, as well as some of the unique liabilityissues confronting archivists and curators. He even addsin his concluding chapters several sections that offerproactive approaches to liability issues, as well as policyand training recommendations.
To my mind, Healey's book has two major benefits. Itserves as a resource, and it offers perspective. As aresource, it covers all the issues associated with lib-rarian and information professional liability. That is,everything which involve personal, legal accountability.In this sense, the book in some ways is invaluable. Itdeals with its topic so thoroughly that it becomes thatquintessential title that your collection just has to have.The volume conversely excludes questions about insti-tutional liability — litigation involving the library itself.If a patron sues the library for slipping on a freshlymopped floor for instance, the legal action falls outsideof Healey's focus and beyond his book's concern.
As for offering perspective, Healey deals effectivelywith those seemingly understandable fears and inse-curity about professional liability. More than anythingelse, his book lays such fears to rest. For Healey, lib-rarians in their professional literature have grossly
overstated the extent of professional liability, and theyhave greatly exaggerated the danger of litigation forproviding reference service. The fact of the matter isthat the author can find no recorded instance of liti-gation for faulty or inaccurate professional librarianservice. There are anecdotes (the stuff of urban legend)and there are stories, to be sure, that have circulatedfrom time to time, but no case of a librarian or infor-mation professional being actually sued has ever beendocumented — all of this despite the online searchingwonders of Westlaw, Lexis Nexis, and the diligence oflegal researchers. Indeed, the author considers thenotion of librarian liability to be largely a myth. Heinsists that the ways in which librarians and informa-tion professionals routinely serve their clients greatlyminimizes such liability and makes the danger of a suitnearly non-existent.
In short, read Healey and forget your worries. Con-centrate instead on providing service. Close your ears tothose who argue that litigation is just around the cornerof the reference desk. It isn't. Take sensible precautionsandwork without fear. Do your job and get onwith yourlife. As a librarian or information professional, you run agreater risk of being struck by lightning than you doof being successfully sued by an irate or frustratedpatron.—Steve McKinzie, Library Director, Corriher-Linn-Black Library, Catawba College, Salisbury, NC28144, USA <[email protected]>.
doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2009.04.017
Gaming in Academic Libraries: Collections,Marketing,and Information Literacy, edited by Amy Harris andScott E. Rice. Chicago, IL: Association of College &Research Libraries, 2008. 231p. $38.00. ISBN 978-0-8389-8481-9.
For university libraries looking to explore or expe-riment with gaming, this publication is a compre-hensive step-by-step manual. As for any institutioncontemplating the use of games as a pedagogical tool,this book offers a definitive view of the process. Dividedinto three distinct sections, the first is titled, GameCollection and Curricular Support. This portion chroni-cles the efforts of several universities to develop a gamecollection that would support teaching and research.This section offers detailed views of the positive andnegative sides of building such collections. Offeringanecdotes about the unusual pathways for purchasing,in which one university resorted to acquiring an out-of-print game from eBay. The challenge of cataloguingthese materials was addressed as another universitydiscussed various changes to MARC records that wouldallow their students to find these resources moreeffectively.
At the conclusion, one has a clear understanding ofhow to approach collecting games (old and new) fortheir collection. And the reader will have no illusions
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about the process to develop collections of these typesto meet the curriculum needs at their institutions.
The second section titled, Gaming as Marketing, wasparticularly informative. Each chapter described theunique ways universities chose to use games as amarketing tool. The common goal expressed by theseinstitutions was the desire to bring in the student whowould most likely not visit the library on a regularbasis. Some utilized board games, and videogames,another choose to create a festive atmosphere incor-porating carnival style booths. Their efforts were prin-cipally focused upon developing the perception thatthe library was a fun place. Introducing the gamingparticipants to the library's resources would be afortunate by product of these activities and a definiteplus.
The third and most vital section is titled, Gaming asan Information Literacy Tool. The chapters outline theefforts of vastly different institutions embarking on
their quests to adapt gaming as a resource to foster theAssociation of College and Research Libraries Informa-tion Literacy Standards. Several universities decided todevelop from scratch; games for instructional pur-poses. Though the development phase proved to becostly and somewhat time consuming, the determina-tion on the part of these institutions to design theseresources clearly shows their belief in the educationalvalue of the games. What stands out most of all in thissection is the comparison of videogame strategies andinformation literacy skills. The analogy makes the casefor gaming's place among the arsenal of tools topromote lifelong learning.—Loretta Wallace, Businessand Economics Librarian, M.D. Anderson Library,University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204-2000, USA<[email protected]>.
doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2009.04.018
392 The Journal of Academic Librarianship
