Libraries in the Age of Mediocrity,

Abstract

V OL . 27, N O . 2, 2001 71 The authors revisit their predictions and assessments in the first edition, and they have a healthy sense of perspective about their missteps. The site designers and experts interviewed are rarely doing what they had been doing when the first edition was published, and predictions for the third edition are modest. Naturally, any book of this type is somewhat outdated before it is out of galleys, and the recent spate of collapses and mergers among Internet companies have made inaccuracies even more likely. The authors and the publisher offer two different Websites to supplement the book and help guard against the inevitable link decay and mutation that is endemic to the Internet. Two of the authors, Rosenfeld and Morville, have done the best job that they can of maintaining their searching-tool site at http:// www.clearinghouse.net/searching/index.html, perhaps because it is an integral part of their Argus Clearinghouse Internet site; only four of the approximately four dozen included links were broken, and one had moved. The page DeCandido created to link to sites referenced in the book (http://www.nealschuman.com/ish.html) had a larger proportion of faulty links, with about fifteen of the ninety links broken and five that had moved. This kind of link rot is understandable but disappointing, the more so because the authors promise these Websites will be maintained to add to the book’s useful life. It is unusual to see a second edition of a book that is shorter than its first. Given the explosion in use of the Web and the increased sophistication of search engines, bots, and other Internet tools, readers would certainly expect the second edition to be longer than the first. Editor GraceAnne DeCandido, however, has greatly improved the Internet Searcher’s Handbook in this second edition, packing more information into a smaller volume. This book would be a good addition for general library reference collections, and it could serve as a supplementary text for information literacy or introductory reference service courses.