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Libraries, Museums, and Archives: Legal and Ethical Challenges in the New Information Era, ed. Tomas A. Lipinski. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002. 335 p. $59.95 (ISBN 0-8108-4085-5)
In May 2000, the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UW-M) hosted an institute on legal and ethical issues affecting libraries, archives, and museums. Organized by the University's Center for Information Policy Research (CIPR), and funded by a National Leadership Grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the institute was to "provide instruction on the implications of new laws, regulations, and technologies for smaller institutions that may be without the benefit of in-house legal counsel." (Conference announcement <http://www.slis.uwm. edu/cipr/ilei.htm> [June 30, 2003]) The institute featured presentations by nationally known legal and information experts to a small number of selected participants. This volume makes those presentations widely available.
In his introduction Lipinski, a UW-M faculty member and co-director of CIPR, notes how legal and ethical issues that have always permeated the information environment have been complicated by what he calls the saturation of libraries, museums, and archives with information technology. This collection is intended to help information professionals "make more informed decisions, or perhaps to better balance the legal, ethical, and practical aspects of a particular problem in their daily institutional settings." (p. xi) The institute and this record of its proceedings are...