Kessler provides much research and many ideas about trends toward the increasing distribution of information over the Internet by libraries around the world. The back cover says that

this first-of-its-kind book explores the fast-changing world of international digital libraries--their current status as well as the challenges and opportunities associated with their continuing development.

The book takes a country-by-country tour of digital library projects being created in very different ways worldwide. It explains how factors such as language, politics, and business practices affect international development and access, and provides important insights into the role of libraries in the development of online digital information.

The book’s strength is the author’s expertise on the digitization of library services. He discusses the preservation and delivery of information and describes how they are affected by computer technology.

The book is divided into four parts. Part 1, “Setting the Stage,” begins with a discussion of the history of the Internet and considers paradigms of public access, such as the French Minitel system. The author includes details about how the Bibliothèque nationale de France is making a “serious bid to become a world-class one-stop shopping place for information, both offline and online.” The author also discusses the development of digital libraries in the United States.

Part 2, “Specifics--National,” takes readers on a world tour, covering France, Singapore, China, India, Australia, Thailand, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Japan, and Indonesia. Each chapter begins with information from the CIA world factbook about the population of each country and how many Internet hosts it has. Kessler then discusses the cultural and legal contexts for libraries in each country.

Part 3, “Specifics--International,” concerns issues of language, politics, political structure, technical standards, and business.

Part 4, “Generalities,” discusses media and messages, the identity crisis of libraries, uninterested users, and the problem of designing libraries for change.

Many figures show World Wide Web pages from many library sites. Following the links on these pages creates an informative tour of some library projects. Curiously, though the pages were clearly created by different people, each figure is captioned with a brief description and the comment “© 1996 Netscape Communications Corporation.” I found it odd to see Netscape mentioned so often without any mention of the copyrights (if any) of the Web page authors.

Kessler waxes eloquent about the political issues that affect public libraries. In chapter 16, on politics and political structures, he says that “there is, finally, the threat of political intimidation. Countries that enjoy basic political rights and freedoms find it difficult to imagine the very immediate and very personal terror that even highly selective enforcement of censorship regulations can inflict.”

One weakness of this book is that some of the sentences are overly complex. Another weakness is that the author’s implicit definition of a library may be too narrow. The definition seems limited to public and university libraries; libraries in private homes and those owned by private companies are not mentioned. There is also no mention of private digital text delivery services that supply information for a fee, such as the Dow Jones News Retrieval Service, Bibliographic Reference Service, and the Dialog online information service. It would have been interesting to read the author’s speculations on how these libraries might affect the future of digital libraries on the Internet.

The author pays attention to the development of computer science, but does not mention the theoretical work of library scholars. Describing the roots of automation in libraries, he says, about the 1960s and 1970s, “At that time, most people thought the single function of computers was to compute. Computers calculated numbers.” Yet as early as 1963, in a speech about the library of the future, Don R. Swanson said that “information centers of specialized types should be set up and maximal advantage taken of techniques for automatic indexing, abstracting, and dissemination.”

Despite these criticisms, I recommend this book for people interested in public library Internet use in the 1990s. The author’s extensive analysis of politics and the World Wide Web provides much food for thought.