Attracting, Educating, and Serving Remote Users Through the Web.

The purpose of this book is to help librarians navigate the various options available for providing library services via the Web. It is a how-to-do-it manual that provides readers with a basic knowledge of issues and strategies for understanding and reaching remote users. This is accomplished by employing both simple, inexpensive and complex, costly methods. Divided into distinct chapters, the book details instructions on the various methods for getting to know users, offering education and reference on the Web, setting up current awareness and document delivery services, providing licensed resources, and presenting the virtual library. The book attempts to address specific concerns of academic, special, and public libraries.

The text provides a good introduction to development considerations for offering services on the Web. For librarians who have not extended their services beyond the physical walls of their building, this is a good source to consult before undertaking such a task. Basic instruction on how to develop Web-forms and set up email reference, as well as options for software to provide more advanced services, is included. A beginner in this area could benefit from the general background and simple explanations the book supplies. Several sample Web pages are included as visual aids, though the large majority of these come from the editor and authors' Website at the University of Nevada in Reno.

Because the book is divided into distinct chapters, targeting the relevant section of interest and finding help concerning a specific topic is easy. If a librarian were developing electronic reference services, chapter four starts with an overview of different types of “AskA” services and goes on to explain each option in further detail. The chapter offers information on everything from telephone reference to the future of digital reference services and even includes a form for setting up an “email Web form with an ASP form handler.”

One of the problems with this book lies in the inclusion of too much material in each chapter. In some instances, the information seems irrelevant or inappropriate to the book's scope. For instance, chapter six covers “providing library instruction to remote users.” In this chapter, the authors spend a significant amount of time describing options for teaching users how to use a library's Website by face-to-face instructional methods (e.g., going to a classroom with a computer, having students come to an instructional lab, etc.). Also included are instructional tips, such as having backup slides in case network connectivity is down or not available. One would expect to find these techniques in a book focused on library instruction, however, not in a book titled Attracting, Educating, and Serving Remote Users Through the Web. More focus on developing online tutorials, building Web-based tools remote users will actually use, and providing context-sensitive help would have been a better use of the authors' time.

This book is not particularly helpful for those already providing services via the Web. No remarkably innovative ideas are presented for those librarians who already have sophisticated Websites, who have figured out how to offer licensed resources to authorized users, and who provide forms for submitting reference questions and interlibrary loan or document delivery requests. Also, because Web and software capabilities are constantly changing, some of the information in this book is already dated. For someone with a more focused question, such as how to design a usability study of a library's Website, a better source might be a journal article describing setting usability testing goals, listing example questions, and outlining the process in detail.

The authors attempt to describe methods for getting at all remote users in all types of libraries. They define remote as “the fact that they [users] are using computers (any computer, anywhere, any time) to interact with library-provided resources or services” (p. 19). While this attempt is noble, it falls short in being specific enough for any library outside of the authors' domain, which is academic with an emphasis on reaching the young, on-campus community of remote users. It does not particularly address the unique needs of distance learners, as does Goodson's book Providing Library Services for Distance Education Students [1] or issues of communicating with other specific communities that public or special libraries might attempt to reach. This reviewer also wonders whether specifying that the user is connecting via a computer is too limited. The authors do not discuss connecting to services using handheld devices, wireless telephones, or other new technologies that might affect the way users interact with library Web services.

Overall, this book provides little information that cannot be extracted elsewhere. Its benefit is that it ties together several topics related to offering library services through the Web in one place. For someone new to delivering services using the Web, it does give a helpful survey of several topics, clearly explaining terminology and technical aspects of developing Web services. However, for someone looking to advance already existing Web services or to find specific information on how to accomplish a particular task, other sources will probably provide more assistance.