This work is the second edition of Budd’s 2005 book of the same title. Budd is a professor in the School of Information Science at the University of Missouri at Columbia; his research areas include scholarly communication, social and epistemological aspects of knowledge transfer, and the politics of higher education and academic libraries. He is also the author of Knowledge and Knowing in Library and Information Science (Scarecrow, 2001) and numerous articles in scholarly journals.

It should be recognized at the outset that this book is intended primarily as a text for library science programs, although ACRL’s press release states it could also be used as “an introduction for new professionals and academic administration.” The book’s style reinforces its suitability as a text by interspersing boxed “challenge” questions as a way of summarizing sections of each chapter. The didactic nature of the text is also seen in the discussion points that follow each chapter’s summary.

The author’s first chapter sets the context with a history of the academic library and of higher education in the U.S. back to colonial times. Chapters 2 and 3 provide an overview of the organizational culture of higher education and an understanding of governance, including business models, faculty governance, and management issues surrounding teams and quality assurance. Chapters 4 through 10 focus on more practical issues: funding and fundraising, scholarly communication, collections, the growth of electronic information, open access and digital repositories, user communities and literacy-based approaches, and the core aspects of academic librarianship. Budd’s final chapter, “A Look Ahead,” admits the dangers of speculation, but touches on trends in instruction, distance education, and scholarly communication. The book ends with a 30-page bibliography of sources cited in the text.

Budd’s text takes such a long historical view that it spends only a fraction of its space on forward thinking. Although he raises some contemporary issues, such as embedded librarianship, it would have been valuable for him to have devoted more space to emerging trends for practitioners in the field. This book provides a solid introduction for students, but does not cover current challenges sufficiently for librarians already in the field, even new appointments.