<b>Kimberly Black.</b> <i>What Books by African American Women Were Acquired by American Academic Libraries? A Study of Institutional Legitimation, Exclusion and Implicit Censorship</i>. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2009. 211p. $109.95 (ISBN 9780773437920). LC2010-278113.

ingly, he concludes that they may have a continuing, if diminished, role to play in an informational environment that increasingly privileges systems for full-text retrieval such as Internet search engines. Because, in Warner 's view, semantic labor is categorically not transferable to machines, any reduction in semantic description labor entails an increase in semantic search labor. Warner tends to view ongoing trends toward increased semantic search labor with equanimity: not all members of the library community will share this attitude. All in all, Human Information Retrieval presents its readers with an interesting perspective on IR that well repays study. The emphasis on human labor as a central analytic category for understanding IR processes allows Warner to integrate a number of disparate themes that have long been objects of reflection for theorists of librarianship and information science into a single, fairly compact theoretical framework. Certainly, the labor-theoretic approach, as set out in the opening chapters of the book, is structurally elegant and has the potential to be a very useful model for " macroscopic " thinking about the design and evaluation of IR systems. One senses, though, that it is not yet complete and requires further development if it is to fulfill its author's ambitions: for example, it pays scant attention to the different types of (and motivations for) search—a factor that should certainly be taken into account in any theory intended to support the evaluation and design of IR systems. Finally, it should be noted that the book is written in an idiom both erudite and abstract: for this reason, it is a demanding read. Laudably, Warner tries to ease the reader's way through the book by providing concrete examples, culled from a variety of sources, to illustrate the theoretical points he is making, employing diagrams and pictures to aid in the visualization of certain points, and constantly signposting and summarizing the key arguments: moreover, in addition to a bibliography and a (rather indifferent) index, he helpfully provides a list of supplementary readings for those interested in exploring further the theoretical bases of his model. For some readers, such aids may not be enough to offset the difficult nature of the text; however, those who persevere will be rewarded with a genuinely illuminating account of IR as a human phenomenon. in Knoxville, has produced a probing and thoughtful examination of the impact of power, and the lack of it, on …