<b>June Abbas.</b> <i>Structures for Organizing Knowledge: Exploring Taxonomies, Ontologies, and Other Schemas.</i> New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers, 2010. xxi, 248p. alk. paper, $85.00 (ISBN 9781555706999). LC2010-024861.

socioeconomic barriers to widespread use of information. South Africa exemplifies an incomplete transformation from the highly developed, bureaucratic, and secretive apartheid state to a country with explicit freedom of information rights but low citizen use and sporadic data collection. African countries, however, are " not a basket case. " This book more than meets its objective of interrogating common assumptions about the universal application of freedom of information rights. The nonideological stance of its authors is one of its strengths, along with their superb research and mastery of theory, history, and politics in many domains. It leaves a rather dispiriting impression in the end, as if freedom of information were not merely an unattainable ideal but possibly a mistaken one. In the final chapter, the authors propose a tentative solution: movement toward nonjuridi-cal, nonadversarial practices (break the " hermeneutics of suspicion''), toward a culture of access in which governments recognize that secrecy leads to bad policy. The Wikileaks model is mentioned too, where technology enables direct action against an authoritarian state. Truthfully, however, the authors have no solution or policy recommendations to offer, which may be just as well given their distrust of universal solutions. Readers should be grateful for their temperate and stimulating treatment of a subject that largely has gone unexamined by library professionals .—Jean Alexander, Carnegie Mellon University. Organization is at the heart of the library profession: without organization both physical (as on shelves) and virtual (as in databases and OPACs), users cannot access information and materials. As the library grows to include more digital resources and users begin to create their own metadata, librarians must expand their concepts of knowledge organization beyond traditional means of description and classification. June Abbas's Structures for Organizing Knowledge: Exploring Taxonomies, Ontologies, and Other Schemas discusses the many ways in which human beings organize objects and how librarians and other information professionals can make use of these tendencies to design effective tools for organizing information. The book is not a practical guide for designing and developing said tools, nor a detailed explanation of the schema used therein; rather, it is an overview of the underlying concepts that shape human organizational behavior and, thus, tools for organizing knowledge. Abbas divides the book into three " threads " : Traditional Structures for Organizing Knowledge, which covers organizational structures commonly used in libraries and the academic world and the history thereof; Personal Structures for …