Cathy O’Neil. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. New York: Crown Publishers, 2016. 272p. Hardcover, $26 (ISBN 978-0553418811).

scenario is that a new intermediary position in libraries devoted to license and contract negotiation will begin to appear. The current situation, that is, the need for librarians to have substantial responsibilities in an area in which they are not professionally trained, for instance, contract law, is not sustainable. An alternative to a new position, one that is already occurring in some academic libraries, would be that such responsibility is farmed out to institutional legal counsel or purchasing specialists.” Besides speculating about the future, this passage captures current controversy in the library world. Care should be taken in presenting these assertions to a generalist audience: that is, a group of library science students planning careers in public service or administration rather than technical services. However, the passage exemplifies beautifully the kind of inquiry to which the newly fledged electronic resources librarian should be equipped to respond, in a manner appropriate to the particular professional setting. While the book’s content has strengths, its editorial problems make it unnecessarily difficult to use and, in some instances, a poor example of an effective presentation of material for students. If we understand that course texts not only provide knowledge but also model standards for how knowledge should be presented, then editorial decisions have ramifications beyond the surface. Grammar and punctuation errors are numerous. The most notable editorial weakness is the index, a shortcoming that, one hopes, will be redressed in future editions. Significant terms used in the book are omitted: for example, “best practices” does not appear in the index at all. However, it occurs in the table of contents and appears seven times across a span of four chapters (32–84). There are also instances in which a term may be listed in the index but the pages on which it appears are only partially enumerated: for example, the term “link resolver” is indexed as appearing only on page 101 when in fact it appears in the text five additional times. Some terms appear in the index only as compounds: for instance, “Project COUNTER” appears under “P,” its presence indicated on pages 111–114, but the standalone term “COUNTER” appears on its own on five more pages, including a substantive discussion on page 41, yet is not indexed under “C” at all. These indexing issues were discovered through a series of full-text searches in Google Books. Relying on a full-text search in the e-book version is problematic irrespective of the need to type a query each time a reference is desired. For example, when a search on forms of the word “cancel” (also absent from the book’s index) was done, it yielded nonmutually exclusive results. On its own, the index is an incomplete and at times potentially misleading reflection of the book’s content, and in particular it makes content review and analysis, even of topics known to have been covered, significantly more difficult. It also makes harmonizing the learning experience across users of the print vis-á-vis the electronic edition problematic. The coauthors have curated the information from the electronic resources domain that is most difficult to absorb independently and methodically. In doing so, they have contributed a concise survey that promises to remain topical into the future and provides a skeleton for the necessary deeper investigations that electronic resources management requires at a professional level.—Mary O’Dea, St. Cloud State University