Information seeking in the online age: principles and practice / Andrew Large, Lucy A. Tedd and R.J. Hartley. - London: Bowker Saur,1999. - 308p. - ISBN 1- 85739-260-4: £35. Apart from its title (which smacks of having been invented by a committee), this book has a lot to offer. It provides an up-to-date overview of searching electronic information resources, combining theory and practice in a useful way. Because of this, Information Seeking in the Online Age will probably be of most use to Information Science students. Written as it is by academics from university Information Science departments, it was probably produced with such students in mind. But it may also be of use to practitioners who want to read a systematic overview of the field, especially those who are involved in delivering information skills training. Information Seeking is in fact an update of Online Searching (by Hartley, Keen, Large and Tedd) from 19901. But as the authors themselves observe in their preface, so much has changed since that time that Information Seeking is a very different book. And in most cases, the new book is very up-to-date. Technologies such as CD-ROMs and the Web loom large here, whereas they were (for obvious reasons) hardly mentioned, if at all, in the earlier volume. Together, the services described and illustrated in Information Seeking give the book an impressively up-to-date feel. Just occasionally there a blast from the past (too much emphasis on command-driven databases or mediated searching), but these lapses are few and far between and do not detract from the overall effectiveness of the work. As well as being up-to-date, the book is thorough in its coverage. It deals with such issues as information-seeking behaviour, the historical development of electronic sources, language and information retrieval, database structures, searching, browsing, user interfaces, and search evaluation. Practical examples are given throughout the book, but a useful chapter at the end also gives several larger practical examples of the search process "from start to finish". This helps to solidify the principles discussed in earlier chapters. From a practitioners point of view, it is gratifying to see that all of the major tools of the trade are in the book: ABI/Inform, Compendex, ERIC, Medline, the Citation Indexes, SOSIG and many more are discussed. The main data providers and hosts, such as BIDS, Dialog, OCLC and Ovid, are also all given treatment. Current issues such as metadata, harvesting, and cataloguing Web resources are also given an airing. Discussion of these different topics is systematically organised by theme rather than service or platform. The first section of the book (chapters one to three) provides an introduction to information seeking. The second section (chapters four to eight) looks at the principles of information seeking itself. Finally, the third section (chapters nine and ten) looks at practical issues in searching and evaluating the results. On the whole, the sections are clearly labelled and easy to navigate. There are a large number of screen shots and other figures which help to get the message across. There are such a large number in fact that the figures are sometimes separated by several pages from the text which discusses them, but this is only a minor irritant. There is also a helpful list of acronyms and a good subject index, but there is no complete bibliography. References are given at the end of each chapter rather than collected together at the end, a fact which I find makes following up leads more difficult. Information Seeking is written very much from a user perspective. It is not a technical book. For example, Z39.50 is dealt with in the chapter on user interfaces because of its impact on the user which means that a number of databases can be searched simultaneously through a single user interface. Technical aspects of implementing the protocol are not included. There is also very little mention of major management issues associated with electronic information resources, such as licensing, charging or authentication. Of course, this is understandable, but some mention of these issues might have been useful as they occasionally have a direct bearing on information seeking behaviour itself. For instance, if you are searching a pay-per-view service this will make you less inclined to browse records to check out their relevance as you go along. It is difficult to know exactly where information seeking in the electronic environment will go. What is clear is that searching electronic resources is moving from being a sophisticated activity undertaken by an information professional to become an everyday job carried out by the end user. Many of the principles described in this book are being built into the system rather than understood by the searcher. Systems increasingly are designed to cope with natural language queries, to assume Boolean operators and to deliver relevance- ranked results. The sophistication of information seeking is to a large extent becoming hidden from the user. Whether this will result in better search outcomes is however a moot point. Stephen Pinfield Academic Services Librarian, University of Nottingham 1 R.J. Hartley et al. Online searching: principles and practice. London: Bowker Saur, 1990. ISBN 0408022906.