Julian Warner. Human Information Retrieval. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010. 189p. alk. paper, $35 (ISBN 9780262013444). LC2009-010120

of real-life assessment in practice. Instruction librarians and coordinators will find helpful assessment models to follow in this volume. The assessment tools described in this book are not necessarily new and different; rather, what differentiates this volume is how the assessment tools are used in faculty-librarian partnerships, so this book will especially be informative and practical for librarians seeking to partner with teaching faculty to enhance and assess information literacy learning.—Maria T. Accardi, Indiana University Southeast. Warner, a faculty member in the Management School of Queen's University at Belfast with a long-standing interest in the intersection of humanistic and technological approaches to information systems, undertakes the ambitious project of rethinking the theoretical framework of information retrieval (IR). Judging traditional approaches to the topic as being overly limited in their concerns or based on theories insufficiently congruent to real-world practice, he seeks to develop a comprehensive perspective on IR that both acknowledges its human dimensions and gives a theoretically adequate account of currently dominant retrieval practices. Over the course of nine chapters, Warner unfolds this agenda by (1) outlining a new approach to IR centered around the concept of human labor and (2) articulating a rationale for full-text retrieval, which, in his view, is the characteristic modality of IR deployed in information technologies today. After an introductory chapter, in which he carefully outlines the trajectory of argument for the book as a whole, Warner devotes three chapters to an explication of his labor-theoretic approach to IR. In his view, enhancement of selection power, defined as " the human ability to make choices between objects or representations of objects, " is the primary aim and core value of IR. Selection power depends upon selection labor, the mental work that goes into the processes of discriminating between objects and choosing between them. Although selection labor is an activity of the human mind, some of its processes can be supported by and, in part, transferred to information technologies. Such transfers are possible, in Warner's estimation, because these technologies are themselves the products of human labor and designed with specifically human purposes in mind: historically, there has been a tendency to delegate as many processes of human labor as possible to technological tools. Selection labor can be further subdivided into two mutually exclusive types: description labor and search labor. Description labor is the material and mental work expended in " transforming objects (documents , images, …