The 1990s provided many challenges for Canadian academic library managers. Financial cutbacks at the federal and provincial levels quickly trickled down to universities and their libraries, and administrators were forced to learn how to manage with shrinking budgets.

Ethel Auster and Shauna Taylor's Downsizing in Academic Libraries is a comprehensive study of the trials faced by Canadian academic libraries in the 1990s. The authors surveyed opinions from over 1100 librarians from across the country. Based on these surveys, they describe how downsizing was implemented, its...