Mark Keller’s Book Reviews

An incredibly productive writer, Mark Keller read and reviewed an enormous amount of books, from short summaries for the Classified Abstracts of Alcohol Literature (CAAAL) to book reviews published in QJSA and JSA to Cliff Notes-style reviews on contemporary topics for digest-type publications, such as the Alcoholism Treatment Digest.

When compiling the Keller bibliography, the question arose early whether to add these when it was so challenging to locate them all. We did, and we are happy that we did. Here is the thought process behind adding them to the final bibliography.

Facing the problem

Unfortunately, our predecessors, including Keller himself as an editor, did a mediocre job with Keller’s bibliography, especially after he retired in 1977. His book reviews were not in the limelight at all. With its 133 items, the original bibliography (that we call “master bibliography”) contained only a handful of book reviews, 21 publishes in QJSA and JSA, and two from other publications.

We discovered new items under different QJSA sections, not indexed on the article level in pre-1970 print QJSA pdfs. These were not indexed separately, but, instead, bundled, 2-8 reviews together, under one section title such as “Current literature,” “Book reviews,” “Books and pamphlets,” and more, with no consistency. Sometimes, two of these sections occur in the same issue. Keller seemed to be the author of many of them, credited as M. K. under each he wrote when there are other authors, or at the end of all three in the same section if there are none. I assume< he wrote them all.

Searching the JSAD website for Keller indexed in QJSA/JSA as an author, the terms “Keller,” or “MK,”  resulted in fewer than 40 hits. Checking against print McCarthy catalogs (we have three, by decades, duplicating the card catalog), we found that only a handful of these were included, like in the master bibliography.

We concluded that Keller’s book reviews would have to be manually collected and entered. This is not a difficult task, but going through each issue would be repetitive and time-consuming, whether they would be added to RefWorks or collected in a Word document.

Questions

Question #1: Is it worth the effort?

A few arguments for and against helped us decide. Note: the following pros and cons were collected and discussed among us in late 2023, well before we started to add newly discovered records to the bibliography.

PRO

• it would be a very long list adding significant substance to our work (justifying a new, updated Keller bibliography)
• it would show an interesting cross-section of what types of publications got on the radar, got indexed, and then brought to the attention of the Alcohol Studies community
• it would show a period in time of publishing addiction science with its focus on probably very multidisciplinary topics, defining the field forever (based on the original five pillars)
• it would prove the importance of indexing and abstracting by subject experts (job security for “documentalists,” as Keller and his staff called themselves)
• it would call attention to the dying genre of book reviews and the humility of scholars willing to “waste” their time writing them
• it would, along with Keller’s and Jellinek’s other works, point out the significance of researchers routinely descending from the ivory tower to write popular literature, educating the masses on the go, instead of letting social media influencers, with no credentials or educational background, fake it

CON

• it would likely to be a VERY LONG list
• there would be no way to automate data collection, such as harvesting data from databases and records or plugging them into a citation manager
  
• it needs some significant hand searching and manual input to go through all the potential issues
  
• it needs a meticulous person who understands the significance and has the patience and tenacity
  
• the number of QJSA/JSA issues to harvest is yet to be defined
• even calculating what issues to look up first sounds challenging
  

Question #2: Who should do it?

Since none of the original authors of the previous bibliographies (Jellinek, Haggard, Bacon, with introductory articles) are available, I decided to look up some QJSA issues as a pilot. I did the math and defined a ballpark number of journal issues to be hand-searched, it didn’t look as bad as I first thought. I made good progress in just one day!

Then came a lucky discovery: we were able to recruit Kate Greenberg for a bit longer than expected! She’s proven herself with the Digital Alcohol Archives project, she is meticulous and knowledgeable. With some guidance, she would be the perfect candidate!

But then came the perennial question: what’s in it for her? Depending on her contributions, she could be at least given credit in the article or even listed as a co-author of the bibliography.

Results: The final count

Long story short, within a couple of weeks, Kate earned not only the acknowledgment but also her co-authorship of the bibliography. She did a fantastic job, which required a lot of patience, combing through all the issues I identified as potential sources.

The final count of Keller’s book reviews alone, 151, justifies our decision to add them to the bibliography. The scope of the books presents an incredible breadth of Keller’s interests and knowledge within the field and beyond. Reviewing these books also contributed to establishing the CAS Library, forming the collection’s foundation. Adding the records to the Master catalog and CAAAL provided more visibility for the titles, as they were also included in bibliographies and digests of recent publications.

Results: Significance

There might be even more book reviews written by Mark Keller, however, the current list is limited to the ones that can be attributed to him. We believe that the verified items in the bibliography belong to Keller’s legacy, as they speak to the role Keller assumed throughout his entire career: bringing together various disciplines that cover alcohol studies and creating a common language that allows translating the results of each discipline for the entire field.

Stay tuned for the updated Mark Keller Bibliography, which currently has 369 items: 330 original publications and 39 republished items. Based on a bibliography of 133 items compiled by previous librarians, the updated version includes 236 additional original publications and republished texts (often in other languages) discovered during the Keller research (2015 to date).