Winner, 2010 Edelstein Prize, Society for the History of Technology Efficiency—associated with individual discipline, superior management, and increased profits or productivity—often counts as one of the highest virtues in Western culture. But what does it mean, exactly, to be efficient? How did this concept evolve from a means for evaluating simple machines to the mantra of progress and a prerequisite for success? In this provocative and ambitious study, Jennifer Karns Alexander explores the growing power of efficiency in the post-industrial West. Examining the ways the concept has appeared in modern history—from a benign measure of the thermal economy of a machine to its widespread application to personal behaviors like chewing habits, spending choices, and shop floor movements to its controversial use as a measure of the business success of American slavery—she argues that beneath efficiency's seemingly endless variety lies a common theme: the pursuit of mastery through techniques of surveillance, discipline, and control. Six historical case studies—two from Britain, one each from France and Germany, and two from the United States—illustrate the concept's fascinating development and provide context for the meanings of, and uses for, efficiency today and in the future.

Cooperative cataloging is "the original cataloging of bibliographic items through the joint action of a group of independent libraries which make bibliographic records accessible to group members and sometimes to nonparticipating libraries as well." (ALA Glossary) The papers in this volume provide an historical perspective, discuss current programs and issues, and suggest possible answers to the issues which will have a major impact on the ability of libraries to provide bibliographic access to information resources. Also published as Cataloging and Classification Quarterly, v.17, nos. 3/4, 1993. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Lotteries in Colonial America explores lotteries in England and the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From the founding of Jamestown to the financing of the American Revolution, lotteries played an important role in the economic life of the colonies. Lotteries provided an alternative form of raising money for colonial governments and a means of subsidizing public and private projects without enacting new taxes. The book also describes and analyzes the role of lotteries in the eighteenth-century consumer revolution, which transformed how buyers viewed the goods they purchased, or in the case of lotteries, won. As the middling classes in the colonies began to acquire objects that went beyond mere necessities, lotteries gave colonists an opportunity to risk a small sum in the hopes of gaining riches or valuable goods. Finally, the book examines how lotteries played a role in the changing notions of fortune in colonial America. Religion and chance were present in colonial lotteries as participants merged their own free will to purchase a lottery ticket with the will of the Christian God to select a winner.