Marta K. Lee is, if not uniquely suited to writing a book on mentoring in libraries, at least ideally suited to do so. Over her distinguished career she has found herself on both sides of the mentor–mentee relationship many times, and as she makes clear in her book, she has gained much through each experience. She states in the preface that she has “found that the most important part of being a librarian is mentoring” (ix). This belief and her enthusiasm for mentoring pervade the entire book. Through this book she shares her experiences so that librarians might learn from them and become interested in serving others in this way.

Throughout the book, Lee discusses various types of mentoring experiences ranging from very formal relationships such as found when mentoring a new employee, to the everyday, informal mentoring relationships that occur during a reference interview or through activities such as the American Library Association’s annual resume review service. In nearly every case Lee is able to provide first person anecdotes from both sides of the relationship. The best features of the book are the case studies where Lee describes a particular mentoring relationship. These case studies provide a way for Lee to offer the reader advice on providing a quality mentoring experience and to convey the lessons that she learned as a result.

The book is organized into nine chapters, beginning with a chapter that introduces the reader to mentoring and continuing through chapters on various types of mentoring relationships, such as those with interns, library school students, prospective librarians, new librarians, volunteers, and coworkers pursuing promotion. Lee concludes the book with chapters on mentoring other librarians through electronic communications, including a chapter that gathers other types of activities, such as the aforementioned resume review service. Several appendixes are included, which contain sample forms for use by potential mentors and descriptions of activities detailed in the case studies. The book ends with an extensive bibliography of works on mentoring in libraries and an index.

Lee spends considerable energy emphasizing that formal mentoring plans, especially for long term mentoring relationships, lead to far better results. She provides a checklist of items to be considered when setting up an internship with a library school student. She goes on in a case study to describe an instance in which she mentored a library school student and the steps she took to set up and organize a meaningful experience for the student. In the chapter on mentoring new hires or librarians new to a position, she shows through two case studies that it is not enough to have a detailed plan—the plan must be customized to allow for the particular needs of the situation. As Lee quotes Pree and Wright from their book, Mentoring: Two Voices, “Mentoring cannot be reduced to a formula.”1 Lee also argues that the mentoring experience is greatly assisted by having strong institutional support. In one case her university paid to have a library school intern attend the American Library Association Annual Conference that was being held locally. This support, as well as administrative support for the staff time needed to supervise an internship, is essential for the success of a long-term mentoring experience.

Nowhere is Lee clearer about the power and influence of a good mentor relationship than when she discusses her early work as a cataloger. Having realized quickly that she was more suited to reference services, Lee feels that an attentive mentor at this time might have steered her in that direction. This is not to say that she did not have good mentors at various points of her career. In fact she describes how an undergraduate geography professor encouraged her to go to library school.

The chapter on mentoring coworkers for promotion spends several pages describing the intricacies of the promotion and tenure system, and how academic librarians function therein. Lee describes two different experiences that she had in mentoring librarians for promotion. In the first case, the two librarians she mentored completed their work on time; one was promoted while the other withdrew her application as she was leaving the university. In the second experience, the librarian was dealing concurrently with other time-consuming duties and was unable to meet many of their agreed upon deadlines. Although this librarian also was promoted, the contrasting case studies show that the mentoring experience can vary greatly.

The final chapter shows the reader—who by now is surely interested in serving as a mentor—how to get started. In fact, Lee demonstrates that many of the things that librarians do in the average day include elements of mentoring. She describes how librarians mentor each other by providing assistance on electronic mailing lists, reviewing resumes, and by commenting on article and presentation drafts. Through these and myriad other activities, mentoring occurs regularly in the library. As Lee states, “There is never a mentoring project too small” (98). With this in mind and this book in hand, librarians everywhere now know where to start.