Current news abounds with reports on high unemployment rates, shrinking government services, and a dire need for small business development to help jump-start a faltering economy. During times of economic stress, public libraries often have been called upon to provide services and resources to local businesses, yet many books on this topic date back to the 1990s. This new book, Small Business and the Public Library, is a timely volume that will be appropriate for some public library professional collections.

The title, preface, and chapter titles of Small Business and the Public Library indicate a book focused on small businesses’ need for support and public libraries’ importance as a partner of small businesses. The book is organized into eight chapters, with topics ranging from collection development to programming, marketing, and partnerships. Unfortunately, the book may be somewhat disappointing to practitioners looking solely for information on aiding small businesses. Throughout the book, the authors provide some excellent examples of collaboration; however, it is somewhat disconcerting to find sections of this compact book devoted not to small business, but to material and resources related to career services. But given the dearth of current material on the market, this book still offers solid value for those who seek to establish or expand a small business center: the authors are clearly experienced, passionate advocates for business and career services in public libraries.

For additional if outdated comparisons, interested readers should also look at Rosemarie Riechel’s Public Library Services to Business (1994) or Maxine Bleiweis’s Helping Business: The Library’s Role in Economic Development: A How to do it Manual (1997). Reichel’s book reports on survey results from both public and corporate library business services, with an explicit chapter on service barriers. Bleiweis’s manual covers basic ground and includes with plans, surveys, forms, and advertising information.

For those interested in collection development for a small business center, Small Business is a solid starting point for some core business resources, but this material may be nicely supplemented by Rita Moss’s new edition of Strauss’s Handbook of Business Information, released in February 2012. Previous editions of Strauss’s book have proven invaluable to many libraries offering business reference services. Last, for those interested in the career resource sections, Jane Jerrard’s 2009 title Crisis in Employment: A Librarian’s Guide to Helping Job Seekers offers useful information to complement Small Business and the Public Library.