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ABOUT THE LECTURE:
As information technologies emerged in, spread to, and captivated
society's leaders and institutions, archivists and records managers
returned to their drawing boards to define better records and
to develop improved administrative approaches for the new and
more complex records. At the same time, in a completely autonomous
fashion, records became a regular topic in newspapers, news magazines,
and television and radio news shows. Even mundane auditing/accounting
records became the focus of leading news stories as corporations
went bankrupt, the dot.com bubble burst, and high-level, formerly
powerful corporate executives were led away in handcuffs. What
we see in these developments, perhaps, is confusion both within
various segments of the information professions and in the general
public about the substance of information, certainly an ironic
state of affairs in an era that often seems to congratulate itself
for its mastery of great globs of information.
Archivists, records managers, librarians, information scientists,
and others have tried to grapple with the broadening scope of
information - especially in the last decade - with a variety of
research, scientific, technical, historical, and mathematical
approaches, with most approaches far from the understanding (or
interest) of the general public that is merrily exploring the
tunnels, caverns, and wilderness of the World Wide Web. It may
be that the distinguishing characteristics of our modern era
may not be that it is the Information or Digital Era because of
more information but that the hallmark is a combination of the
pervasiveness of information and our recognition of its pervasiveness.
This lecture will focus on Dr. Cox's teaching on "understanding"
information and his other work on electronic records management
and archival appraisal. He will talk about the great variety of
information "documents," broadly and loosely defined,
and what he sees as the implications of this for the education
and work of librarians and other information professionals (like
archivists). Dr. Cox will contrast (and critique) his own sense
of the broadening definition of document with that of his own
efforts to define more narrowly a record for work with electronic
information systems.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Richard J. Cox is Professor in Library and Information Science
at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Information Sciences
where he is responsible for the archives concentration in the
Master's in Library Science degree and the Ph.D. degree. Prior
to his current position he worked at the New York State Archives
and Records Administration, Alabama Department of Archives and
History, the City of Baltimore, and the Maryland Historical Society.
He chaired the Society of American Archivists (SAA) committee
that drafted graduate archival education guidelines adopted by
its Council in 1988, served for four years as a member of that
association's Committee on Education and Professional Development,
and was a member of the Society's governing Council from 1986
through 1989. Dr. Cox served as Editor of the American Archivist
from 1991 through 1995, and he is presently editor of the Records
& Information Management Report as well as serving as the
Society of American Archivists Publications Editor. He has written
extensively on archival and records management topics and has
published eight books in this area: American Archival Analysis:
The Recent Development of the Archival Profession in the United
States (1990) -- winner of the Waldo Gifford Leland Award given
by the Society of American Archivists; Managing Institutional
Archives: Foundational Principles and Practices (1992); The First
Generation of Electronic
Records Archivists in the United States: A Study in Professionalization
(1994); Documenting Localities (1996); Closing an Era: Historical
Perspectives on Modern Archives and Records Management (2000);
Managing Records as Evidence and Information (2001), winner of
the Waldo Gifford Leland Award in 2002; co-editor, Archives &
the Public Good: Records and
Accountability in Modern Society (2002); and Vandals in the Stacks?
A Response to Nicholson Baker's Assault on Libraries (2002). He
has new books coming out on the implications of September 11th
for archives, libraries, and museums and on re-thinking the concepts
and purposes of archival appraisal. He is currently working on
additional books on the
concept of information documents, the impact of electrostatic
copying on the modern office, and principled records management
(ethical and legal issues).
LECTURE TRANSCRIPT
Records, Documents, and Stuff in the Digital Era
Richard J. Cox
Library of Congress
March 7, 2003
INTRODUCTION: CHALLENGING AND CONFUSING TIMES
Let’s start with the obvious. We have access to more information
today than at any other time. One historian states, rather casually,
“Per person, we consume about 20,000 times as much reading
material as our medieval ancestors.” Some translate such
statistics into a characteristic of our modern era as The Information
Age, and others suggest that somehow we are better off for all
this information than we were before. Given the general propensity
to believe in a Western notion of Progress, whereby with our faith
in technocratic and scientific solutions we believe that the more
information we have the better off we are and the better we will
continually get, it is obvious why so many grab onto the idea
that we are living in a grand and glorious era whereby we can
muster all of human knowledge to solve virtually any problem or
challenge confronting society and its institutions. Winifred Gallagher,
in her book about her search for the divine, believes that “For
most of history, there were no hard lines between the intellectual,
emotional, and spiritual.” The promises of our present technocratic
age seem to be erasing the lines once again, except that technology
has become god and information the divine message.
As a faculty member in a school of information sciences, observers
might expect that I could muster a much more precise explanation
for what this present age (the Digital Era with greater and easier
access to information) means and offers or, that at the least,
I could offer some scientific or formulaic definition of information.
For sure, the twentieth century has been a century when we have
seen varying explanations for information from the beginning of
the twentieth century to the present (the documentalists, information
theory, cybernetics, information science, and so forth). What
I am discussing and arguing about here concerns my own work, my
professional calling, and my livelihood. There are fallacies with
this approach. Margaret Atwood, poet and novelist, notes, “Even
if we are writers ourselves, it is very hard for us to watch ourselves
in mid-write, as it were: our attention must be focused then on
what we are doing, not on ourselves.” Today, I am trying
to do both, ruminating about my work in mid-work in a manner intended
to provide some self-reflection about the notion of information
in the Information Age. As it turns out, trying to assess the
nature of information in an age we have termed as being demarcated
by information itself might be an impossible task, if not an improbable
one. Perhaps, trying to mull over information through the teaching
one does in a school of information studies in the so-called Information
Age might be even more ludicrous of an assignment. Of course,
it is an assignment I have given myself.
There are other reasons why this has become a difficult task.
Bill Stumpf, renowned designer, draws on the Dutch historian Johan
Huizinga to remind us how “not to forget how much we have
sanitized natural experiences. We are warm in winter, cool in
summer, we light up the night and darken the day. Our technology
has allowed us to separate the visceral reactions from the experience
producing these reactions.” We are like the frogs slowly
and unconsciously heated in a pot of water in our high school
biology classes. Words are everywhere, books pour from the publishers,
Web sites proliferate at an immense rate, the television news
programs and talk shows run twenty four hours a day, and email
piles up on our desktops. In such a time, how we gain, read, or
think about information is crucial. The issue is not how much
information we have, but how we use it and how it helps us function
in the real world. And for this, we have immense quantities of
articles, books, software, and advice trying to guide us. And,
now, let me add some more thousands of words to the cacophony
of opinions, assuring you that this is what academics do best.
Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s, senses that “we
assign to education the powers that other societies award to religion,
the word itself invested with so many meanings that it can be
confused with Aladdin’s lamp, made to serve as synonym for
the way out and ticket home, offered as an answer to every mother’s
prayer.” I don’t think I am offering the way home
or a ticket out, but rather that I am describing what my own road
map seems to indicate about traveling in the present Information
Age.
PARADOXES OF THE DIGITAL ERA
Let me provide a little personal view of my perspective adding
to the great and reigning paradoxes of our age of information
wealth. My professional affiliation is that of the archivist –
the professional responsible for selecting, preserving, and making
available the portion of the documentary heritage that has continuing
(some would say enduring) value to society, its citizens, and
its organizations . If one studies carefully the writings of both
the theorists and practitioners (those who write) in my field,
you will find a curious trait. Every commentator on the nature
of records and record-keeping laments the quantity of records
created and a goodly portion of these commentators suggests a
range of guiding theories and methods by which to manage the documentary
universe. It is also not difficult to find critics of the too
many records syndrome, whether they are lambasting government
waste and inefficient bureaucracy or simply observing how much
paper piles up in offices and homes.
Likewise, we can find great gobs of critics, pundits, and others
who write about the wonders and challenges of our so-called modern
Information Age. While it is relatively easy to break these observers
into camps of either complainants about too much information or
predictors or proponents of the saving virtues of readily accessible
information, more than ever before and cheaper than ever before,
all groups readily acknowledge that we are immersed in information
in unprecedented fashion. At the least, we recognize that the
new information technologies of the past decade have transformed
American governance and society, with extremely mixed results,
both increasing access to more information about our government,
institutions, and society while making some aspects of our lives
much more difficult than ever before. At the same time, we must
recognize that our immersion in these modern technologies tends
to have us assign them greater revolutionary significance than
we should. Debora Spar recently argued, “Cyberspace is indeed
a brave new world, but it’s not the only new world. There
have been other moments in time that undoubtedly felt very much
like the present era, other moments when technology raced faster
than governments and called forth whole new markets and social
structures. Other entrepreneurs sensed that, they, too, were standing
on the edge of history, bending authority to their will and reaping
fabulous profits along the way.” Todd Gitlin, more caustically,
notes that the “centrality of media is disguised, in part,
by the prevalence of the assured, hard-edged phrase information
society, or, even more grandly, information age. Such terms are
instant propaganda for a way of life that is also a way of progress.
. . . Information society glows with a positive aura. The very
term information points to a gift – specific and ever replenished,
shining forth in the bright light of utility. Ignorance is not
bliss. . . information is.”
There is obviously a ready connection between these groups and
an obvious reason why archivists, and their colleagues such as
records managers, have an important role in the so-called Information
Age. A large portion of what holds information is represented
by records, and a substantial amount of these records remain of
traditional types – letters, receipts, checks, licenses,
diaries, and so forth – and these appear now in both analog
and digital forms. And, as well, we are seeing increasingly new
kinds of records, such as Web sites, reports with audio-visual
and constantly updated statistics, and the like. However, what
really holds the attention of Information Age pundits and the
critics of bureaucratic documentation may be that their concerns
are eternal. A half century ago, the scholar Jacques Barzun observed
that “every age has carried with it great loads of information
. . . deemed indispensable at the time.” When we look at
the abundance of modern records and the flood of contemporary
information we are simply too close to our sense of the documents
to comprehend that whether one looked out over the documentary
universe in 2000 or 1950 or 1850 or 1750 or at anytime before,
they might have the same sense of euphoria or melancholy about
what they observed. The image of the “information”
building that you have been staring at, a photograph taken by
one of my students who survived my “Understanding Information”
course, shows a building from an early nineteenth century industrial
site. Even a hundred years ago information was important enough
that it was featured in a separate building at the entrance of
an industrial complex. People needed information even then to
navigate among the various buildings, to find a particular individual,
to deliver a product or package, and the like. If the site was
still an active one, we might expect it to have an information
kiosk with a Web directory and GIS-guided maps and directories;
and, some day, too, these might sit vacant, a relic of an earlier
age and different hopes and sensibilities.
Despite the great widening notion of information objects or
artifacts or documents, we also see additional immense paradoxes
in our Information or Digital Age. In the midst of high-tech,
flashy new concepts of documents that talk, read, and sing to
us and blink and wink to sell, convince, and amuse us, we have
seen a remarkable new sensitivity to the importance of very traditional
records, many still kept as paper forms and housed in file cabinets
and records center storage cartons, in our times. The remarkable
story of the use of government archives and banking records, along
with the opening of vast quantities of formerly classified records
in both government and non-government entities like museums and
libraries, in the Holocaust assets case has elevated the public’s
understanding of the importance of even the most routine of the
most bureaucratic seeming records. Stuart Eizenstat’s powerful
new book about this provides a window into what we see happening.
He comments in a number of places about the opening of the records
and data banks of eleven federal agencies, noting how such cooperation
is unusual: “The project demonstrated the awesome resources
the U.S. executive branch can muster when it receives presidential
backing. I was amazed at the powerful story that was emerging
by drawing from the data banks of these different federal agencies.”
Eizenstat relates that about a million records were declassified,
the “largest single declassification in U.S. history.”
At other points in the book, Eizenstat contrasts the cooperation
and openness of the American federal government with the reluctance
of many corporations and institutions and other national governments
to open records or even to admit that they had records. Still,
he relates that one success of the entire project was in ultimately
seeing twenty-eight historical commissions established around
the world to open other archives, a stellar achievement in the
importance of open government and for attesting to the significance
of records. Eizenstat believes that the “most lasting legacy
of the effort [he] led was simply the emergence of the truth.
. . . Historical facts can be suppressed, but eventually they
bubble to the surface. What started as a tiny trickle from long-buried
U.S. archives became a torrent of information that helps provide
a final accounting for World War II.”
And we can see such comments, about numerous other cases, reflecting
on the essential importance of records to society, especially
in holding governments, corporations, public officials, the media,
and other entities and groups accountable to society. We only
have to consider the case of the Enron/Arthur Andersen scandals
and the dramatic stories of the shredding of Enron’s records.
The normally hurried efforts to destroy bureaucratic choking paper
and other records were cast in another light, where “Enron
failed because its leadership was morally, ethically, and financially
corrupt.” In Enron’s case, we find false financial
books cooked up to hide questionable activities, adoption of accounting
procedures intended to favor certain kinds of risky speculative
behavior and to inflate the sense of financial profits intended
to produce raises and bonuses, the buying off of the auditors
to look the other way, reports fabricated in ways to make them
difficult to understand and allowing a range of interpretations,
and a host of other strange and wonderful activities with multiple
implications for what corporate records managers and archivists
will face in their future work. The information buried in formerly
very mundane records suddenly looked much more important and critical
than as a mere byproduct of large corporations and excessive government
regulations.
An essential paradox of our present age is, however, that we
see the vocal advocates of the power of information and the technologies
supporting the use of information often depicting traditional
records as either bureaucratic obstacles needing to be re-engineered
or re-invented out of the way or as objects that are far too limited
in their analog, cumbersome state. The Information Age pundits
conjure up pictures of inefficiency, ineptitude, waste, and other
such obvious barriers – all serious matters – with
the promise that new hardware and software will solve these problems
or that these challenges will be resolved by the creation of new
kinds of documents. The chief problem with such promises is, however,
that concerns such as accountability are usually not part of the
equation. The activities of the Third Reich or Enron, admittedly
far apart in the degree of evil represented, were not factored
in; governments and businesses would simply use the best information
technologies in rational and orderly manners. How many times have
you talked with a vendor promising you the world, until you asked
some very specific questions about the long-term maintenance of
particular kinds of records or objects, how the system enables
you to keep the organization or yourself compliant with external
regulations and best practices, or raised other such concerns?
There is substantial evidence that both the long-dreamed of idea
of the paperless office is that, a dream, and that the promise
that the computer will bring greater efficiency also still a promise
(an unfulfilled one).
The paradoxes go much deeper and are much more blatant. The advent
of the Internet has been heralded with promises of greater access
to information, more open organizations, easier methods of working
in organizations whereby professionals can work from home or anywhere,
and stronger democratic societies in which citizens have more
information and greater opportunities for influencing their elected
and appointed officials. The reality has been somewhat different.
It can be a mistake to believe that the modern information technologies
are no more intrusive than those of earlier eras, or that there
may not be something distinctive about this particular information
age. There have been invasions on privacy and the quality of life.
There are, for example, immense differences in the modern workplace
related to or caused by the information technologies. A recent
study on the corporate workplace notes that the “overwork,
stress, and insecurity of today’s workplaces has been exacerbated,
not relieved, by the proliferation of high-tech equipment –
laptop computers, cell phones, electronic desk calendars, beepers,
portable fax machines, Palm Pilots, and more – that help
people try to keep up with growing workloads while also making
it impossible for them to fully escape their jobs and rules. New
technologies, meanwhile, facilitate intrusive efforts by employers
to monitor everything from their staffers’ comings and goings
to computerized keystrokes and mouse taps, e-mails sent and received,
and personal productivity on a weekly, daily, or even hour-by-hour
basis.” And after a decade of opening up government records,
we have seen a severe closing down of records, post September
11, 2001, in the name of national security (even though many of
the activities to shut down access to records seems to be only
peripherally related to security matters).
MORE PARADOXES: RECORDS AND DOCUMENTS
One of the more interesting paradoxes, for me at least, has been
the nearly simultaneous narrowing of the notion of record and
the broadening of the concept of document in this age of the ubiquitous
computer. If nothing else, these contrasts point to the wild frontier
that is cyberspace.
Archivists and other records professionals have worked with electronic
information technologies for more than three decades, and while
there is still a great deal of consternation about just how successful
the preservation and maintenance of electronic records systems
has been there are obvious discernible features of the processes
involved in confronting such challenges. In the 1960s, most archivists
either ignored what were then called machine-readable records
(since these were mostly large scale statistical databases) or
more adamantly declared the early electronic records to be non-records
and not their responsibility. Within a decade, as the personal
computer took over, such attitudes changed and archivists and
records managers knew that they needed to expand their horizons,
that they needed to be in the game. There followed debates about
the nature of archival theory and knowledge, calls for practical
case studies and the subsequent appearance of how-to manuals,
expressions of the need for research and the need for stronger
partnerships with both the creators of records and the creators
of the hard- and software, and some research into the challenges
and nature of electronic records management.
Most of the research, all with a heavy bit of theorizing as well,
has led to efforts to more precisely define records. In the major
research project I was involved with, we concluded that records
were the products of business transactions, that each record must
possess a structure, content, and context in order to be a complete
record, and that each record was the result of a warrant (deriving
from legal, fiscal, or acceptable best practices). Another research
project, drawing on the much older science of diplomatics, also
came up with a much more restricted notion of record: “When
a record is said to be trustworthy, it means that it is both an
accurate statement of facts and a genuine manifestation of those
facts. Record trustworthiness thus has two qualitative dimensions:
reliability and authenticity. Reliability means that the record
is capable of standing for the facts to which it attests, while
authenticity means that the record is what it claims to be.”
One of the primary investigators in this project defines an electronic
record, presenting its components (medium, content, physical form,
intellectual form, action, persons, archival bond, and context),
and arguing that “electronic records possess essentially
the same components as traditional records,” but “with
electronic records, these components are not inextricably joined
to one another as they are in traditional records” but are
“stored and managed separately as metadata. . .”,
all of these needing to be used to “embed procedural rules
for creating, handling, and maintaining such records in an agency-wide
records system, and to integrate documentary procedures with business
processes.” In such projects, we can readily see that in
order to manage records as precise objects that they needed to
be defined as precisely as possible in order to enable their requirements
to be engineered into the software.
While such interesting projects in the archival corner of the
information professions have been going on, other information
professionals have been expanding the notion of the information
document. David Levy and John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid in their
recent books provide the best glimpse of the broader sense of
a document. David Levy argues that documents are “bits of
the material world – clay, stone, animal skin, plant fiber,
sand – that we’ve imbued with the ability to speak.”
These things are fixed, that can be repeated, and that are essential
to the social order. Out of such writings come a very broad concept
of a document that is very fitting to the expansive landscape
that is cyberspace and beyond. Documents are cultural artifacts,
the adhesiveness for community, imbued with symbolic value and
power, representative of other activities, full of content, responsible
for performing a task, and both fluid and fixed (depending on
their medium). As Levy very poetically muses, a document is a
“surrogate, a little sorcerer’s apprentice, to whom
a piece of work has been delegated.”
Brown, Duguid, and Levy are all trying to reign in, to some degree,
what is the main building block of the Information Age. Still,
it is relatively easy to surmise that the archivist’s notion
of a record is, at best, a subset of the concept of document as
it is now being more popularly used. This is certainly not a problem.
Indeed, if we tried to diagram the universe of information along
with the various information professions, we would readily discern
that there are many other disciplinary groups (librarians, museum
curators, information scientists, knowledge managers) in addition
to archivists and records managers who have carved out a niche
of that universe. Each of these groups has developed different
means to define or assess an aspect of information, and it is
when we think more broadly like this that we begin to see another
fuzzy and challenging aspect of what we are dealing with in our
particular information era.
INFORMATION EVERYWHERE
An amusing aspect of being a professor in a school of information
sciences and being part of what we call the information professions
is to be on the front line of what remains continuing and confusing
discussions about what information is and how the various information
disciplines array themselves. I have followed listserv discussions
whereby information scientists viciously attack the concept of
knowledge as used by knowledge managers even though there are
hundreds of definitions of information. In my own school many
of my library and information science colleagues wonder why I
am buzzing around and discussing concepts like evidence as manifested
by records and important for purposes such as accountability,
corporate memory, and social memory. At best what holds us together
(and sometimes this is very tenuous) is that we (the disparate
faculty members) are convinced of the importance of information
to improve the performance and quality of society, the life of
its citizens, and its institutions. While we have many different
perspectives about how information is defined or focus on different
elements of information, we share a common commitment that information
is critical to life, as well as a common sense notion that information
needs to be managed, preserved, accessible, protected, made reliable,
and processed in forms that are practical.
One of the values of the Levy and Brown-Duguid model of documents
is that it both opens up the possibility of cutting across the
diverse disciplinary orientations to information and provides
a common notion (even if it is somewhat imagined) that can unite
us. For teaching purposes, it actually breaks open the more rigid
quantitative or qualitative measures of information that is often
assumed by library and information scientists and opens up the
students’ world to see that information is not something
that is confined to a record, a book, an archives, a library but
it is actually something we are all immersed in. I have used the
information document notion as a unifying theme in my version
of one of the core courses (Understanding Information) for our
Masters in Library and Information Science degree, where students
are intended to gain knowledge about the responsibilities held
by the information professions, but mostly to help students to
comprehend the complexities of information in modern society and
how the various notions of information affect or should affect
the work of any information professional. Course objectives include
defining the nature of information, providing historic background
on the nature of information systems, orienting students to concepts
of information systems, integrating views of the physical and
virtual library and other information providers, orienting students
to technology issues related to information systems, making students
aware of professional issues, making students aware of human factors
influencing information systems, providing an orientation to information
services, and providing an awareness of social, economic, political,
and other issues affecting information systems. Students learn
about some obvious information documents (obvious to people planning
to work in a library or archives), such as books, records, newspapers,
photographs, and maps, but they are also asked to explore other
information documents such as movies, artifacts, monuments, landscape,
and buildings. The last information document we consider is the
Web page, a place that most of the younger students seem to see
as both the beginning and end of the essence of both information
and documents.
These are all things we read, or to adopt some of the language
of experts like Levy, these are all things that speak to us. We
tend to assign document-like characteristics to many artifacts
or objects. Geologist Robert Thorson’s book on New England’s
stone walls commences, “Abandoned stone walls are the signatures
of rural New England.” These “stone walls have an
important story to tell.” Thorson adds, “A stone pulled
from an authentic New England wall speaks, all at once, of ancient
seas, glacial mud, and the tip of a scythe being broken during
spring mowing a century ago.” We can “read”
all sorts of things. Alberto Manguel’s discourse on reading
pictures, notes “I would say that if looking at pictures
is equivalent to reading, then it is a vastly creative form of
reading, a reading in which we must not only put words into sounds
into sense but images into sense into stories.” In other
words, reading pictures can be complex and confusing. Pictures
provide stories, riddles, witnesses, nightmares, reflections,
philosophies, memories, theatrical performances, and the like,
sometimes all at once or sometimes bits at a time as experienced
by different individuals at different times and at different cultures.
Reading these documents is a complicated and challenging process,
for sure, but every aspect of the effort involves some aspect
of what can be termed “information.” The Irish historian
R. F. Foster describes a visit to a country estate where when
doing some historical research he encountered a story about the
reluctance to cut down an old tree in the late nineteenth century
because it was “unlucky.” When some workers finally
agreed to remove the tree, it was discovered that the tree was
“densely peppered with lead.” Foster continues: “The
tree stood for more than bad luck. In the 1798 Rising, particularly
bloody [in the area of the estate], local rebels had been tied
to the tree and shot. The memory persisted, and the taboo: the
actual association was suppressed, whether for reasons of tactfulness
or trauma. Or both.”
Brown and Duguid in their interesting analysis worry that the
“myth of information . . . is overpowering richer explanations,”
whereby we have a “tunnel vision” or “infocentric”
explanation to everything primarily associated (such as computers
and the Web) with the Information Age. Kicking open a broader
array of information documents helps students, and me, to comprehend
that every age, every socio-economic group, every culture is part
of an information culture. For sure, the high powered computer
networks, massive digitization projects, the pervasive and daily
dumping of email messages are all part of something that seems
somewhat unique or special to our times, but it is certain that
most people in most eras believed themselves to be immersed in
information in very similar ways. Michael Pollan describes reading
books in this way: “Rather than a means to an end, the deep
piles of words on the page comprised for me a kind of soothing
environment, a plush cushion into which sometimes I would remember
almost nothing the moment I lifted myself out of the newspaper
or magazine or paperback in which I’d been immersed. . .
. Mostly I just let the print wash over me, as if it were indeed
warm water, destined to swirl down the drain of my forgetfulness.”
In the same way we are surrounded by objects that can be read
(sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively). We must, for example,
learn that museum exhibitions are “fundamentally theatrical,
for they are how museums perform the knowledge they create.”
We learn to read the weather: “Weather writes, erases and
rewrites itself upon the sky with the endless fluidity of language;
and it is with language that we have sought throughout history
to apprehend it. Since the sky has always been more read than
measured, it has always been the province of words.” Monuments
or memorials, with or without texts, are the “most traditional
kind of memory object or technology,” and as a result has
to be learned to be read and re-read. Landscapes are covered in
texts, but they can also be read as texts even if no words are
evident. Surveying Antebellum New York, David Henkin notes, “writing
and print appeared on buildings, sidewalks, sandwich-board advertisements,
the pages of personal diaries, classroom walls, Staffordshire
pottery, needlepoint samples, election tickets, and two-dollar
bills, to name just a few locations and contexts.” Looking
over our contemporary cityscape, Dolores Hayden sees that “urban
landscapes are storehouses for these social memories, because
natural features such as hills or harbors, as well as streets,
buildings, and patterns of settlement, frame the lives of many
people and often outlast many lifetimes.”
We could continue this exercise of considering just how far-reaching
the scope of information documents is, and how this provides perhaps
a richer context for considering the salient features of the Information
Age. Suffice it to say that my students seem to have been grasping
that understanding information, and hence the nature of the current
era, is richer and more complicated than they really have generally
thought about before considering a broader array of documents
outside of the most obvious ones. Students, in addition to the
information documents I presented, considered in their own research
projects diaries, nutritional labels on food products, poetry,
tattoos, pictograms, oral tradition and storytelling, music recording
liner notes, personal names, advertisements, cookbooks, county
courthouses, the family snapshot photograph, zines, and comic
books (to report on some of their topics) as other document forms.
Their papers added to a rich discussion enabling us to see that
the world, for generations and across cultures, has been distinguished
by information eras. Just as Robert Darnton has reminded us that
France in the mid-eighteenth century was also an information society
– “we imagine the Old Regime as a simple, tranquil,
media-free world-we-have-lost, a society with no telephones, no
television, no e-mail, Internet, and all the rest. In fact, however,
it was not a simple world at all. It was merely different. It
had a dense communication network made up of media and genres
that have been forgotten” – we can demonstrate how
nearly every era has been one in which information plays a crucial
defining role.
THE SYNDROME OF SAVING EVERYTHING; OR EVERYTHING IS OF EQUAL
VALUE; OR RETHINKING SOME BASIC TENETS OF LIS EDUCATION
One result of seeing all this information and believing that
information technology is the defining metaphor for our present
Information Age is to come to believe that we must also be able
to save everything. It may be that we need to expand our notions
of information away from the purely scientific or theoretical
to a much more practical, working definition or concept. Just
as scholars are working the treasures of eBay because they find
materials they do not believe are held in most archival or library
repositories, information scholars and professionals probably
need to expand how they research, write, and teach about information.
One commentator writes, “Academic sleuths once relied almost
exclusively on the archives of major research libraries to track
down facts and colorful details. Now, historians, literary critics,
and museum archivists across the country incorporate a regular
search of eBay into their research routine.” This assessment
continues, “Overall, the availability on eBay of historical
objects and ephemera from Americans' attics has given scholars
access to information that traditionally has been ignored by major
research institutions.” All this makes sense. It is, however,
quite something else to think that we can save everything that
is on eBay because of its potential information value. Archivists
and other information professionals are waking up to such challenges.
One archivist from South Africa notes, “Even if archivists
in a particular country were to preserve every record generated
throughout the land, they would still have only a silver of a
window into that country’s experience.” We probably
can say this about the task of saving all print and digital information
as well; it is only a miniscule part of all human experience and
for sure only a minor portion of all documents that can be read
in some fashion.
A few years ago most of us would have laughed at even the possibility
that anybody would posit the notion that everything with some
information content or value must be preserved. We would have
thought it outrageously hilarious that someone might have decided
that not only should everything be saved but that it must be saved
in its original format. Then along came novelist and literary
essayist Nicholson Baker and his Double Fold bombshell. The media
took to his rambling, saber-rattling, conspiratorial diatribe
like a duck to water. Laudatory review after laudatory review
appeared, and in short order the word got out that librarians
and archivists were destroyers, that they were violating a sacred
covenant with the public, and that preservation administrators
and conservators alike were willing accomplices in the destruction
of our documentary heritage. The institution that we are now in
was a part of this conspiracy. We were all vandals in the stacks,
as the New York Times Book Review dramatically portrayed on the
cover of its issue reviewing the controversial Baker book. Harken
to me, my fellow vandals!
The purpose of understanding information and the documents that
constitute and convey information is to comprehend that the universe
of documentation is so large that not everything can or should
be saved. As an educator of archivists, members of a professional
group who cleave quite closely to the notion of highly selective
appraisal approaches and results, I work to help their future
colleagues perceive that even every record with archival value
might not be able to be saved. The understanding of the archivist
derives from his or her knowledge about records and record-keeping
systems. Likewise, the reason that we teach a course like Understanding
Information is to assist students to grasp that information and
the information documents are multitudinous, complex, fragile,
ubiquitous, redundant, and constantly expanding in size, scope,
variety, and nature. By understanding what kinds of information
documents society builds on, we can begin to understand what kinds
of decisions must be made about how to manage the information
and its supporting technologies.
The challenge for a library and information science educator
is, of course, that these schools are often easily caught up in
the hype of the information age. We become believers of the importance
of information as the crux of what makes society function. We
become technocrats, immersing people into the nature of tools
as if these tools and the requisite skills to use them are the
only critical matters. Over the years we pushed out rare books
and history of printing courses in order to accommodate more courses
on information technology, partly to grab onto the revenue gravy
train of funding agencies and partly out of belief that the printed
book was dying and digital information was to replace everything.
Now, we find the need to reintroduce new courses because the book
persists and, just as importantly, because the e-book demands
its historical context if we are to understand what it represents.
In order to be able to value the true worth of the present era
and the growth and wonders of the World Wide Web, we must be able
to place it as well into its historical context. Otherwise we
become prey to every new fad, gimmick, buzzword, and trite trend
that runs on newspaper and television advertisements promising
a kind of digital salvation. And our schools do not educate the
next generation of information professionals, but they merely
turn out unquestioning people lacking the big picture or possessing
the skills to be problem solvers, critical analysts, and wise
leaders.
While it is critical for us to understand that we acquire information
from multitudinous sources, we also must recognize that certain
of these sources assume different levels of importance because
of what they document. The memory of the destruction of the Congo
and its people by King Leopold II of Belgium in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries was nearly eradicated because of
the deliberate destruction of the state archives by Leopold and
his officials. Oral tradition and other eyewitness accounts did
not compensate for the loss of the records, or, at least, did
not keep memory of these events alive and vital. What Leopold
did was a deliberate act of wanton destruction, a kind of informational
genocide as well as the more traumatic real kind. If we persist
to believe in all the promises and hype of the Information Age
we will inadvertently destroy the critical information documents
and documentary heritage of our own generation.
Yes, these are exciting, complex, and trying times, and we as
information professionals have a very important role to play in
our society and culture – if we can get our collective minds
and disciplines wrapped about the primary questions and issues.
One university professor commenting on the purpose of higher education
has argued for a “more holistic approach to learning, a
disciplinary training for people who teach in college that takes
into account the fact that we are educators of whole human beings,
a form of higher education that would take responsibility to the
emergence of an integrated person.” This is especially difficult
in a school of information sciences, where tools and numbers and
rhetoric can easily get in the way of teaching the full dimensions
of information use and nature in our lives, places of work, and
society.
Yet, we need to seek out to not just manipulate and massage information,
but to understand it. Otherwise, we are just playing with lots
of stuff and the people and organizations relying on records and
documents for evidence, accountability, and memory will be lost
in cyberspace. Novelist and science fiction writer Bruce Sterling
recently wrote about technology in our Information Age, arguing
that “Technology never leaps smoothly from height to height
of achievement; that’s just technohype, it’s for the
rubes. In the real world, technology ducks, dodges, and limps.”
For Sterling (and for me), both the present and the future are
messy and complex, and the roles that information plays in all
this just as messy and complex. As an information professional
and the educator of information professionals like librarians
and archivists, I have to convey to my students and colleagues,
both in the academy and in the field, that these complexities
are what makes our tasks both so important and interesting. The
sheer bulk of information tests and taunts us, and I love it.
And when I discover that another individual fifty or a hundred
or more years ago also struggled with the same challenges, I am
reassured that the records, documents, and stuff of our present
digital era are worth even more attention and care, connecting
us both to the past and the future while serving the needs of
the present.
In a fascinating history of the compass, Amir Aczel gives us
a glimpse into the complexities of understanding information.
Aczel writes, “Ancient mariners were astute observers –
their trade was not only a science, it was an art.” A mariner
“would use all the tools available to him – astronomical
observations, soundings, estimation of the directions of winds
and currents, and even the directions followed by migrating animals
– to guide his ship as close as possible to its destination.
Once the coastline was sighted, he would use his knowledge of
the terrain to correct the vessel’s heading accordingly
and guide it into port.” Likewise, we need to use all of
our faculties to bear on understanding information and the nature
of our present era. Are we really very different from those of
a century, five centuries, or a thousand years ago in our reliance
on both information and the technologies that support its creation
and use? Yes, the technologies are different, and they pose new
possibilities as well as problems, but how we best use information
may still be as much a factor of cultural, economic, political,
and other dimensions as anything else, necessitating us to be
“astute observer” as well. Many worry that we are
being numbed by all of the information, but I hope my students,
at least, take away with them a greater appreciation of information
and its present age. I hope the tool I, and my colleagues, give
them is the counterpart of the compass for the Information Age
– the ability to think, critique, and find the way.
Thank you.
REFERENCES
- John Man, Alphabeta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2000), 14.
- Winifred Gallagher, Working on God (New York: Random House,
1999), 55.
- Ronald E. Day, The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse,
History, and Power (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois
University Press, 2001).
- Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 55.
- Bill Stumpf, The Ice Palace That Melted Away: How Good Design
Enhances Our Lives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1998), 9.
- Lewis H. Lapham, “Study Hall,” Harper’s
303 (September 2001): 9.
- See, for example, Haynes Johnson’s discussion of these
technologies and the O. J. Simpson trial, the Clinton political
scandals, and corporate influences on society in his The Best
of Times: The Boom and Bust Years of America Before and After
Everything Changed (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2002).
- Debor Spar, Ruling the Waves: Cycles of Discovery, Chaos,
and Wealth from the Compass to the Internet (New York: Harcourt,
Inc., 2001), 3.
- Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and
Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives (New York: Metropolitan books, 2001),
p. 5.
- Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (New York: Perennial
Classics, 2002; org. pub. 1959), 12.
- Stuart E. Eizenstat, Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave
Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II (New York:
Public Affairs, 2003), 100, 346.
- See Richard J. Cox and David A. Wallace, eds., Archives and
the Public Good: Accountability and Records in Modern Society
(Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books, 2002) for numerous case studies
and additional examples.
- Robert Bryce’s Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death
of Enron (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), 12.
- See Thomas K. Landauer, The Trouble with Computers: Usefulness,
Usability, and Productivity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995) and
Abigail J. Sellen, and Richard H. R. Harper. The Myth of the
Paperless Office (Cambridge: MIT, 2001).
- For an example of such promises, consult the writings of Howard
Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (New York:
Perseus Books, 2002); The Virtual Community: Homesteading on
the Electronic Frontier (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993); and
Virtual Reality (New York: Touchstone Book, 1991).
- Jill Andresky Fraser, White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration
of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America (New York: W. W.
Norton & Co., 2001), 10.
- At the beginning of this year the New York Times ran a long,
front page news story about how the current Bush administration
is clamping down on the access to its records. Adam Clymer,
“Government Openness at Issue as Bush Holds On to Records,”
New York Times, January 3, 2003 was a chilling story. Clymer
provided an accounting of all of the various steps taken by
this administration and reasons why such actions are underway
and the picture was not an attractive one: “Some of the
Bush policies, like closing previously public court proceedings,
were prompted by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and are part
of the administration's drive for greater domestic security.
Others, like Vice President Dick Cheney's battle to keep records
of his energy task force secret, reflect an administration that
arrived in Washington determined to strengthen the authority
of the executive branch, senior administration officials say.”
Another recent report confirms such problems. Jack Nelson’s
U.S. Government Secrecy and the Current Crackdown on Leaks,
Working Paper Series #2003-1 (Cambridge: The Joan Shorenstein
Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard University,
2002) describes how the Bush administration has set an “all-time
record” for classifying records, coupled with such sponsored
legislation as the Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Information
Act, and the Homeland Security Act. Nelson describes the history
of such secrecy, dating back to the First World War, but he
primarily focuses on the very recent past because of the greater
intensity of government efforts to be more secret and to stop
up leaks. The most interesting description of activities relates
to an unofficial government body named the “Dialogue,”
a group of media executives and government officials brought
together to try and discuss the nature of information leaks
and their role in a democratic state. “Dialogue”
has been meeting for the past year, and it seems to have made
some positive steps in convincing government officials that
harsher actions taken against individuals who may leak information
is counter to how a democratic society works and, in fact, the
efforts to cease leaks may be impossible and cause damage to
the work of the administration and government agencies. The
report can be found at http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/presspol/publications/papers.htm.
- My view of all this is documented in my The First Generation
of Electronic Records Archivists in the United States: A Study
in Professionalization (New York: Haworth Press, 1994).
- Here is a sampling: David Bearman, Electronic Evidence: Strategies
for Managing Records in Contemporary Organizations (Pittsburgh:
Archives and Museum Informatics, 1994); The Concept of Record:
Report from the Second Stockholm Conference on Archival Science
and the Concept of Record 30-31 May 1996 (Skrifter utgivna av
Riksarkivat 4, 1998); Richard J. Cox, Managing Records as Evidence
and Information (Westport: Conn: Quorum Books, 2001); Cox and
David Wallace, Archives and the Public Good: Accountability
and Records in Modern Society (Westport, Conn.:Quorum Books,
2002); Luciana Duranti, Terry Eastwood, and Heather MacNeil,
Preservation of the Integrity of the Electronic Record (Dorddrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003); Trevor Livelton, Archival
Theory, Records, and the Public (Lanham, Md.: The Society of
American Archivists and the Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1996); Sue
McKemmish and Frank Upward, eds., Archival Documents: Providing
Accountability Through Recordkeeping (Melbourne: Ancora Press,
1993); Heather MacNeil, Trusting Records: Legal, Historical,
and Diplomatic Perspectives (Dorddrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
2000); Elizabeth Shepherd and Geoffrey Yeo, Managing Records:
A Handbook of Principles and Practice (London: Facet Publishing,
2003).
- My main summary of this research is Managing Records as Evidence
and Information (Westport, Conn: Quorum Books, 2001).
- Heather MacNeil, Trusting Records: Legal, Historical, and
Diplomatic Perspectives (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
2000), xi.
- MacNeil, Trusting Records, 96, 98.
- David M. Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents
in the Digital Age (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001), 23.
The other book is John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social
Life of Information (Boston: Harvard Business School Press,
2000).
- Levy, Scrolling Forward, 38.
- Robert M. Thorson, Stone by Stone: The Magnificent History
in New England’s Stone Walls (New York: Walker and Co.,
2002), 1, 9, 229.
- Alberto Manguel, Reading Pictures: What We Think About When
We Look at Art (New York: Random House, 2002; org. pub. 2000),
149.
- R. F. Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It
Up in Ireland (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 211.
- Brown and Duguid, The Social Life of Information, 1, 16, 32.
- Michael Pollan, A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur
Builder (New York: Random House, 1997), 54.
- Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism,
Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998), 3.
- Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds: How An Amateur Meterologist
Forged the Language of the Skies (New York: Picador USA/Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2001), 11.
- Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the Aids
Experience, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1997), 10.
- David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces
in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press,
1998), 6.
- Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public
History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 9.
- Robert Darnton, “An Early Information Society: News
and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” American Historical
Review 105 (February 2000), available at http://www.indiana.edu/~ahr/darnton/.
- Noel C. Paul, “Scholars Scour eBay,” Christian
Science Monitor, January 14, 2003, at http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0114/p11s02-lecs.htm,
accessed January 16, 2003.
- Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Verne
Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, and Razia
Saleh (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 135.
- Nicholson Baker, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on
Paper (New York: Random House, 2001); my own response is Vandals
in the Stacks? A Response to Nicholson Baker’s Assault
on Libraries (Westport, Conn,: Greenwood Press, 2002).
- Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed,
Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Co., 1998).
- Jane Tompkins, A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned
(Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 1996), 218.
- Bruce Sterling, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years
(New York: Random House, 2002), 26.
- Amir D. Aczel, The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention That
Changed the World (San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 2001), 27.
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