Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age.

• Author: Taylor, Sheila
• Position: Book Review

TITLE: Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age

AUTHOR: David M. Levy

ISBN: 1-55970-553-1

PUBLISHER: Arcade Publishing

PUBLICATION DATE: 2001

LENGTH: 212 pages

PRICE: $24.95 U.S.; $38.95 in Canada; $11 U.S. for Adobe e-book available directly from the publisher

SOURCES: Arcade Publishing (www.arcadepub.com); AOL Time Warner Book Group (800.759.0190); and Amazon.com (www.amazon.com)

RIM professionals are skilled in managing documents. We organize them, store them, retrieve them, and otherwise help to manage their lifecycles. But rarely do we reflect upon them. What are they? What purposes do they serve? What will be their fate in the digital world?

In Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age, David Levy reflects upon the nature of documents and illustrates both the continuity and the differences between earlier documents and their newer, digital counterparts. He also demonstrates that the effects of digital technologies on documents, as well as on our writing and reading habits, are analogous to the impacts of earlier technologies (e.g., the printing press) on the documents used by our ancestors.

Scrolling Forward is a well-written and thoroughly researched treatise on the role of documents in society. The author defines documents as "talking things" and asserts that documents speak for us while acting on our behalf and in our absence. Using the deceptively simple example of a cash register receipt, the author describes the many roles that a document can play. Those roles include serving as a historical document (a snapshot of something that happened), a "proof of purchase," and as an agent in mankind's efforts to transcend death and achieve immortality. The author also examines the characteristics of documents and illustrates how they can be both fixed and fluid, thereby debunking the common belief that the inherent difference between paper and digital documents is the fact that paper documents are fixed while digital documents are fluid.

Chapter four is of particular interest to RIM professionals because it traces the evolution of mankind's use of documents for administrative purposes to regulate institutional and personal practices (the discipline otherwise known as "records management," although the author does not use that term). In addition to celebrating this role, chapter four also explores what the author terms the "abusive side of documents" because humans often feel trapped in a tangle...