Is Digital Different? How Information Creation, Capture, Preservation and Discovery Are Being Transformed

Citation

Geoffrey Yeo (2016), "Is Digital Different? How Information Creation, Capture, Preservation and Discovery Are Being Transformed", Records Management Journal, Vol. 26 No. 1, pp. 104-106. https://doi.org/10.1108/RMJ-12-2015-0043

This volume of contributed chapters is concerned with the impact of new technologies on the field of information. Its contributors are practitioners and scholars based in Great Britain, the USA and Australia. After a brief introduction by the editors, Michael Moss opens the book with a chapter entitled “What is the same and what is different?”. Next eight chapters address digital search and retrieval (David Nicholas and David Clark), the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the semantic web (Norman Gray), crowdsourcing (Ylva Berglund Prytz), trust frameworks in information management (Scott David and Barbara Endicott-Popovsky), digital finding aids for archives (Tim Gollins and Emma Bayne), security and risk (Barbara Endicott-Popovsky), moral and intellectual property rights (Gavan McCarthy and Helen Morgan) and the implications of digital technology for humanities research (David Thomas and Valerie Johnson). According to the editors’ introduction, the book’s purpose is “to introduce students […] to the issues surrounding the transition from an analogue to a digital environment”.

The title of the book is provocative. In recent years, many people have told us that everything is different in the digital era. In writings about record-keeping, it has often been claimed that the advent of digital technology not only creates new access opportunities and preservation challenges, but also obliges us to rethink the nature of records and archives or the fundamental principles and aims of the record-keeping profession. From an information philosophy perspective, Floridi (2014) has argued that the digital revolution changes our understandings of human identity and existence as profoundly as the earlier conceptual revolutions generated by the works of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud. However, views such as these are far from universally accepted. The shift to digital technology undoubtedly allows us to do many things more easily, faster or on a larger scale than analogue methods would permit; where record-keeping is concerned, it undeniably requires us to assimilate new practices and adopt new ways of working. But can we really say that the digital world is totally different from everything that preceded it? Is it different at every level of understanding, or are there points of continuity as well as difference? These are important questions, and when I was invited to review this book, I looked forward to reading what its editors and contributors had to say on these matters.

The book’s title asks whether digital is different, but its subtitle poses a different question; not whether, but how digital technologies are transforming the creation, capture, preservation and discovery of information. The subtitle clearly implies that the answer to “is digital different?” must be “yes”. The editors’ introduction similarly asserts that the “new environment … is transforming the information landscape” and indeed is “challenging the very existence of the traditional library and archive”. Moss’s opening chapter, however, concludes that “there is more that is the same in the digital environment than is different”, and adds that those who fail to recognize continuities do not understand the roles of records managers, archivists and librarians. His arguments are wide-ranging and persuasive, but many readers are likely to observe that this chapter markedly diverges from the stance taken in the editors’ introduction.

The eight chapters that follow take the book in a rather different direction. Each offers a detailed overview of a topic of current concern in the digital arena. All these chapters are written by experts who provide a cogent account of their subject, but only Thomas and Johnson fully engage with the question posed in the book’s title. The chapter by Thomas and Johnson perceptively discusses whether the arrival of digital technology has been “truly transformative” of humanities research, but the other contributors offer only the briefest of thoughts on the digital transition or ignore it altogether. Most emphasize the challenges or opportunities presented by particular current technologies, and many focus on descriptions of recent projects. It turns out that much of the book serves as an introduction to specific topics in the new digital world, rather than a study of the broader shift from analogue to digital.

The topics examined in these chapters seem a fairly random selection, and there are many others that might have been equally representative of the digital environment. I could find no allusions to, for example, public sector data re-usability, encryption, visual analytics or the OAIS and InterPARES approaches to digital preservation. E-discovery, the cloud, mobile devices and ubiquitous computing are mentioned only in passing; the “big data” movement is discussed in relation to academic research, but not in terms of its burgeoning roles in corporate planning, marketing and investment strategies. Of course, it would have been impossible to cover everything in a book of just over 200 pages, but the editors give no explanation of how or why their particular choice of topics and contributors was made. It appears that most or all of the contributors have worked with Moss or Endicott-Popovsky; about half have archival interests, while the others come from a range of information-related backgrounds. None are records managers; apart from Moss’s chapter, the book makes few direct references to records management concerns. The chapters that are not written by archivists rarely mention records or archives, and some of the chapters written by archivists pay little heed to the wider information scene beyond the cultural heritage field. Although each chapter works well on its own terms, the book as a whole lacks a sense of unity. The book’s title is eye-catching, but does not fully reflect its contents. Is Digital Different? is certainly worth reading, but greater coherence and a closer alignment between the title and the subject matter would have been welcome.