Archival Science 3: 65-66, 2003.

65

Book Review

Bruce W. Dearstyne, Managing Historical Records Programs: A Guide for

Historical Agencies (Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira Press, 2000), 240
pp. $62.00/$24.95. ISBN 0-7425-0282-1

Until recently in the UK, most archivists assumed that the responsible way
of ensuring the future preservation of and access to the records of local
communities was through their deposit in or gift to an established local
authority record office or a specialist repository. Historical societies, literary
institutes, charities, local museums and public libraries were discouraged
from keeping archives, especially if they had no professional archival staff
(which they generally did not) and if they were reliant on volunteer help.
Archivists believed that proper provision could only be made in adequately
staffed and funded record offices, even though this meant removing archives
from their original context. In part, this stems from the century-long tradition
of a network of county record offices across England that offered levels of
service far beyond what a small institution could aspire to. Hard won recog-
nition for the archive profession and its achievements was defended and for
archives of outstanding importance their proper care is clearly paramount.
A more inclusive and flexible approach is now emerging, which takes into
account the value to local communities of all sorts of historical materials.
Against this British perspective, it is almost shocking to read that US State
Historical Records Advisory Boards surveys carried out in the late 1990s
found that less than one third of the historical agencies holding historical
records had a professional staff member, almost one third relied entirely on
volunteers and 40% had budgets below $1000. Dearstyne sounds a cautionary
note when he remarks 'how easy, and common, it is to underestimate what it
takes to manage historical records in a responsible manner and on a sustained
basis'. However, he does not advise historical agencies to give up, rather he
sets about writing a soundly based and practical handbook 'intended to help
these agencies find solutions and approaches that best fit their needs'.
The handbook is organised into ten thematic chapters which address the
framework and management of archives programmes (e.g. prerequisites for
programme success, leadership and management) and the key professional
activities (e.g. arrangement and description, preservation, services to users).
There is a brief look at the future in chapters on electronic archives and on
66 BOOK REVIEW

current trends. Almost 100 pages are devoted to practical appendices, which
usefully gather material from a variety of sources and reproduce it with some
additional commentary. Each chapter (except chapters 6 and 10) ends with
a handful of questions, designed to help the reader to check their records
programme against good practice.
I have some differences of opinion on some of the matters discussed.
Chapter 1 defines the terms used. Dearstyne suggests that records are defined
by their informational content: I think that their essence is that they provide
evidence of an activity and this is what makes a record distinct from an infor-
mation product. He also says that 'document means approximately the same
thing as record' which it does not. 1 I dislike the use of 'collection' to mean
fonds or record group: I think that it should only be applied to artificially
created 'collections' such as those amassed by an antiquarian.
Apart from a short discussion of records management on page 2, this vital
part of our work is not mentioned. The justification may be that the book is
directed at acquisitive archives (Dearstyne's 'collecting programs') but they
all ought to be encouraged to have an interest in the record creating activities
of the parent body especially when the records are created electronically.
Dearstyne effectively admits this difficulty in chapter 9 when he suggests
that the best option may be for electronic records to stay in the organizations
that created them. Local authority record offices in the UK commonly neglect
the management of the current records of their parent body, to the ultimate
detriment of the archives, and this book perpetuates this weakness.
My other main criticism of the book is that it makes little reference to inter-
national approaches and standards. For example, in chapter 6, Arrangement
and Description, while MARC, AACR2 and Library of Congress Subject
Headings are discussed, there is no mention of the International Standards
on Archival Description (such as ISAD(G)) published by the International
Council on Archives. Although there may be practical reasons for such an
approach it limits the usefulness of the book to audiences working outside
the North American tradition.
These points aside, Dearstyne has produced a useful, practical handbook
which will no doubt be invaluable to its target audience. It is to be hoped that
it will contribute to the strengthening of historical records programmes along
the lines of Dearstyne's recommendations.

Elizabeth Shepherd
School of Library, Archive and Information Studies
University College London, London, UK

1 For a discussion of these and other terms, see E. Shepherd and G. Yeo, Managing
Records: A Handbook of Principles and Practice (London: Facet Publishing, 2003) pp. 2-5,
13-17.
 Archival Science 3: 67-74, 2003. 67

Book Review

Albert Borgmann, Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the

Turn of the Millennium. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Since Socrates, an enduring pre-occupation of western philosophical thought

has been the search for answers to the basic ethical question, what is the
life worth living? Any contemporary exploration of that question inevitably
entails consideration of the effects of information technology on the human
condition. In Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of
the Millennium, Albert Borgmann explores some of those effects and offers
a vision of the life worth living that is rooted in the symmetry of humanity
and reality, a symmetry that, Borgmann believes, has eroded with the rise
of technological information. While HoMing On To Reality does not address
archival concerns in direct terms, it is eminently relevant to them.
Borgmann is a professor of philosophy at the University of Montana
whose field of interest is the philosophy of society and culture with a special
emphasis on technology. Holding On to Reality builds on themes the author
has explored in earlier works such as Technology and the Character of
Contemporary Life (1984) and Crossing the Postmodern Divide (1992). In
it he seeks to elaborate a theory and an ethics of information, "a theory to
illuminate the structure of information and an ethics to get the moral of its
development" (p. 6).
The relationship between information and reality, Borgmann argues, is
grounded in the interplay between signs and things, between reference and
presence. He arranges the world of information into three categories: natural,
cultural, and technological. Natural information is information about reality.
Its central structure is a relation and instantiation of intelligence, a person,
a sign, a thing, and a context, in which, "intelligence [i.e., the capacity to
retain information] provided, a person is informed by a sign about some thing
within a certain context" (p. 20). Natural information turns on natural signs
- landmarks - that bring things remote in time and space closer - a moun-
tain peak that points the way to hunting and fishing grounds, fire tings that
mark the site of a camp, cairns that mark burial sites, stone altars that mark
places of ancient worship, and so on. For Borgmann, the primary benefit of
natural information is its perspicuity: the interplay between signs and things,
68 BOOK REVIEW

between reference and presence is clear and coherent. "Natural signs disclose
the more distant environment, yet they do not get in the way of things. A
natural sign, having served as a point of reference, turns back into a t h i n g . . .
Thus the ancestral environment, however and wherever humans moved in it,
maintained a focal point of presence with a penumbra of signs pointing to the
wider world" (p. 25).
Cultural information, on the other hand, may be about reality but, more
distinctively, it is information for the shaping of reality. It turns on conven-
tional signs - letters and texts, lines and graphs. The key difference between
natural and cultural information resides in the way in which each emerges and
presents itself. "Natural information emerges of itself, intimates rather than
conveys its message, and disappears. Cultural information, to the contrary, is
wrested and abstracted from reality, carries a definite content, and assumes an
enduring shape. Before it can be encountered it has to be produced by human
hands. Yet even before it can be produced, the signs that are used to extract
and convey information must have evolved" (p. 59).
The emergence of cultural information is associated with the rise of
literacy. Drawing on the work of Rosalind Thomas and Michael Clanchy,
who have traced the transition from oral memory to written record in ancient
Greece and medieval England respectively, Borgmann gives a fascinating
account of the development of signs from monumental to instrumental
containers of information and traces their affiliation, as external markers of
memory, first with forms of piety (cairns, altars), then with numeracy (tallies,
clay tokens) and, finally, with literacy (logographic symbols, alphabetic
writing). Alphabetic writing constitutes a particularly efficient and powerful
kind of information, the effects of which Borgmann describes as both alien-
ating and liberating: alienating, because it allows for an endless accumulation
of information that, unchecked, can lead to confusion rather than perspicuity;
and also because, with writing, three of the terms of natural information -
intelligence, persons, and context - drift into the background, leaving only
signs and things. At the same time, writing can be a tool of liberation because
it is more widely and easily available than natural or oral information and
opens up the world.
Alphabetic writing demonstrated that language had a structure that could
be analyzed into a finite number of definite elements - spoken language into
sounds, written language into letters. It also cultivated a belief in the possi-
bility of disclosing the structure of reality itself. As Borgmann observes, "the
search for structure is the quest for the secret of the nature of reference - the
tie between signs and things. The driving force is the unspoken hope or belief
that we can come to know the world clearly and comprehensively if we can
 BOOK REVIEW 69

penetrate the mysteries of structure, that is, uncover the ultimate constituents
and the lawful arrangement of signs and things" (p. 59).
Alphabetic writing exemplifies the analytical side of structure. Building,
on the other hand, reveals its synthetic side. "Builders using bricks demon-
strated how one kind of element can yield all kinds of structures - platforms,
stairs, columns, walls, and vaults - and how these can be combined into
sewers, farmsteads, residences, palaces, and temples" (p. 64). Borgmann
takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the evolution of the language of
building and construction from geometry, which revealed the structure of
the world's form, to Newtonian physics, which disclosed the structure of its
content.
As the author points out, the structure of reality can be imposed as well
as revealed. The extraction of information from reality by means of structural
devices is exemplified in the invention of the clock, which fixed measures
for time, and the development of the grid, which fixed measures for space.
Writing itself constituted an orderly grid of information, the power of which
increased exponentially with the invention of printing in the sixteenth century.
In the same period, musical notation - which allowed for the plotting of pitch
and duration over time - established itself as a coordinate system for fixing
yet another realm of reality. In all these examples, Borgmann argues, informa-
tion about reality resulted in a transformation of reality. Printing, for example,
"created an entirely new medium of information. It liberated texts, maps and
tables from their unique incarnations and projected them on a universal screen
that was accessible to many people at once in many places and at any time. It
was a surface that in our time has unfolded a third dimension and has come
to be known as cyberspace" (pp. 82-83).
The history of the search for the lawful structure of things may be read
as a series of efforts to transcend or at least subordinate contingency, which
Borgmann defines as "the presence of the unforethinkable". Structure aligns
itself with conventional signs, "which have the precision and generality of
a concept", while contingency aligns itself with things, "which have the
richness and particularity of a picture". The former is associated with the
production of information (books, musical scores, plans), the latter, with
its realization (reading, playing music, building). As Borgmann interprets
the concept, contingency "signifies the way things make contact with one
another and coalesce" and is analogous to consummation. Such interpreta-
tion is evident in his reading of the chequered history of the building of
Freiburg Minster in the Upper Rhine Valley between 1200 and 1513. "From
the standpoint of rigorous and total design, the construction of the church
is a history of false starts and aborted plans, of incongruities and accidents,
of contingency, in the sense of coincidence. But this point of view fails to
70 BOOK REVIEW

reveal how the several parts and periods of construction came to converge
in a coherent whole" (p. 109). For Borgmann, the presence of contingency
in the world (the unpredictability or given ness of things) does not reduce to
coincidence or meaninglessness or randomness; it speaks, rather, to what he
calls "the unsurpassable eloquence of reality".
If the growth of cultural information is a history of efforts to penetrate the
mystery of structure, the growth of technological information, i.e., the infor-
mation that is measured in bits, ordered by Boolean algebra and conveyed
by electrons, is a history of efforts to penetrate the mystery of contingency.
As Borgmann explains, the lineage of the term information may be traced
back to the Latin verb informare, which meant, "to impose a form on some
thing, particularly on the mind, in order to instruct and improve it" (p. 9).
Information as a word and a concept did not rise to prominence, however,
until its appearance, in 1948, in an article written by Claude Shannon entitled
"The Mathematical Theory of Communication". In that article, which became
the landmark of information theory, Shannon described how to measure infor-
mation and how to judge the fidelity and economy of communicating it. The
promise of information theory was that it would enable us, "to measure,
control, and enhance information about reality and so enlarge and enrich the
scope of human experience" (p. 133). Technological information appeared to
be the tangible means of fulfilling that promise.
Borgmann argues that, whereas natural information is information about
reality and cultural information is information for reality, technological infor-
mation is distinctively information as reality. He takes the reader through
the elementary measures of technological information (the electron, the bit,
content), its basic structures (binary notation; Boolean algebra; transistor and
computer) and its paradigmatic expressions (geographic information systems,
virtual reality) to illustrate how technological information detaches itself
from reality and offers itself as something that can rival and replace it.
He examines specifically how geographic information systems, with their
capacity to make visible otherwise invisible things on, above, and beneath
the earth, create the illusion of a fully disclosed, transparent reality, and how
virtual reality, with its intense vividness and interactivity, tends to flatten
and trivialize actual reality and blur the boundary between fact and fiction.
"At its limit, virtual reality takes up with the contingency of the world by
avoiding it altogether. The computer, when it harbors virtual reality, is no
longer a machine that helps us cope with the world by making a beneficial
difference in reality; it makes all the difference and liberates us from actual
reality" (p. 183). Intelligence, things, and context - three of the original five
terms of natural information - all evaporate, leaving only persons and signs.
Borgmann's description of virtual reality mirrors Jean Baudrillard's notion
of hyperreality, where reality disappears beneath the seductive surfaces of
 BOOK REVIEW 71

simulation. There is, however, a radical difference in tone: where Baudrillard

is ironic, Borgmann is elegiac about the loss of the real.
The apparent rigour and robustness of technological information, which
derive from its binary nature, camouflage a fundamental fragility. This
fragility exists at a number of levels. At the level with which archivists are
most familiar, technological information is physically fragile because of its
dependence on hardware and software. Its massive complexity also makes it
structurally fragile. The irony here is that, while this complexity is designed
to address the contingency of reality, "growing complexity gives contingency
more and more openings for revenge" (p. 196). Finally, technological infor-
mation is culturally fragile because it is parasitic on the reality it mimics
and a feeble reflection of it. As Borgmann observes, "... seeing Holbein's
The Ambassadors come up on the screen is a tepid encounter compared to
walking through the neoclassical spaces of the museum [the National Gallery
in London] and coming face to face with the painting that celebrated the
opulence of French nobility just when the balance of power began to shift
toward the English and the middle class" (p. 199).
The fragility of technological information does not invalidate the tremen-
dous accomplishments of information theory or computer science, but it does
suggest the need for deliberation, discrimination and restraint when incor-
porating technological information into contemporary culture. "The task, it
would seem, is a matter of commensurating the fluidity of information tech-
nology with the stability of the things and practices that have served us well
and we continue to depend on for our material and spiritual well-being . . . .
What is needed is a sense for the liabilities of technological information and
an ear for the changing voices of traditional reality" (p. 201). The ways in
which technological information currently is being incorporated into areas
such as education, research, scholarship, fiction, and business, however, does
not instil confidence that such commensuration is taking place. In all these
areas of human activity, Borgmann fears, consumption is displacing engage-
ment as information technology is promoted and implemented as an end in
itseif rather than a means towards some beneficial end. What is being lost in
the process is the sense of depth and continuity that previously gave meaning
to these activities.
Borgmann's description of the effects of information technology on tradi-
tional ways of experiencing reality is reminiscent, in some respects, of
Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction". ~ In that essay Benjamin argued that, with modem forms of
technological representation such as photography and cinema, the work of
art has become endlessly reproducible. Because a reproduction lacks a unique

1 .In Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New
York: Schocken,1968), pp. 217-252.
72 BOOK REVIEW

presence in time and space, it no longer possesses the "aura" of the original,
i.e., the ritual or cult value that attaches to a traditional work of art and which
is a prerequisite to the notion of authenticity. As uniqueness and permanence
give way to transitoriness and reproducibility, the exhibition value of the work
of art displaces its original, cult value. Benjamin views this state of affairs
with some ambivalence, recognizing that its effects can be both alienating
and emancipating for aesthetic and political representation.
Borgmann is similarly ambivalent about the consequences of informa-
tion technology for the representation and experience of reality. And, like
Benjamin, he sometimes overstates both the alienating and the liberating
effects of the developments he describes. It is simply too early to know
whether and in what specific ways information technology is disfiguring
education, research and scholarship, for example. Nor is there any evidence
to support his claim that, on the positive side of the ledger, "the recent burst of
information technology h a s . . , silenced the voices of overt misery, of disease,
poverty, and violence, both here and around the globe" (p. 232).
Inevitably, Borgmann believes, the current excesses of information tech-
nology will undergo some correction, which will lead to greater clarity of
technological information; nevertheless, he argues, some decisive action is
needed if we are to recover the sense of depth and continuity that has been
lost in contemporary culture. The action he advocates amounts to a righting of
the balance between information and reality and among natural, cultural, and
technological information. This involves, among other things, the restoration
of a spatial and temporal order to information that will allow for its trans-
formation into knowledge. "The inherent fluidity and facility of information
technology may move us to consider a radically different way of presenting
information, some method of selecting, stabilizing, and secluding information
so that it will invite quiet attention, and a manner of making it spare and
austere enough to engage memory and imagination. We may find a new regard
for an old vessel of information - the book. And when we have recovered
the book, we may want to restore the place that used to be dedicated to the
quietude and concentration the book inspires - the library" (p. 212).
In the end, the life worth living, as Borgmann sees it, is one in which
the contingency and heaviness of reality are faced up to and embraced, in
which both natural and cultural environments - wildernesses and cities - are
respected and sustained, in which communal spaces for celebration, reflection
and remembrance are protected and preserved, and where human redemption
is sought through faith in the unsurpassable moral eloquence of reality, an
eloquence that transcends both structure and contingency. Borgmann's vision
of faith in the possibility of redemption and remembrance, while couched in
the Christian terms of salvation, is a broadly ethical one that speaks to the
profound connectedness of humanity and reality.
 BOOK REVIEW 73

So what insights might archivists glean from this erudite, elegiac and,
occasionally, rhapsodic meditation on the nature of information and reality?
It is reasonably safe to say that Borgmann's analysis is relevant to archivists
given that records are embodiments of both cultural and technological infor-
mation. More specifically, his analysis carries at least three implications for
the way archivists fulfill their duties as custodians of records and as mediators
of access.
The first implication concerns the importance of recognising and accep-
ting the limits of what we can accomplish. As custodians of records, archivists
face the daunting task of identifying, preserving and making available for use
records of enduring value. To meet that task, we have devoted considerable
time and energy in recent years to the development of standards - for creating
and maintaining records, for managing the metadata associated with them,
for appraising and describing them, and for assessing and maintaining their
trustworthiness - all of which are, essentially, efforts to impose structure and
overcome contingency. However laudable and necessary these efforts are,
their realization will always be constrained by the unforethinkable. We cannot
escape, for example, the contingency of preservation; what gets preserved
will always be, to an extent that probably discomfits us, as much a matter of
accident as design.
There is a particular irony that pervades the effort to develop and imple-
ment metadata standards for managing electronic records. The irony is that
the volume and complexity of the metadata necessary to elucidate and per-
petuate the meaning and context of electronic records and to manage them
physically over time increase exponentially their structural fragility, pro-
viding contingency with new opportunities for revenge. If the recommended
standards were to be implemented fully it is likely that the electronic systems
in which they sat would collapse under the sheer weight of the metadata.
Moreover, as signs, records are, necessarily, underdetermined realizations of
reality. Even if we were capable of preserving all the necessary metadata, the
records would remain a pale reflection of the reality they purport to represent.
Given the inherent ambiguity of signs, the meaning, context, and truth-value
of records, both as representations and reflections of reality, are bound to
elude us to some extent.
The second implication concerns the need for archivists to observe dis-
crimination and restraint in using information technology. As mediators of
access to archival holdings, archivists have an obligation to take advantage of
the opportunities information technology provides for making records of all
kinds available in digital form. The retrospective conversion of analog records
into digital form for the purpose of enhancing remote access is a logical and
beneficial development in the promotion of open and equal access to archives,
a development that began with the opening of archival institutions in the early
74 BOOK REVIEW

part of the nineteenth century. The increasing (some might say excessive)
emphasis that public archives and their funding agencies place on retro-
spective conversion projects is evidence of a powerful desire to expand the
volume and diversity of digital resources available to the research community
and the general public. The benefits, however, must be balanced against the
costs. "Watching these activities", Seamus Ross observes, "one senses the
wholesale rush to retroconvert our documentary heritage into virtual form
without a realisation that we are potentially exposing this virtual material to
an increased risk of loss". 2 Quite apart from the physical fragility of these
digital resources, the costs of preserving them are enormous; such costs do
not obviate or reduce the costs associated with the preservation of analog
records and may even endanger such preservation through sheer neglect and
lack of available funding.
Moreover, it would be a great pity if our efforts to democratize and enrich
access resulted in a degradation and flattening out of the meaning and value of
records as representations of reality. While it is true that, as signs, records are
pale reflections of the reality they represent, they are, nevertheless, laden with
ideological and cultural meanings. The stories records tell are complex and
ambiguous and they can be as oppressive and empowering as reality itself.
Their meaning and value as representations, therefore, should not be reduced
to mere display and infotainment. This is not to say that looking at records as
display and infotainment is illegitimate or even inappropriate; the point is to
ensure that this does not become the only way we look at them.
The third implication relates to the continuing importance of archival
institutions. The incorporation of virtual archives into contemporary docu-
mentary culture does not obviate or lessen the significance of and need for
real archives, i.e., archives as public, communal spaces for research and
reflection. Though it is more honoured in the breach than the observance,
archival institutions serve an essential symbolic function as monumental sites
of cultural remembrance (with all the attendant ambiguities of meaning that
such function implies) and as visible expressions of a culture's depth and
continuity. HoMing on to Reality is an eloquent reminder of the moral value
of that function and the consequent need for archivists to work toward its
meaningful realization.

Heather MacNeil
School for Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS)
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada

2 Seamus Ross, "Changing Trains at Wigan: Digital Preservation and the Future of Scho-
larship", (London: British Library National Preservation Office, 2000), available at www.bl.
uk/seIvices/preservation/occpaper.pdf.