From Gutenberg to Global

ARMS, William Y. Digital Libraries MIT Press, 2000 ISBN 0 262 01180 8 £29.95 287p.

BORGMAN, Christine L. From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World MIT Press, 2000 ISBN 0 262 02473 X £27.95 324p.

These two companion volumes are the first in a series “Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing”. Books on digital libraries may seem a contradiction in terms, but the series editor justifies this as allowing contemplation and perspective to an area where development is almost too rapid for assimilation. The two volumes come from the imprint of a distinguished university; they have notably heavyweight authors; both authors are noted anglophiles. All of this suggests a treat in store before a page has been turned.

Arms is one of the co-founders of D-Lib Magazine, a five year old veteran of the digital scene and this shows in a book which attempts to concentrate on current activity, trends and research rather than indulging in speculation. It is a celebration of the present, a present defined by the writing of a book in 1997-8 which has not then appeared in print for a further eighteen months. Nevertheless Arms seeks to provide an overview of the digital library scene. His own background is in computing but his specialising in digital libraries for many years leaves him particularly well suited to bridge what he quite properly sees as the very different traditions of information professionals and physical scientists. He offers a brisk workmanlike style with good plain English descriptions and histories. Interspersed with the text are a series of “panels” offering encyclopaedia style definitions of everything from TCP/IP to MIME. The chapters offer a trot through the major issues: economic and legal, rights management, user interfaces, metadata, object identifiers, archiving, publishing and considers the needs and ambitions of the various stakeholding communities.

It is a little difficult to be sure of the target for Arms book. It is essentially descriptive. It reads like a primer or an encyclopaedia on digital libraries– and as such is excellent. It synthesises history and practice in a huge field and does so well, but inevitably this leads to a degree of superficiality in describing many of the topics. It desperately needs but does not provide a bibliography or references or suggestions for further reading on core topics. Indeed he concludes by making the point that in writing the book he has discovered that digital libraries already exist, for he has used several hundred sources, all of them available electronically on the Internet. By comparison Borgman moves to the other extreme and provides a forty page bibliography. Cautious little justificatory notes by author and editor (Arms) preceding this may be read as implying a significant difference of view on the value of bibliography.

Borgman offers cold showers and pragmatism. She seeks to tone down the wilder claims of the fanatics and concentrates on human behaviour and how what we know of it can sensibly be applied to the design of the infrastructures which will appeal to people. Although the book argues for a pragmatic centralist approach, it reflects a very broad literature which is usefully summarised in reaching her position. The book spends much of its time attempting to define terminology, reflecting on different usages and their value. Carefully constructed overviews of research allow her to move forward to establish the centralist position that users will absorb relevant technology or parts of it rather than technology pushing users into unwanted activities. User behaviour will determine the rate and nature of adoption or adaption of technology. There is a notably good chapter on the information life cycle which offers a critical view of the debate on the future of scholarly publishing. Generally however the recurring theme is how to make systems usable and user-friendly. Borgman favours radical incrementalism or extensive fine-tuning in the real world. The concluding chapter includes a useful study of how East and Central Europe went from minimal computing and telecommunications infrastructure to being inundated as the Cold War ended.

Despite the common theme of digital libraries, there is surprisingly little overlap between the two books, perhaps because of the quite different approaches. Arms offers the textbook approach with the reflection perhaps being that of the warrior-practitioner who has been at the heart of many of the battles and debates he describes. Borgman is much more rigidly scholarly in approach attempting the detached eye of the observer, weighing the evidence and reaching balanced conclusions. She aims to stimulate discussion on improving access to information where Arms aims to describe the world he sees around him. Both books aim to bring together the relevant work from many disciplines. In both, most of the focus is on the United States, perhaps most notable when dealing with legal issues such as copyright. Borgman is perhaps better in her sense of the Internet as a multilingual and multicultural space. Both stress the immaturity of the technology and the immaturity of the thinking about it, stressing that we are at the start of an information revolution, not its end; but both are quite clear that the digital library is here to stay.

These are both in their own ways excellent books. There are, as always, minor irritants such as over-use of paragraph headings and some fairly dense acronym rich sections. However the books do not disappoint and are important texts which, if unlikely to be seminal works, will be cited regularly by those building digital libraries and they give promise that future volumes in the series should be eagerly anticipated.