The Australian Library Journal

The endemic document

'What do you take with you?' a question which arose in my previous editorial seems to have exercised a number of readers and I have been asking friends, colleagues and acquaintances what they would take. Responses were varied, but in the formulation of answers the question was often reprocessed so that it read 'Which documents do you take with you?' There was also an assumption that that portfolio of essential documents which we all carry round with us all the time, the wallet or purse, was a given, in that nobody nominated credit cards, driver's license - those essential documents which are a sine qua non in our society and our pockets. Some respondents nominated passports, title deeds or citizenship papers, but family photograph albums or their digital equivalents were the most popular choice, and that preferred by all female respondents. A limited sample to be sure, but it raises some interesting questions about how we view those objects which, literally are the evidence of our lives. Ours is without question the most highly-documented society ever to exist, and the tendency for each of us to be the consenting or unwilling subject of many of those documents will increase.

Documents, electronic, plastic and paper, have now become instrumental in the daily lives of each of us as we interact with our context. The creation of documents, their ethical bases, their use and misuse, are central to the work of those professions which practise the various forms of documentary management. If you are a librarian, archivist, records manager, it is essential that you have some understanding of these phenomena of which you may be the custodian, retriever and interpreter. But these are not the only documentary professions; historians, social workers, lawyers, journalists, researchers, authors, a teacher, all need to understand the centrality of documents in our society. Indeed, the life and happiness of the ordinary citizen depend in large measure on the nature of the documents which affect her, in the evolution of the context she is surrounded by.

What is a document? The dictionary shows that the word is derived from the Latin docere: to teach, and that it means 'instruction; a warning; a paper or other material thing affording information, proof or evidence of anything...' So the earliest documents taught, or showed, the significant activities of the relevant group or individual. The famous Domesday Book is a document; James Cook's logbooks are documents; a parliamentary paper is a document; so is a love letter. A coin is, and a bank-note. For each and every one of us, there are, in our daily lives, many documents which have implications for us, and for the administration and management of the society of which we are a part. When our parents marry, or create a formal relationship, there is a document; when we are born, a document records the fact; when we die, likewise. And for all the stages in between, ranging from a supermarket receipt to the entire codified base of the legal system, there are documents.

Books, archives and records are particular forms of documents, and our professions have evolved to specialise in their management and application. But many 'other material things' can provide evidence: an animal track in the sand; an aerial photograph showing prehistoric fields, invisible to the land-bound observer; a faded sign painted on the side of an old building; soil forms on an old battlefield; an old tramway overgrown by the rainforest. Even our selves can perform this evidentiary function: as in the case of the now-famous 'glacier man' of the Austrian Alps, whose winter expedition 5000 years ago resulted in the most extraordinarily informed view yet to emerge regarding him and his social and physical environment.

When humans first began to make records, they described human activities of various kinds The earliest cave paintings show the process of hunting, vital to the survival of Neolithic man; Aboriginal art is similarly focussed on the essential experiences of its creators over very long periods of time: indeed, it may comprise the longest continuous process of documentation in human history. Contemporary documents take a much narrower and in many ways a less humane perspective: they are essentially functional rather than illustrative or narrative. They provide the evidence [from the Latin videre: to see...] in our lives. One cannot even pick up an airline ticket without it. The shift from paper to electronic documents which has taken place over the last twenty years represents one of the great revolutions in the ways in which humans communicate, record, detail and effect their activities: it is not merely that paper documents are being replaced by other materials; the new formats, physical and electronic are more powerful, more active than their immediate predecessors.

What implications does this have for us, for our professions? Most immediate is the question of intellectual property: not far behind are issues of privacy, of improper access, and of our putative right to know what documents exist about us; and then there is the question which once would have come first for us - restrictions on access in the form of censorship. And bestriding, affecting all are the challenges of new formats. As always, the technology has raced ahead of our ability to formulate and agree on rules and to resolve moral and ethical implications. These are touched on directly and indirectly in several of the articles in this issue, but they are not dealt with. Are they being addressed in the academy? I can no longer tell. But it would be interesting to hear how educators are dealing with these immensely complex and important questions.

We have recently moved by silent consent away from mere librarianship to embrace the new discipline and put on the raiments of knowledge management: Standards Australia has recently begun to formulate some tentative drafts in the area. But does this miss the point? Is it not the management of documents which is our core and central concern? Perhaps the documentalists of the 1930s are sniggering in their graves at the great schism which separated them from librarians, now knowledge managers? Especially if what, in the end, we choose to take with us, turns out to be a document.

In this issue Aurorans reveal what happened to their hearts and minds at the recent Aurora Recall in New Zealand; Kirsty Williamson and Marion Bannister report on their workface-centred exercise aimed at facilitating the effective learning of a slew of databases - may there be more of this kind of research coming out of the academy; Ross Harvey, Australia's foremost academic voice on conservation, discusses our lost and missing documentary heritage - and it is of astonishing dimensions; Gillian Hallam and Chris Gissing relate their efforts to connect students with mentors, a program worth emulating; Mark Hoorebeek casts a wreath for the now-defunct Napster, gone but by no means forgotten, and looks at the electronic dragon's teeth sprouting from its grave; Keith Trickey shows how style can displace substance in the search for improvement in public services in the United Kingdom - another example if more were needed, of the impact of the unintended consequence, and Gaby Haddow offers some invaluable observations on the need to qualify health information on the internet. Two-score of book reviews to top it all off.

A note to contributors Please don't send me documents or sub-documents in 'read-only' or padlocked format: in the preparation of copy for this issue, I twice lost a substantial amount of work as Word gave me the illegal operation error message and shut down, taking all the edits to that point with it. In each case the file was not marked 'read-only' when it was first opened, although it speedily reverted to that format when I tripped over the locked sub-document.

One more thing The etymology of the word 'mentor' is sound: that used to indicate a subjective [in the grammatical sense] relationship to a mentor isn't. It also calls up instantly an advertising jingle from a bygone age. You'll find the word in these pages, but only by default. The world of letters will be in the debt of anyone who comes up with a semantically appropriate and more euphonious substitute.