Paper to Digital: Documents in the Information Age

Citation

Spink, A. (2009), "Paper to Digital: Documents in the Information Age", Online Information Review, Vol. 33 No. 4, pp. 839-840. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520910985774

This book by Ziming Lui is an exploratory survey of aspects of the human use of paper and digital documents. Aspects of digital documents are explored including preservation, reading behaviour, credibility and cultural issues. Lui discusses the future of paper in a world of digital documents. Many chapters are updated and expanded versions of previous journal articles written by the author. The book addresses some important questions, including “Is the paperless society really possible?” and “What is the future of paper in the digital age?” After nine chapters of analysis the author's major conclusion is that “It is very hard to predict exactly what will happen to paper in the future because there are a number of subtle interactions of forces and trends.”

On the positive side, the book is an interesting and exploratory overview of the world of digital documents. The book is easy to read and digest. Although the chapters talk about research, the book is largely written for information professionals and may be a useful text for courses at schools offering a focus in library and information science.

Alternatively, how this book relates to the book about digital documents and scholarly communication written by Christine Borgman is not clear. Lui does not cite the earlier Borgman book or discuss how Borgman's work relates to the current text. From this perspective and with the large number of reprinted journal articles as chapters in the book, the reader is not sure what novel or new ideas are being presented or how Lui's work relates to Borgman's work.

The book seems limited to an opportunity for the author to reprint papers rather than providing a coherent set of new ideas for the scholarly field. The book is also written largely from a US viewpoint without much international perspective. Also, the book largely does not say much about the web. The author's perspective seems to be based in a more traditional view of people's information behaviour based in libraries or digital libraries without much understanding of the role of the web as a realm for digital documents.

Overall, the author needs to write another book that provides a more substantial overview of digital information and includes some new insights into the human creation and use of digital documents.