Awhile back I was at a party where I talked with a friend who is also interested in libraries and more specifically archives. When he found out I was interested he recommended that I read Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age
by David Levy, which I promptly purchased the next week. This slim (202 pages to be exact) book is full of information about the place of the document in today's world. Even though the book was published in 2001, it is still right on target with the way we see documents in a digital world. And it takes a surprisingly personal approach towards them and made me see documents in a way I hadn't really considered or just maybe couldn't verbalize before; "For if documents are surrogates for us, they are extensions of ourselves, parts of ourselves. The best and the worst of ourselves can be found in them"(38).
The book starts out with the receipt. Receipts are very ordinary, and a lot of times I tell the cashier I don't want a receipt anymore because I know it will just sit in my wallet for three months and then I will throw it away. But receipts, as Levy shows us, are actually full of information. They tell us where a person went, the day they went there, possibly what they purchased, how much the item cost on that day, how much tax was or if the item was taxed, and anymore a lot of receipts will tell you who it was that rang you up. Receipts are also, as I said, easily discardable and the reason for this is because paper can be mass produced now. This, however, has not always been the case and the fact that we can so easily print and toss receipts says a lot about the society we live in today. This is just one of many examples Levy makes in the book, although it is one of the ones I enjoyed the most. Another section I really enjoyed was the chapter entitled Libraries and the Anxiety of Order, which is all about the basic human need to organize and how libraries are a reflection of this anxiety. He also gets into the creation of the Dewey Decimal System which I think any book lover would enjoy.
There is a lot of information to take in in this book and even though it is short, I read it over a long period of time. It is, honestly, a scholarly book. But I felt like the book maybe wasn't quite sure what it wanted to be. At times it catered to the average Joe, pointing out mundane things we see every day and then turning them and making us see them differently. But then at other times it make an intense discussion about how computers work which, frankly, used some vocabulary that could have been discarded as easily as that receipt at the beginning of the book. And he spent way too much time talking about the etymology of words. I'm sorry, but a pair of parentheses on every page describing the origin of a word is really not that helpful to me, maybe one or two of the really interesting ones I can live with but it was just all too much.
So basically, I would say read this book if you are interested but skim the parts you think are boring. If you are only going to read one library book I would suggest reading Marylin Johnson's This Book is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All which is much more readable than this one. There is a lot to discover here, and that is why this book earned a B.
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