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Book Review: The Virtual Representation of the Past, Information Science in Transition, Disaster Management in Archives, Libraries and Museums, Transferred Illusions: Digital Technology and the Forms of Print

Deegan, Marilyn and Sutherland, Kathryn. Transferred illusions: digital technology and the forms of print Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. 204 pp. ISBN 978-0-7546-7016-2. £55The so-called 'digital transition' has been at the forefront of the minds of many library/information specialists over the past few years, as the certainties of the world of print give way to the changes and complexities of the digital age. Deegan and Sutherland do an excellent job of guiding us through some of these issues, in this scholarly but accessible book.It comprises six essentially discrete chapters, each of which could be read alone as a primer on its topic. It is well written, with a clear flow illustrated by numerous asides and examples. It takes a historical perspective, relating 'new' issues to what has gone before, and is well referenced; it would be an excellent source book for academic courses in this area. The authors state the aim that it would contain both 'informational' and critical/ reflective writing, and generally succeed well.The book is, as the authors say, 'about the forms and institutions of print - newspapers, books, scholarly editions, publishing, libraries - as they relate to and are changed by the emergent forms and institutions of our present digital age'. It deliberately does not deal with blogs, social networking sites, and the like. Some may consider this a weakness, given the often-stated potential of such media to complement, or even compete with, the more traditional forms of communication. However, it does give the book a clear rationale, and allows a logical argument to develop.The first chapter, 'After Print' considers the survival, surprising to some, of print-on-paper, and reflects on how long it will survive, and what may replace it. The authors foresee the disappearance of printed reference works, lament the World Wide Web as a degraded form of Ted Nelson's vision for true hypertext, and conclude that 'far from dying, in its old age print is casting a long shadow across the digital generation'.Chapter two deals with news sources, citing the commonly held fears of the death of news in print, and noting that during the 1991 Gulf War less than 9% of Americans kept up with the issues primarily through newspapers, compared with ten times that proportion at the end of the Second World War. They suggest that using personalized newsfeeds, approximating to the long-heralded 'Daily Me', is perhaps not such a great deviation from reading a newspaper chosen to reflects one's own social standing, political views, and so on, and lament the problems involved in the replacement of hard-copy files of historic newspapers with microform or digital equivalents.The third chapter focuses on editing, described as a 'cultural work', and the way it is changed in a digital environment. Ranging widely, it touches on metadata, text mark-up and encoding, and other new issues which concern the digital editor.The next chapter is concerned with new modes of publishing: such things as electronic journals, self-archive repositories, e-books, print-on-demand books, niche publishing and self-publishing, and so on. …