Documentation circumscribes our lives, and it is through documentation, in its broadest sense, that we discover, record and interpret the world. Documentation shapes our culture and even defines us; without documents, we have no legal identity, and hence no legal existence. Documentation and the law are intimately entwined.
Lund situates his work within a tradition of modern documentary theory that began in the late 19th Century, when Paul Otlet (1868-1944) and Henri La Fontaine (1854-1943) established the International Institute of Bibliography. In 1951, Suzanne Briet (1894-1989) asserted that a document is a proof in support of a fact, and expanded the concept of the document to encompass almost any object that could be stored or represented in an institution and catalogued. The later 20th Century saw documentation studies shift in focus towards anthropology and sociology, until in the 1990s, the advent of new electronic media revived interest in studying documentation as an information science.
A document can be a piece of paper, or it can be a baby’s first scream on entering the world; both are discrete entities that communicate information. Lund’s thesis starts from the premise that documents emerge from a ‘complementary’ process of documentation, communication and information. The concept of ‘complementarity’ originates in the work of physicist Niels Bohr (1885-1962), and allows for the perception of objects in different, mutually exclusive, ways. In applying it to documentation, Lund attaches equal weight to a document’s materiality, its mental aspects and its context. This conceptual framework for document analysis takes into account not only content, but format (for example, a document might be a letter, or a television programme), parameters (we need to be able to define where a document begins and ends), and the social situations in which documents are created and received.
Every document has a form, a social and historical context, and by definition carries information. Documents are made up of constituent parts, which Lund calls ‘docemes’. For Lund, categorising and organising documents requires a ‘complementary’ approach, which takes account of the physical, social and information aspects of documentation. This means that we can view a document as a phenomenon that is 100% physical, 100% social and 100% mental. By treating these aspects as mutually exclusive features, we can arrive at the fullest description and the most complete analysis possible of any document.
Law librarianship is founded on the collection, organisation and dissemination of documentary material, which our users treat as evidence in support of facts that may justify courses of action. Academic law libraries retain extensive hard copy holdings, but even in universities, legal research now occurs in a blended environment of physical and electronic materials, and academic library staff manage and contribute to extensive online collections (an example being the UK Web Archive). In the commercial sector, the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated a shift away from hard copy, increasing reliance on material that may not be readily available, or even exist, in a physical format. Physical and online information carriers interact in an ‘infosphere’, which juxtaposes the permanent and the ephemeral; the objective and the subjective; the authoritative and the spurious. All librarians have a responsibility to support their readers by enabling them to evaluate library materials; for law librarians that obligation is particularly and immediately apparent as our collections are used to underpin legal processes that directly affect and determine the future of individuals and the state.
This book falls into three parts. Part One, in which Lund sets out his documentary theory, is demanding reading. It is worth persevering with this theoretical section, in order to understand the four analytical methods (‘diachronic’, ‘synchronic’, ‘comparative’ and ‘experimental’) that Lund demonstrates in the following chapters.
In Part Two, Documentation in Practice, Lund illustrates his methodology using examples drawn from music, literature, art, science, politics and law. These chapters are very enjoyable to read. The story of Mozart’s Requiem (which documented the fact that Count Franz von Walsegg was mourning his wife) demonstrates the way in which documentation and the process of documentation changed due to a shift between what Lund, following Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991), terms ‘subsystems’. The initial social subsystem, in which a composer was merely the sponsor’s servant, was superseded by one in which a composer has agency and ownership of his work, with consequences for documentation.
In the next case study Lund uses the difficulties that the author Ernest Hemmingway (1899–1961) experienced when working simultaneously within the different conditions of mass communication and literary writing to show the documentary differences between the ‘subsystems’ of journalism and literature.
In his third case study, on the picture ‘The Girls on the Bridge’ by Edvard Munch (1863-1944), Lund examines a documentary problem involving multiple versions and alternative titles, concluding that they are all originals, which have become ‘docemes’ in different exhibition catalogues.
In his fourth case study, Lund uses the history of a doctoral dissertation to show how documents can become part of a continuous system of evaluation through a formal scholarly process, when a controversial or original theory becomes part of the received published literature, even if the argument is not universally accepted as a scientific truth.
The fifth case study presents the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at which Martin Luther King (1929-1968) gave his ‘I have a dream’ speech, as a ‘temporal document’, bound by time, in which Lund suggests that every participant also became a document.
The final case study is of the US Social Security Card, which Lund discusses in terms of its conceptual constituent parts, considering the significance of names, numbers, signatures and a design that physically represents the entire system of US Social Security Administration.
In Part Three, Documentation in Theory and Practice, Lund draws conclusions and extracts principles from these case studies, and offers an alternative to the IFLA Library Reference Model with a tentative proposal for one which, instead of starting with an abstract dimension (the ‘res’), begins with the most concrete dimensions (‘documents, agents, means’). The book’s final chapter is a manifesto for a new discipline of Documentation, Information and Communication (DIC) studies.
It is unlikely that the typical working law librarian will have time to practise the detailed documentary analysis that Lund demonstrates. Nevertheless, his systematic and logical guidance on how to assess and evaluate material of any kind is highly relevant to legal research methods. We have all encountered problematic material, whether on the web, in files of documents in the office, or on our library shelves, which is of doubtful origin or authenticity. Assumptions based on just one aspect of an item can be misleading, and it is vital to consider the carrier and context, as well as the content. Lund’s techniques are not just for cataloguers and documentalists, they are for anyone that relies on documentary evidence. As we adjust to the challenge of generative AI and the proliferation of misinformation via online platforms, this book is a timely call for the recognition and use of complementary documentation techniques by information practitioners, and makes the case for Documentation, Information and Communication (DIC) studies as a scientific discipline in its own right.
The book is indexed, well laid out and easy to navigate, and it includes an excellent list of references.
