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Self-Authentication in Books

The 19th century tipped a balance from cultural management of society to technological management. The century of the advent of photographic imaging, instantaneous telecommunication, digital encoding, mass production shifted the paradigm. Every aspect of culture was newly directed by technological churn including learning and education and the nature of the library and its books. In the sweep toward automation it was apparent that books did not index themselves. Human classification and physical organization were required. This was a discordance.

Innovative librarians by-passed the nature of books and began to automate the index rather than the collection. The card catalog was digitized in the 1960's and whole text digitization happily converged the rendering of text with the indexing of text; the single encoding provided both.

The physical book remained unchanged while the general advent of automation shifted to a self-indexing culture: from meaning to tabulation. Machine and mass production changed society but not the book. Its production remained separated from its indexing. But while physical books are not self-indexing, they are self-authenticating. As a result, academics clung to them and both the physical books and the academics were considered regressive.

But another shift is about to occur. This will be a shift in which authentication will again be influential. Touch screen voting, census automation and many other automated tabulations from traffic control to genetic modification will require some self-authentication. Museums, established to study physical artifacts, have already encountered this constraint on the limits of digital simulation and libraries will follow.

What are the special attributes of self-authentication inherent in physical books and artifacts? In the context of digital delivery the advantages at first appear to be the disadvantages but we must define these features in their own context. The information and knowledge conveyed by physical books and artifacts does not change, the encompass of their content is self-evident and they act as a witness to the period of their production.

As James O'Donnell has said; "On the Internet, you never know what you are missing." On-line content, even on-line simulation of a physical book, is subject to mutation and revision. Queries posed search an unknown range and the results may well be filtered. On-line resources confirm only their existence in the present moment and on-line texts constantly change in relation to each other. These features are considered attributes of digital delivery, but they should not be considered deficiencies of self-authenticating physical books.