Is scanning as good as reality?

In the latest New Yorker, there's an article about L'affaire Meinertzhagen, the discovery of fabricated and sometimes stolen works in the collections of famed ornithologist and collector Richard Meinertzhagen. This bit caught my eye: one worry that scientists working to uncover the extent of Meinertzhagen's fraud in the British Museum was that their findings

might damage the collection at a time when some scientists were beginning to debate the value of keeping large collections. In the same way that card catalogues in libraries were disposed of once their contents were digitally rendered, so, perhaps, could specimens be removed from museums, once they had been digitally sampled and photographed-- freeing up valuable space for revenue-generating attractions like planetariums. "Serious people have seriously suggested that once you digitize the specimens you don't really need them," [Smithsonian ornithologist Pamela] Rasmussen told me, indignantly. "People are asking what collections are good for, why do we need to keep them?"

This is one of the more spectacular examples of the assumption that digital versions of physical objects-- particularly scientific specimens or printed works-- are just as good as the objects themselves, which is in turn an expression of the cyberspace-era notion that the digital world (or digital records) was superior to the physical world (or physical things).

Technorati Tags: digital culture, digital-physical, library

One can argue that nothing significant is lost in electronic versions of The Iliad or today's New York Times, or that the gains-- in increased accessibility, portability, reduced storage and circulation costs, etc.-- outweigh the losses. And as Geoffrey Nunberg pointed out,

In modern industrial societies, the vast majority of books bear no cultural burden at all: they are parts catalogues, census reports, Department of Agriculture pamphlets, tide tables, tax codes, repair manuals, telephone directories, airline schedules - documents whose appearance as books rather than in some other form has mostly to do with the practical requirements of display and diffusion and the limits of available technologies... Who would have any reservations about putting texts like these into electronic form, if it will make the world a roomier and greener place?

The argument gets fuzzier with things that at first glance look like mass-production items, but might have hidden complexity: Nicholson Baker made the case for old newspapers and card catalogs in his book Double Fold, arguing that the handwritten notations in library cards contained information that didn't get captured in OCLC records downloaded to a college's electronic catalog. (Electronic card catalogs aren't PDFs of the old cards, but rather are digital records with completely different histories.)

When you get to even more complex artifacts like bird skins, it's worth asking whether the digital version of a physical object can ever capture everything significant about it, given that what constitutes "significance" can change over time, or vary depending on what you're interested in. Indeed, the case of the Meinertzhagen bird skins offers a good example of how things you don't normally look at became critically important. Irish ornithologist Alan Knox, whose work established that some of Meinertzhagen's skins were problematic, based his argument

on the fact that skin collectors have characteristic styles of "making" a skin. Some slice off a small piece of the skull, in order to scoop out the brains, whereas others cut off the whole back of the skull, while still others take the brains out through the palate. Some birds are made with a full belly, others with a flat belly. The kind of thread, cotton, and internal supports used in making the skin can also differ from maker to maker. Based on an analysis of several preparers' styles, Knox concluded that at least two redpoll skins which Meinertzhagen claimed to have shot... were probably stolen from a series of birds in the Natural History Museum.

Under most circumstances, an ornithologist wouldn't be particularly concerned with figuring out the personal styles of bird skin preparers: they'd be far more interested in the birds themselves, their plumage, beak design, average wingspan, what have you (I'm not an ornithologist, so I'm just guessing about the specifics). Only if you had concerns about the authenticity of the specimens would you pay lots of attention to the methods by which the skins had been prepared, and reconstruct the signatures of different naturalists. But it seems unlikely that that information would be have been created when scanning a specimen: the Zoological Museum of Amsterdam, for example, has some terrific high-resolution 3D QuickTimes of their bird skins, but they don't show details that illustrate how the birds were prepared.

Can a digital version of an object really be as good as the original? Perhaps if you could collect information about every molecule in the object, it would be as good; but a lot of high-resolution pictures don't add up to the thing itself, and don't capture everything you might want to know about it.

Even recognizing all the great things you can do with electronic records, I think we're now at the point where we can recognize that they're not the same-- and in important respects are never the same-- as the objects they represent. Or so I thought, until I ran across the Web site of AFSCME Local 2910, the Library of Congress Professional Guild. They have a page devoted to the future of cataloging, with some alarming-sounding stuff about how cataloging is under attack. One of their publications is a critique of a recent report on "The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration with Other Discovery Tools," by Cornell librarian Karen Calhoun:

According to the Calhoun report, library operations that are not digital, that do not result in resources that are remotely accessible, that involve professional human judgement or expertise, or that require conceptual categorization and standardization rather than relevance ranking of keywords, do not fit into its proposed “leadership” strategy. This strategy itself, however, is based on an inappropriate business model – and a misrepresentation of that business model to begin with. The Calhoun report draws unjustified conclusions about the digital age, inflates wishful thinking, fails to make critical distinctions, and disregards (as well as mischaracterizes) an alternative “niche” strategy for research libraries, to promote scholarship (rather than increase “market position”). Its recommendations to eliminate Library of Congress Subject Headings, and to use “fast turnaround” time as the “gold standard” in cataloging, are particularly unjustified, and would have serious negative consequences for the capacity of research libraries to promote scholarly research.

Apparently I was wrong.