One of many blogs I read a couple or three times a week has a review of
a new book that although it might be of more interest to the archival
community some list members may also find it of interest.

The blog is Reading Archives by Richard J. Cox.

http://readingarchives.blogspot.com/ 

On Wednesday he posted a review of a book titled " Files: Law and Media
Technology" by Cornelia Vismann.

The first paragraph from his review:
----
Want to read a book about paper filing systems that stretches your
imagination and challenges your most basic assumptions? Cornelia
Vismann, Files: Law and Media Technology, translated by Geoffrey
Winthrop-Young (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008) is a
detailed examination of the shifting legal, administrative, and
technological aspects of files, extending from the ancient world to the
modern era. Vismann, a German legal historian and scholar, has given us
a meditation of how records have changed through the centuries, with the
intention of revealing, "how files control the formalization and
differentiation of the law" (p. xii). While Vismann indicates that this
book is written for those who work with files, have worked with files,
or have forgotten how files function because of new technologies that
transform their functions, this is a book really for the serious scholar
of recordkeeping and the archival function. It is not a book that can be
skimmed lightly or read at the beach or assigned to the novice archival
student. As a study, Files provides complex assessments of key shifts in
record-making and archiving, drawing heavily on European examples but at
times ranging widely across the geopolitical and historical landscape.
There are ideas I am still wrestling with and conclusions I question,
but this is a book, despite its rather pedestrian title, that
intellectually engaged me in new and different ways.
----

An intellectually engaging book on filing - how cool is that? <grin>

Be sure to read the rest of his review.

Amazon has it: http://tinyurl.com/674sdo

My copy is on its way.



Cheers,

Gerry 

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