Dear Colleagues:

I wanted to report back to you about this seminar. It was all in English (hooray!) and lasted for five days. The French schools presented their papers for the first three days (including representatives from Germany and Algeria) and the next two days were the Americans, Canadians, and Scandinavians making presentations.

Jean-Marc Ogier, "Document and Digitization" was about creating efficient processes for imaging detailed property ownership maps and using OCR. He then discussed imaging other types of complext documents and trying to get the computer to recognize and extract other types of information.

Alexandra Saemmer, "Reading in Hypertextual Environments" asked the question whether navigating among hyperlinks and using the various interactive features of web pages would actually create a document different from what the author intended. Her conclusion was that it didn't really because you cannot simply define reading as a linear activity: think of reading a newspaper.

Jean Charlet, "Medical Knowledge between Non-structured Documents and Ontologies" as concerned with creating an master index or classification for medical knowledge. He concluded that you cannot do so, because the way specialists use medical knowledge does not use the same access points or relationships as a master classification. This paper also addressed whether the Semantic Web could succeed and concluded that it could not for the same reason.

A. Iacovella and A. Benel, "Communities' Knowledge and Experts' Viewpoints in Digital Libraries" was about how to create a collaborative portal www.porphyry.org for archaeologists that would permit them to create a space for all the types of information they need to put together knowledge. Because archaeologists deal with disparate information, this portal is an interesting example of how everything can be put on a portal and connections made both manually as well as using OCR by small teams. The results of all the teams working together produces a whole that can be used for creation of greater knowledge for each individual team.

Valerie Jeanne-Perrier and Yves Jeanneret, “Media’s Metamorphosis” was about how the radio reporters of France 1 have rejected use of the Internet as a part of their reporting efforts despite being supplied with technology that would easily permit them to publish their news stories to the web. The Internet site for this public radio station is run and operated by a different set of employees.

Manual Zacklad, “Document for Action” queries how multiple documents actually go into a total picture of a case or project—what we would call a “file.” These documents fulfill the role of making a “transaction.” He asks further how annotations change those documents.

Ghislaine Chartron and Franck Rebillard, “Publishing on the Web” defined “publishing” as simply “making public.” This paper looks at how our understanding of the creation process and publishing has changed and how, for example, Google, can be viewed as presenting a different model of publishing through aggregation.

Eric Guichard, “Measures of the Internet” was a discussion of the “long tail” phenomenon of the Internet where small groups whose demand cannot easily be serviced by our traditional methods of physical supply. He suggested that this is largely hype, because the physical methods of supply are still required to fulfill demand.

“Artistic Documentation—the Case of Music” was a performance and demonstration of how complicated it is to capture a musical performance either as a performance or as notation. Several demonstrations were performed of how the instrument, the composition, and the act of composing contain multiple levels. This demonstration was meant to question what we think we have captured when we have an artistic document.

Carol Choksy, “How Documents Work” was my presentation about how documents, particularly business documents, do more than just contain and organize information. We use them as material proxies to act for us. Just as we use words like “I do” as action, so we use documents like contracts to do the same thing.

Yves Marcoux, “Document Management in Government,” was about the new definition of document in the Quebec government and how it gave the IT departments the opportunity to implement document management technologies. This presentation discussed the project management challenges, particularly the need for clear lines of communication.

Vesa Suominen, “Document Management in Public Libraries” suggested that an overarching classifications like the Semantic Web can be created using faceted schemes.

Gunnar Hartvigsen, “Leaving Nineteenth-century Understanding of Documents” asked what a document was within health care. Modern mechanisms to measure what the body is doing and testing samples challenge even the most daring of our definitions of documents.

Catherine Smith response to Hartvigsen, The history of medicine is a good indicator of why our medical records are still in the 19th Century whereas the tools of health care are in the 21st century. Doctors were still reading Latin when the rest of the world was reading in the vernacular. It is that combination of precision and desire to appear to have arcane knowledge that keeps health care documents mired in paper.

The final presentations by Bernd Frohmann, Michael Buckland, and Niels Windfeld Lund discussed the weakness of traditional understandings of the document that define our understanding of communication too narrowly and do not clearly identify a role for studying the document within the academy.

Every presentation was followed by heated conversation. The purpose of the seminar, however, was not to come to a conclusion about what a document is, but to challenge our understanding of what a document is. I found these particularly interesting because they challenge our definition of a record. If records are what we send to the archivist, then we can rest on our laurels. If a record is made up of documents that could be requested by opposing counsel, then we have the most supreme challenge.

I wished many times more records managers could have been there. I think the discussions would have been even more interesting. Tromso itself is amazing, the sun goes around and around in the sky--its day all day--and the seagulls are awake and squabbling at 3 am.

Best wishes,
Carol

Carol E.B. Choksy, Ph.D., CRM
CEO
IRAD Strategic Consultant. Inc.
(317) 294-8329

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