Would a paperless global information environment be a desirable thing?
Before I explore whether the prospect of a paperless global information environment is a realistic one, is it even something we want to achieve? For the moment I will assume that the technology exists for there to be a real global information environment without paper – in other words everything that people currently use in paper form is available online in a digital form, and that everyone in the world has reliable access to these online resources (again, I will discuss the feasibility of this scenario later on!). What would the pros and cons of such an environment be?
Paper, whether in the form of books, journals, memos, letters, or forms, takes up a great deal of space, and therefore the cost of storage is high. According to Sellen and Harper, “to store 2 million paper documents, an organization can expect to spend between $40,000 and $60,000 on filing cabinets alone” (Sellen and Harper, 2002). Their digital counterparts take up a fraction of the space, fitting easily onto a handful of DVDs or a portable hard drive. A paperless society has the potential to free up vast amounts of space in libraries and offices.
If information is in a digital format, it can easily be shared almost instantaneously between people or between organisations, even if they are on different continents. This would improve access to information, as you would no longer need to be in the same building as the document you were accessing. Digital versions can be accessed by multiple people simultaneously (assuming licensing laws allow this of course), lessening the need for multiple copies of textbooks, for example. Digital versions could also improve access in cases where the original is extremely fragile, as we do not need to worry about the original being damaged through use.
Digital media brings with it new possibilities. Texts no longer have to be static, and content creators can experiment with new formats and layouts. This could mean interactive enhanced textbooks. Macmillan have already made inroads into this market with their ‘DynamicBooks’ series which are interactive, and can be customised by lecturers (Reid, 2010). Another benefit digital versions have over print is the possibility for adding hyperlinks to more easily navigate through the document. Online resources can also be updated and revised much more easily than their print counterparts. All of these features add value to the document, and take advantage of the possibilities offered by digital technology. However, a paperless information environment would reduce the serendipitous experience of browsing shelves somewhat. Libraries and other information providers will need to take this into account when designing online catalogues, perhaps taking hints from services such as LibraryThing and Amazon, who have been demonstrating a different kind of browsing experience based on recommendations.
Whilst digitisation is very useful in preservation, providing a surrogate and reducing the impact of physical handling on the original, it is not a true preservation method. No matter how good the scan, it will never be a perfect reproduction, and time has yet to tell how our TIFF and JPEG files will hold up in the future. As Bruce Shurman points out:
Magnetic tapes might last only a decade, depending on storage conditions. The fate of floppy disks, videotape, and hard drives is just as bleak. Even the CD-ROM, once touted as indestructible, is proving to be vulnerable to stray magnetic fields, oxidation, humidity, and material decay […] If we do not keep migrating the information to newer forms (which is extremely labor-intensive and correspondingly expensive) will we lose the information, and how will that affect future researchers? (Shurman, 2001)
The most stable media form we currently know of is paper. Books written and bound hundreds of years ago are still perfectly readable. How many of our electronic documents will we be able to access in even ten years’ time? Paper is currently the “ultimate backup”.
My final argument against the desirability of a paperless information environment is that if we were to go entirely paperless, we would then be thoroughly dependent on an electricity supply. A power cut would halt research and productivity completely if there was no paper backup.
Introduction | Desirability | Feasibility | Conclusion | Bibliography