The Myth of the Paperless Office (review)

Behind the frequent prediction of the obsolescence of libraries is the assumption that paper will be unnecessary in the future. All information, in this view, will be available and managed on the Internet or by other electronic means. The Myth of the Paperless Office explains why paper is unlikely to disappear when working with information. In doing so, it elucidates valuable information for librarians and cultural managers both for defending the paper they currently oversee and for creating paperless document systems. In this book, Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H.R. Harper do nothing less than describe how people read, take information, and create knowledge from information.

The authors specialize in psychology and business practices, and the book is a culmination of years of their research. They study what individuals do with paper that makes it so necessary to office work and, consequently, why it might never totally disappear, and what software and hardware creators need to take into account in order to tap this market of office efficiency. This book does not touch on type sizes, readability or legal issues of electronic documents. Instead, it provides a very interesting analysis of a common problem that touches everyone, either at our desks or in our thinking about the value of libraries, which even now consist of a great deal of paper. The broad audience for this book is demonstrated by a recent, highly positive review in The New Yorker (78,5:92-97).

Sellen and Harper focus on the activities paper allows, also called the "affordances" of paper. They analyze types of reading and what people physically do with paper when they read. By describing the affordances of paper, the authors can describe how paperless systems and software do not work as well as paper. There are many different kinds of reading and writing. Police officers read and input information differently than buyers in a chocolate company. The authors also analyze why companies feel paper is a hindrance to work, and then examine why "paperless office" projects fail. They find that "the paperless office is a myth, not because people fail to achieve their goals, but because they know too well that their goals cannot be achieved without paper" (p. 212).

Sellen and Harper are not always promoters of paper. They want office workers to use the most efficient and effective means necessary to get their job done. They point out the instances where even now, computers and software do a better job than paper: storage of less frequently needed information, searching large amounts of information, updating content frequently, and displaying multimedia. Their point is the move toward electronic documents and publishing is appropriate for some documents and at some points in the document life cycle.

What can libraries learn from The Myth of the Paperless Office? Sellen and Harper demonstrate in their research that when people want to consult several documents and synthesize information, they prefer to have the documents in print. Thus, libraries should keep photocopiers and printers well maintained. As more resources go online, as students refer to them and use them to compare and to do research, they will want to print them out. In fact, librarians might want to encourage printing to discourage plagiarism, as printing out a page from the Web makes it easier to consult, rather than just copy. Sellen and Harper's work also may provide insights into the best kinds of resources to digitize and some characteristics these digital resources should have. Their work confirms the importance of full-text searching of electronic resources and good multimedia online, as well as the increasing interest in digital preservation issues. Library workers creating digital collections will be interested in their descriptions of how individuals browse, read, skim, and refer to several documents at once. Sellen and Harper illustrate how there is more to...