reviews


Book Reviews 291 

contemporary librarianship. Digital Li­
braries is a disturbing, distressing book, 
as it should be. Modern librarianship can 
benefit from a gadfly, and Arms plays that 
role with admirable effectiveness.—Allen 
B. Veaner, Tucson, Arizona 

Authenticity in a Digital Environment. 
Washington, D.C.: Council on Library 
and Information Resources, 2000. 
76pp. $20, alk. paper (ISBN 
1-887334-77-7). 

On January 24, 2000, the Council on Li­
brary and Information Resources (CLIR) 
convened a group of recognized experts 
to ponder the questions: What is an au­
thentic digital object? How do the stan­
dards of archival preservation apply to 
digital artifacts? Where can archivists 
position themselves, as the keepers of the 
intellectual record, to ensure that future 
generations will be able to study certifi­
ably genuine digital documents? In an 
effort to get the discussion started, CLIR 
asked five leaders in the fields of 
archiving and digitization to write posi­
tion papers on various aspects of the topic 
of ensuring authenticity of the digital 
record. This publication contains those 
five essays.

 Charles T. Cullen, president and li­
brarian of the Newberry Library, writes 
in his essay, “Authentication of Digital 
Objects: Lessons from a Historian’s Re­
search,” of the difficulty of affirming the 
provenance of paper objects, let alone that 
of digital objects. He expresses chagrin at 
the lack of real signature markings that 
would prove beyond doubt that a docu­
ment is truly the work of the assumed 
author. He touches on the ease with which 
changes can be made without note in digi­
tal work, even when an honest transcrip­
tion is attempted. Who can vouch for the 
fidelity of the transcript to the original? 
Finally, Cullen urges librarians, publish­
ers, and authors to push forward to find 
methods to mark digital works with iden­
tifiers that will prove authorship.

 Peter B. Hirtle, codirector of the 
Cornell Institute for Digital Collections, 
in his essay, “Archival Authenticity in a 

Digital Age,” focuses on the records used 
for authentication of an object. As an ex­
ample, he uses the USS Constellation,  a 
wooden-hulled navy vessel moored in 
Baltimore Harbor. The Constellation was 
recorded as being Baltimore built in 1797, 
and all historic documents regarding her 
construction and launch were consistent 
in this regard. However, it was discov­
ered that she was actually built in Nor­
folk, Virginia, in 1854, and constructed to 
look like the much-admired USS Consti­
tution, but commissioned for duty during 
the Civil War, not the Revolutionary War. 
The documentation had been “adjusted” 
in 1909 to reflect the earlier building date, 
although records prior to 1909 showed 
her accurate construction date. Hirtle’s 
point is that if paper records can be so 
manipulated and still appear authentic, 
archivists will need to exert great effort 
to maintain accurate provenance for digi­
tal objects. He proposes that one collec­
tive method will be “social mechanisms 
of control,” or diplomatics, a body of prac­
tices that has long been accepted as a rig­
orous validation technique. Trust in the 
repository will continue to be a key con­
cept.

 David M. Levy, a consultant on docu­
ments, digital libraries, and publishing, 
uses a humorous example in his essay, 
“Where’s Waldo? Reflections on Copies 
and Authenticity in a Digital Environ­
ment,” to make the point that in a digital 
world, in which a copy can be identical 
to the original (or nearly so), the ascer­
taining of authenticity of the original be­
comes almost impossible. First establish­
ing that it may not be possible to create 
stable digital objects, he suggests that 
audit trails may be useful in defining the 
“original.” He posits that our first step is 
to understand what it is we want to ac­
complish, then to discern what is possible 
to accomplish.

 Clifford A. Lynch, executive director 
of the Coalition for Networked Informa­
tion, in his essay, “Authenticity and In­
tegrity in the Digital Environment: An 
Exploratory Analysis of the Central Role 
of Trust,” sets forth many propositions 



292 College & Research Libraries 

that warrant further research. Among his 
points is the need to establish long-term 
infrastructure for authentication, includ­
ing provision of a watermarking process, 
intellectual and economic support for the 
process, and the technological support 
necessary for management of digital ob­
jects. At the current time, this manage­
ment process is being driven by the mo­
tivation for profit in the publishing indus­
try, and this will not sustain the goals of 
archival preservation. 

Finally, Jeff Rothenberg, a senior com­
puter scientist at the Rand Corporation, 
writes in his essay, “Preserving Authen­
tic Digital Information,” that a “uniform 
technological approach” is necessary for 
the true authentication of digital objects. 
He accurately compares this concept with 
the Rosetta Stone, as it would provide 
translation capabilities borne through the 
commonality of validation. Urging 
cross-disciplinary communication and 
cooperation, Rothenberg builds a case for 
the establishment of a common authenti­
cation vocabulary. 

These essays, read individually and as 
a whole, are provocative to anyone who 
has interests in publication, research, ar­
chives, copyright, and other aspects of 
information perpetuity. None is so tech­
nical as to be daunting nor so scholarly 
as to be obscure. This is, in fact, a remark­
ably clear-eyed and cohesive collection. 
Each essay is opinionated and compel­
ling. The summary following the essays, 
written by Abby Smith, director of pro­
grams at CLIR, does a good job of identi­
fying key issues that appear in the papers 
and that arose in discussions during the 
meeting. Her introduction also serves its 
purpose well. This collection can be rec­
ommended to all who are interested in 
this timely topic, as well as to students 
preparing to forge a career in the infor­
mation world broadly defined.—Tom 
Schneiter, Harvard University. 

Douglass, John Aubrey. The California 
Idea and American Higher Education, 
1850 to the 1960 Master Plan. Stanford, 
Calif.: Stanford Univ. Pr., 2000. 460p. 

May 2001 

$55, alk. paper (ISBN 0804731896). LC 
99-45668. 

Is there a distinctively “American” 
contribution to the development of higher 
education in the Western world? Begin­
ning at least with Veysey’s landmark 
study of The Emergence of the American 
University (1965), a number of scholars 
have suggested that there is. Douglass 
builds on Veysey’s work, as well as that 
of more recent historians of higher edu­
cation, including Levine and Geiger, to 
describe the evolution of public higher 
education in California as a reflection of 
American egalitarianism. He suggests 
that the “California Idea” is a model for 
building a broadly accessible system of 
high-quality institutions of higher edu­
cation that eventually might be as influ­
ential on the world stage as was the Ger­
man model of the research university 
more than a century ago. 

For those unfamiliar with the subject, a 
short introduction is required. In its cur­
rent form, public higher education in Cali­
fornia is built on three systems: the Cali­
fornia Community Colleges (CC), the Cali­
fornia State University (CSU), and the 
University of California (UC). This tripar­
tite system provides the youth of the state 
with unparalleled access to postsecondary 
education. Moreover, each type of institu­
tion occupies a specific niche within the 
system (with the UC system, for example, 
the only one authorized to independently 
grant the doctoral degree). Although the 
present arrangement is largely the result 
of the so-called master plan for higher edu­
cation engineered by UC President Clark 
Kerr in 1960, Douglass argues that Cali­
fornia had long been committed to coor­
dinating a statewide system of comple­
mentary educational institutions. This 
commitment to both increase access to 
higher education and create high-quality 
institutions as part of “a logical and inter­
connected system” of public higher edu­
cation is what Douglass refers to as the 
California Idea. 

Douglass contrasts the California ap­
proach to public higher education with