Bit by Bitmap They Are Building A Madhouse

The Information Scientists want us to make our material "accessible" by emulating their obsessive love affair with the internet. Claiming our carefully crafted finding aids do not go far enough in revealing the existence of documents, they demand we describe individual documents with all the care and exacting attention to detail as librarians of yore put into the cataloging of books. Unfortunately, the analogy is faulty, because the demands of the Information Scientist are more akin to the effort it would have taken Charles A. Cutter to catalog the individual pages of a given volume rather than a summation of its contents. And for what purpose, we may ask? To give the illusion of discovery to an end user? This Sisyphean task is more than just futile, it is maddening, and here at True Archives we sympathize with our brethren pushed to the brink of insanity because they are charged with dumbing down the process of historical investigation.