For the Record

It turns out that the line between what we think of as “history” and what we consider “current events” is roughly twenty years in the past. The Meech Lake Accord, for example, is firmly in the realm of history. The 9/11 attacks, by contrast, still retain some of the immediacy of current events. That means we are now entering the age when — in order to preserve the historical record — librarians, archivists, and historians will need to collect and study “born-digital” documents.

The migration from paper to electronic records has ushered in a host of complications for anyone who works with the written word, and Ian Milligan’s book is a primer on how to deal with those complications going forward. Indeed, archives have practical consequences for all of us: Functioning governments can base their policies only on the information they have, and social problems can be analyzed only if records are kept, catalogued, and retrievable. Archives shape the history we teach in...