Book Reviews 397

structures.—Deborah DeGeorge, University 
of Michigan.

Controlling the Past: Documenting Soci-
ety and Institutions: Essays in Honor 
of Helen Willa Samuels. Ed. Terry 
Cook. Chicago: Society of American 
Archivists, 2011. 434p. $56 (ISBN 
9781931666369).
In 1986, Massachusetts Institute of 

Technology archivist Helen Willa Samu-
els published an article in American Ar-
chivist entitled “Who Controls the Past.” 
Invoking George Orwell’s lines from 
1984: “who controls the past, controls the 
future,” Samuels noted that in “a modern, 
complex, information-rich society… only 
a small portion of the vast documentation 
can be kept… archivists are challenged to 
select a lasting record, but they lack tech-
niques to support this decision-making.” 
She proposed an appraisal process called 
“documentation strategies… to respond 
to these problems.” 

The plight of the modern archivist in 
today’s information-saturated society is, 
to put it mildly, daunting. Given the stag-
gering number of physical and electronic 
documents generated by institutions in 
particular, and society at large, how does 
an archivist go about creating order and 
accessibility to this mountain range of 
information? Cutting to the crux: how 
does an archivist decide what to keep and 
what to destroy? 

Helen Willa Samuels grappled with 
these questions and sought to answer 
them in a body of work that helped define 
the role of archivist as much more than 
merely a collector of the past. Rather, 
Samuels described how, through the 
careful, collaborative, and thoughtful 
appraisal and selection of what materials 
should be archived, archivists have an 
active role in shaping societal memory. 

As a testament to her stature in the 
archives community, editor Terry Cook 
has compiled Controlling the Past as a 
festschrift that celebrates the work and 
legacy of Helen Willa Samuels. Control-
ling the Past contains 16 essays by noted 

archivists, as well as an introductory over-
view by editor Terry Cook, an annotated 
bibliography of Samuels’s work, and an 
autobiographical essay by Samuels. 

There’s a lot to unpack and digest in 
Samuels’ work, and these essays do a 
wonderful job of providing context and 
insight to her body of work. A number of 
these essays address and expand upon 
Samuels’ documentation strategy/ activ-
ist archivist literature, as well as one of 
Samuels’ concept of archival functional 
analysis. Outlined in her 1992 book Varsity 
Letters: Documenting Modern Colleges and 
Universities, functional analysis suggested 
that institutions such as universities were 
best understood by looking at what they 
do—their functions. 

The essays are broadly categorized 
under two main divisions: “Document-
ing Society” and “Representing Archives/
Being Archival.” The former category 
focuses on appraisal and related issues 
and includes essays on electronic records 
management, oral history, problems 
presented by digital records, corporate 
archives, archiving photographs, and the 
“complication of color in an academic 
archive,” an examination of the mono-
chromatic nature of archival work. 

The second section addresses the role 
of the archivist within Samuels’s docu-
mentation/appraisal/activism model. 
Included are essays on the importance 
of collaborative work among archivists, 
the interrelated role between creators, 
archivists, and users of information, 
the philosophical and ethical role of the 
archivist as “controller of the past,” and 
the changing nature of the archivist in 
relation to the historical research process. 

For the nonarchivist, Controlling the 
Past sheds some light on the archival 
profession from a theoretical and practical 
perspective. For archivists, this volume is 
filled with thought-provoking essays that 
mingle theory, observation, and practice. 
It’s one of those books that you’ll return to, 
one that will lead you back to Samuels’s 
original work with fresh insight.—Gene 
Hyde, Radford University, Radford, Virginia.