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

Technology archivist Helen Willa Samu-els published an article in American Archivist 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 techniques 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 staggering 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. Controlling the Past contains 16 essays by noted archivists, as well as an introductory overview 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/ activist 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: " Documenting 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 …