Customer Reviews

Emanuel Goldberg and His Knowledge Machine: Information, Invention, and Political Forces (New Directions in Information Management)

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Buckland presents a singular man in an extraordinary era. Goldberg's contributions to photography and information science are nearly breathtaking; yet, he has been largely unknown in these fields. I am embarrassed to say that I have been making photographs for 50+ years and an academic in information science, yet had almost no understanding of Goldberg's contributions before reading Buckland's work.

If this were simply a catalog of Goldberg's inventions, publications, reviews, and explanations it would be thought provoking for photographers, librarians, information scientists, historians, and those who study scholarly uses of information. Buckland's genius lies in presenting the stories of a man and the time in which he lived. Moving with grace and facility the author brings us almost into a set of conversation with Goldberg by ranging from discussions of electro-plating and gradient wedges to the bouquet held by the woman he would marry; from descriptions of the German university system of the day to Goldberg's work with other active scholars to establish bridges between scholars, scientists, and artists with refined machinery and refined notions of how to make use of documents; from descriptions of family life to very technical yet readable descriptions of cameras,movie cameras, and information retrieval devices that pre-saged digital hypertext.

Buckland holds the academic credentials to speak with authority on Goldberg and his times; he displays a clear grasp of the interplay between an individual and his/her times; and he writes with a lovely mix of scholarly consideration, a detective's passion for tracking down bits of evidence, and an enthusiastic narrator (even champion) for a man whose contributions touch many of us but whose name and deeds are little known. As befits the telling of Goldberg's story, the images are thoroughly integrated into the text.