# Literature/2009/Buckland

Authors :
* A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z &
* As We May Recall
* http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1620693.1620712

## Editor's Note

Occasionally in studying HCI history, I have stumbled upon large topics that I was unaware existed. Perhaps the most surprising has been the development of advanced information technologies, which preceded computers. In some ways, the constraints imposed by those technologies forced deeper thinking about information itself. In this column, Berkeley Professor Emeritus Michael Buckland describes the work of four dedicated creative pioneers.---Jonathan Grudin

## Author

Michael Buckland worked as a librarian in England and has also been a library educator and academic administrator in Britain and the U.S. He is interested in the redesign of library services in a digital, network environment and in the history of bibliography and documentation. Recent work includes the biography Emanuel Goldberg and his Knowledge Machine (Libraries Unlimited, 2006). He is currently emeritus professor, School of Information and co-director, Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, University of California, Berkeley. He served as president of the American Society for Information Science and Technology in 1998. For more information visit, http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland

## Summary

All four of the individuals spotlighted in this article contributed to the tools, methods, and theory we take for granted today, yet all four remain relatively forgotten. Please, take a minute to recall these pioneers.

## Wikimedia

| w: Paul Otlet (1868-1944) w: Wilhelm Ostwald (1859-1932) w: Emanuel Golberg (1881-1970) w: Suzanne Briet (1894-1989) | w: World Encyclopedia w: Memex w: Hypertext w: World Wide Web |

## Chronology

* Reagle Jr., Joseph Michael (2010). Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia. MIT Press. $^{[^]}$
* Buckland, Michael (2009). "As We May Recall: Four Forgotten Pioneers," Interactions, vol. 16, No. 6 (November + December 2009), pp. 76-79. $^{[^]}$
* Rayward, W. Boyd, ed. (2008). European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the Past. Ashgate Publishing. $^{[^]}$
* Wallace, Danny P. (2007). Knowledge Management: Historical and Cross-Disciplinary Themes. Libraries Unlimited. $^{[^]}$
* Buckland, Michael (2006). "Collaboration: Bad Words and Strong Documents," (p. 3) In: Hassanaly, Parina, et al., eds. (2006). Proceeding of the 2006 Conference on Cooperative Systems Design: Seamless Integration of Artifacts and Conversations -- Enhanced Concepts of Infrastructure for Communication. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: IOS Press. $^{[^]}$
* Lesk, Michael (2005). Digital Searching to Digital Reading. Presentation at LITA session at American Library Association conference, Chicago, 2005. $^{[^]}$
* Gorman, Michael (2004). "Google and God's Mind: The problem is, information isn't knowledge." (Commentary) Los Angeles Times, December 17, 2004. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/2003/Keenan $^{[^]}$
* "FID was dissolved in 2002."
** w: International Federation for Documentation (FID)
* Literature/2001/Wales $^{[^]}$
* Gillies, James & Robert Cailliau (2000). How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web. Oxford University Press. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1999/Gardner $^{[^]}$
* Rayward, W. Boyd (1999). "H.G. Wells's Idea of a World Brain: A Critical Reassessment," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50(7): 557-573. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1999/Stallman $^{[^]}$
* Brin, Sergey & Lawrence Page (1998). "The Anatomy of a Large-scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on World Wide Web 7, p.107-117, April 1998, Brisbane, Australia. $^{[^]}$
* Rayward, W. Boyd (1997). "The Origins of Information Science and the Work of the International Institute of Bibliography / International Federation for Documentation and Information (FID)," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 48(4): 289-300. $^{[^]}$
* Campbell-Kelly, Martin & William Aspray (1996). Computer: A History of the Information Machine. Basic Books. $^{[^]}$
* Cunningham, Ward (1995). WikiWikiWeb. Portland Pattern Repository, Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki $^{[^]}$
* Rayward, W. Boyd (1994). "Visions of Xanadu: Paul Otlet (1868-1944) and Hypertext." Journal of the American Society for Information Science 45(4): 235-250. $^{[^]}$
* Mayne, Alan J., ed. (1993). World Brain: H. G. Wells on the Future of World Education. London, UK: Adamantine Press. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1992/Rayward $^{[^]}$
* Buckland, Michael (1992). "Emanuel Goldberg, Electronic Document Retrieval, and Vannevar Bush's Memex." Journal of the American Society for Information Science, vol. 43, no. 4 (May 1992), pp. 284-294. $^{[^]}$
* Buckland, Michael (1991). "Information as Thing." Journal of the American Society for Information Science 42 (5): 351-360. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1990/Berners-Lee $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1980/Berners-Lee $^{[^]}$
* Smith, Linda Cheryl (1980). "'Memex' as an image of potentiality in information retrieval research and development." Proceedings of the 3rd annual ACM conference on research and development in information retrieval (SIGIR '80, Cambridge, England, 1980) Kent, UK: Butterworth, 1981. pp. 345-369. $^{[^]}$
* Soergel, Dagobert (1977). "An Automated Encyclopedia: A Solution of the Information Problem?" International Classification, 4(1): 4-10; 4(2): 81-89. $^{[^]}$
* Belkin, Nicholas J. & Stephen E. Robertson (1976). "Information Science and the Phenomenon of Information," Journal of the American Society for Information Science (Jul-Aug 1976) 27 (4): 197-204. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1975/Garfield $^{[^]}$
** http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v2p640y1974-76.pdf
* Rayward, W. Boyd (1975). The Universe of Information: The Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and International Organisation. (FID 520). Moscow: VINITI (for FID). $^{[^]}$
* Wersig, G. & U. Neveling (1975). "The Phenomena of Interest to Information Science." The Information Scientist. 9 (4): 127-140. $^{[^]}$
* Kochen, Manfred, ed. (1975). Information for Action: from Knowledge to Wisdom. New York: Academic Press. $^{[^]}$
* Kochen, Manfred (1972). "WISE: A World Information Synthesis and Encyclopaedia." Journal of Documentation, 28: 322-341. $^{[^]}$
* Kochen, Manfred (1969). "Stability in the Growth of Knowledge." American Documentation, 20 (3): 186-197. $^{[^]}$
* Kochen, Manfred, ed. (1967). The Growth of Knowledge: Readings on Organization and Retrieval of Information. New York: Wiley. $^{[^]}$
* Kochen, Manfred (1965). Some Problems in Information Science. Scarecrow Press. (Jan 1, 1965) $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1961/Fairthorne $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1958/Fairthorne $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1948/Bradford $^{[^]}$

## Comments

* ↑ This essay looks like a summary of the concerns of Michael Buckland, the author himself, and Boyd Rayward. Buckland is an expert of Emanuel Goldberg and perhaps as successful critic of Vannevar Bush as Robert Fairthorne in the 1950s. Rayward is an expert of Paul Otlet and perhaps unsuccessful critic of H. G. Wells. This essay seems to focus on Otlet (1868-1944) above all, whose "FID was dissolved in 2002," hence endangering his main achievement, UDC. Librarians should have kept FID from dissolving as far as UDC is useful. Put otherwise, UDC of little use may have resulted in FID of such use. What is wrong with it? It is an artificial vocabulary of extremely unfriendly decimal terms in the sophisticated, complicated conceptual hierarchy that Vannevar Bush definitely disliked. It competes with the controlled and uncontrolled (natural linguistic) words. Any ways would have been taken for granted as far as the "word magic" (1923/Ogden) or textualism remained undoubted, say, until 1975 when the world view made a Copernican revolution indeed, however unsaid and obscured. Obscured before that may have been such revolutions as 1923/Ogden, 1929/Magritte, 1933/Magritte, and so on, perhaps by the invisible hand.