# Literature/1997/Rayward

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 &

## Authors

* University of New South Wales

## Abstract

This article suggests that the ideas and practices embraced by the term "documentation," introduced by Paul Otlet and his colleagues to describe the work of the International Institute of Bibliography (later FID) that they set up in Brussels in 1895, constituted a new "discursive formation," to echo Foucault. While today's special terminology of information science was not then in use, this should not obscure the fact that key concepts for information science as we now understand this field of study and research -- and the technical systems and professional activities in which it is anchored -- were implicit in and operationalized by what was created within the International Institute of Bibliography in 1895 and the decades that followed. The ideas and practices to be discussed would today be rubricated as information technology, information retrieval, search strategies, information centers, fee-based information services, linked data bases, database management software, scholarly communication networks, multimedia and hypertext, even the modern, diffuse notion of "information" itself. The article argues that important aspects of the origins of information science, as we now know it in the U.S. and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, were contained within or became an extension of the discursive formation that we have labeled "documentation."

## Wikimedia

| w: Librarianship | w: Information science |

## 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. $^{[^]}$
* 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. $^{[^]}$
* Gillies, James & Robert Cailliau (2000). How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web. Oxford University Press. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1999/Stallman $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1999/Berners-Lee $^{[^]}$
* 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. $^{[^]}$
* 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. $^{[^]}$
* 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. $^{[^]}$
* Rayward, W. Boyd (1993) "Some Schemes for Restructuring and Mobilising Information in Documents: A Historical Perspective," Information Processing and Management, 30: 163-175.
* Rayward, W. Boyd (1983) "The International Exposition and The World Documentation Congress, Paris, 1937," The Library Quarterly, 53: 254-268.
* Rayward, W. Boyd (1975). The Universe of Information: The Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and International Organisation. (FID 520). Moscow: VINITI (for FID). $^{[^]}$
* Kochen, Manfred, ed. (1975). Information for Action: from Knowledge to Wisdom. New York: Academic Press. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1951/Briet $^{[^]}$
* Wells, H. G. (1938). World Brain. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co. $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1934/Otlet $^{[^]}$
* Goldberg, Emanuel (1931). Statistical Machine. U.S. patent 1,838,389. Dec. 29, 1931. $^{[^]}$