Read the text: Scientific discipline of documentation (Part I)

The discipline of documentation science, which marks the earliest theoretical foundations of modern information science, emerged in the late part of the 19th Century in Europe together with several more scientific indexes whose purpose was to organize scholarly literature. Many information science historians cite Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine as the fathers of information science with the founding of the International Institute of Bibliography (IIB) in 1895. A second generation of European Documentalists emerged after the Second World War, most notably Suzanne Briet. However, "information science" as a term is not popularly used in academia until sometime in the latter part of the 20th Century.

Documentalists emphasized the utilitarian integration of technology and technique toward specific social goals. According to Ronald Day, "As an organized system of techniques and technologies, documentation was understood as a player in the historical development of global organization in modernity – indeed, a major player inasmuch as that organization was dependent on the organization and transmission of information." Otlet and Lafontaine (who won the Nobel Prize in 1913) not only envisioned later technical innovations but also projected a global vision for information and information technologies that speaks directly to postwar visions of a global "information society." Otlet and Lafontaine established numerous organizations dedicated to standardization, bibliography, international associations, and consequently, international cooperation. These organizations were fundamental for ensuring international production in commerce, information, communication and modern economic development, and they later found their global form in such institutions as the League of Nations and the United Nations. Otlet designed the Universal Decimal Classification, based on Melville Dewey’s decimal classification system.

 Although he lived decades before computers and networks emerged, what he discussed prefigured what ultimately became the World Wide Web. His vision of a great network of knowledge focused on documents and included the notions of hyperlinks, search engines, remote access, and social networks.

Otlet not only imagined that all the world's knowledge should be interlinked and made available remotely to anyone, but he also proceeded to build a structured document collection. This collection involved standardized paper sheets and cards filed in custom-designed cabinets according to a hierarchical index (which culled information worldwide from diverse sources) and a commercial information retrieval service (which answered written requests by copying relevant information from index cards). Users of this service were even warned if their query was likely to produce more than 50 results per search. By 1937 documentation had formally been institutionalized, as evidenced by the founding of the American Documentation Institute (ADI), later called the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

Otlet first adopted the word Documentation, in 1903, in an article entitled “Les sciences bibliographiques de la documentation”, in the sense of the process of providing documents or references to the ones who need information they may contain. This author refers to a body of knowledge denominated bibliographic sciences defined as: production, material fabrication, distribution, listing, statistics, conservation and utilization therefore, including compilation, printing, publishing, bookselling, bibliography and librarianship. Otlet considered as documents not only books and manuscripts, but also archives, maps, schemes, ideograms, diagrams, drawings and their reproduction, photographs of real objects, among others . For Fayet-Scribe, this text may be considered the founder of Otlet’s work. According to this author, the library stops being only an institution which conserves books and these are not any longer the only ones in which could be identified knowledge: the idea of document is created: its function turns out to be more important than its morphology.

Besides this, designating the specific activity of collecting, processing, searching and disseminating documents, Otlet used the term documentation in 1905 in the article “L’organisation rationale de I’information et de la documentation en matière economique”. Here we observed probably the first use of the words information and documentation. Between 1905 and 1917, Otlet started to abandon the word bibliography in his publishing in favor of the words documentation and information, even when in many times he uses one for the other. In the Traité de Documentation, he made use of the word Documentology to designate the field of knowledge which encompasses the words bibliography, bibliology and documentation.

Otlet describes the Documentation as being:

[…] nowadays constituted by a series of distributed operations among different people and organisms: the author, the copier, the printer, the editor, the bookseller, the librarian, the documenter, the bibliographer, the critic, the analyst, the compiler, the reader, the researcher and the intellectual worker. The documentation follows the document from the moment it arises out of the author’s pen until the moment it impresses the brain of the reader.

I. Answer the questions:

1. When did the discipline of documentation science emerge?

2. What classification was designed by Otlet?

3. Who won the Nobel Prize in 1913?

4. When did Otlet use the term “documentation” at first time?

5. How did Otlet describe the Documentation?

II. Pick out the basic information of the text.

Lesson 17