Historical Development of Information Infrastructures and the Dissemination of Knowledge: A Personal Reflection, The
Editor's Note: Boyd Rayward was the recipient of the ASIS&T Research Award for 2004. The award honors outstanding research contributions in the field of information science.
My research over the years has focused on historical questions related to library and information science as providing the intellectual underpinning of a variety of professional practices related to the dissemination and use of information. I have published a number of historical studies examining Utopian schemes for managing knowledge, the evolution of institutionalized or organizational aspects of information infrastructure (as represented especially by libraries, museums and systems for the international organization and dissemination of information), and the emergence of what I think of as an interdiscipline - nowadays often designated library and information science - concerned with the study of these phenomena.
Studies of the Life and Work of Paul Otlet
The Universe of Information: The Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and International Organization was an initial study of a hitherto neglected figure. A Russian translation of this book was published in 1977 and a Spanish edition in 1996. With the advent of the Internet and the Web, it has become clear how pioneering and important historically the work of Paul Otlet and his colleagues was. It seems yet even more relevant today with the recently announced agreement between Google and a number of research libraries to digitize and make their collections available through the Web. I have argued that in Otlet's world of paper, card and cabinet technology he provided a theoretical basis for, and described many of the functionalities characteristic of, today's information technology and the uses to which it has been put. Two articles that might be mentioned in this context are "Visions of Xanadu: Paul Otlet (1868-1944) and Hypertext," and "The origins of information science and the International Institute of Bibliography/International Federation of Documentation (FID)." Both articles were reprinted in ASIS&T's Historical Studies in Information Science.
Otlet's innovative thinking encourages us to question and to broaden our understanding of what constitutes a document. His technological experiments and speculations suggest how clearly he understood that technology limits not only what we can do but also what we realize is possible in the management of information and that, reciprocally, technology can open up what we can think as well as what we can do. Many of the failures he experienced and his conceptual struggles with them also made him acutely aware that managing and deploying information are profoundly social processes that are embedded in political and ideological structures of various kinds. Otlet's Traité de Documentation is, for me, the first systematic information science treatise. I believe that his ideas have a historical role in our understanding of the emergence of the Internet and World Wide Web and the functionalities they represent that is as important as any of the roles attributed to such pioneering and iconic figures as H.G. Wells, Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson and others. The World Wide Web: how readily he would have embraced this simple evocative locution for what he called the International Network for Universal Documentation!
International Organization and Dissemination of Knowledge: Selected Essays of Paul Otlet was designed to make some of his thinking available in the English-speaking world. A collection of my own papers on Otlet-related matters has been translated by Pilar Arnau Rived into Spanish as Hasta Ia Documentacion Electronica. A recent article, "Knowledge Organization and a New World Polity: The Rise and Fall and Rise of the Ideas of Paul Otlet," is an attempt to assess the historiography that has developed around Otlet and his work in the last 25 years or so and introduces the Otlet-themed issue of the bi-lingual Transnational Associations/Associations Transnationales, the journal of the Union of International Associations.
Historiographical Questions Related to Library and Information Science
My studies of Otlet's work made me aware that asking, "What is a library or bibliography or information or librarianship or library and information science?" is to ask interesting historically contingent questions. My first exploration of some of these questions took a kind of "evolutionist" view in "The Development of Library and Information Science: Disciplinary Differentiation, Competition and Convergence," in Machlup and Mansfield's The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages. Later in "The History and Historiography of Information Science: Some Reflections," which introduced an issue that I edited of Information Processing and Management on the history of information science, I tried to give a broader view of what I saw as the nature of information and the roles and functions of the systems that we have devised as a society to manage information, of which the library is an historically important example. I think of all of these elements as society's information infrastructure - before the term was taken over and limited in its designation by the telecommunications industry ("History and Historiography of Information Science"). The first of two more recent studies explores the idea of emergent communities that are both national and international in their interest in historical study of information systems and science, while the second explores the idea of how we might think about pioneers in a field like library and information science ("Scientific and Technological Information Systems" and "When and Why Is a Pioneer?").
My research over the years has focused on historical questions related to library and information science as providing the intellectual underpinning of a variety of professional practices related to the dissemination and use of information. I have published a number of historical studies examining Utopian schemes for managing knowledge, the evolution of institutionalized or organizational aspects of information infrastructure (as represented especially by libraries, museums and systems for the international organization and dissemination of information), and the emergence of what I think of as an interdiscipline - nowadays often designated library and information science - concerned with the study of these phenomena.
Studies of the Life and Work of Paul Otlet
The Universe of Information: The Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and International Organization was an initial study of a hitherto neglected figure. A Russian translation of this book was published in 1977 and a Spanish edition in 1996. With the advent of the Internet and the Web, it has become clear how pioneering and important historically the work of Paul Otlet and his colleagues was. It seems yet even more relevant today with the recently announced agreement between Google and a number of research libraries to digitize and make their collections available through the Web. I have argued that in Otlet's world of paper, card and cabinet technology he provided a theoretical basis for, and described many of the functionalities characteristic of, today's information technology and the uses to which it has been put. Two articles that might be mentioned in this context are "Visions of Xanadu: Paul Otlet (1868-1944) and Hypertext," and "The origins of information science and the International Institute of Bibliography/International Federation of Documentation (FID)." Both articles were reprinted in ASIS&T's Historical Studies in Information Science.
Otlet's innovative thinking encourages us to question and to broaden our understanding of what constitutes a document. His technological experiments and speculations suggest how clearly he understood that technology limits not only what we can do but also what we realize is possible in the management of information and that, reciprocally, technology can open up what we can think as well as what we can do. Many of the failures he experienced and his conceptual struggles with them also made him acutely aware that managing and deploying information are profoundly social processes that are embedded in political and ideological structures of various kinds. Otlet's Traité de Documentation is, for me, the first systematic information science treatise. I believe that his ideas have a historical role in our understanding of the emergence of the Internet and World Wide Web and the functionalities they represent that is as important as any of the roles attributed to such pioneering and iconic figures as H.G. Wells, Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson and others. The World Wide Web: how readily he would have embraced this simple evocative locution for what he called the International Network for Universal Documentation!
International Organization and Dissemination of Knowledge: Selected Essays of Paul Otlet was designed to make some of his thinking available in the English-speaking world. A collection of my own papers on Otlet-related matters has been translated by Pilar Arnau Rived into Spanish as Hasta Ia Documentacion Electronica. A recent article, "Knowledge Organization and a New World Polity: The Rise and Fall and Rise of the Ideas of Paul Otlet," is an attempt to assess the historiography that has developed around Otlet and his work in the last 25 years or so and introduces the Otlet-themed issue of the bi-lingual Transnational Associations/Associations Transnationales, the journal of the Union of International Associations.
Historiographical Questions Related to Library and Information Science
My studies of Otlet's work made me aware that asking, "What is a library or bibliography or information or librarianship or library and information science?" is to ask interesting historically contingent questions. My first exploration of some of these questions took a kind of "evolutionist" view in "The Development of Library and Information Science: Disciplinary Differentiation, Competition and Convergence," in Machlup and Mansfield's The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages. Later in "The History and Historiography of Information Science: Some Reflections," which introduced an issue that I edited of Information Processing and Management on the history of information science, I tried to give a broader view of what I saw as the nature of information and the roles and functions of the systems that we have devised as a society to manage information, of which the library is an historically important example. I think of all of these elements as society's information infrastructure - before the term was taken over and limited in its designation by the telecommunications industry ("History and Historiography of Information Science"). The first of two more recent studies explores the idea of emergent communities that are both national and international in their interest in historical study of information systems and science, while the second explores the idea of how we might think about pioneers in a field like library and information science ("Scientific and Technological Information Systems" and "When and Why Is a Pioneer?").