Information science and its core concepts: Levels of disagreement Birger Hjørland

3.4 Documentation

"The term "documentation" is a neologism invented by [Paul] Otlet to designate what today we tend to call Information Storage and Retrieval. In fact it is not too much to claim the Traité [de Documentation, 1934] as one of the first information science textbooks" (Rayward, 1994, 238).

The relations between librarianship and documentation have been described in the following way:

“The main differences [between library science and documentation] were identified as lying in the areas of bibliography and what came to be called "documentation". Exactly what the differences between these new "documentalists" and traditional librarians were was not altogether well defined. However, there was general agreement that documentalists were concerned not only with the physical handling of documents, but, to a much greater extent than traditional librarians, with the exploitation of the information contained in the documents. This practical thread generated some of its own theory, a noticeable example being Bradford's law of scattering” (Meadows, 1990, p. 59).

When electronic databases became common in the 1960s and 1970s, searching was done by intermediaries who were referred to as (research) librarians, information specialists, or documentalists. Online intermediation was the last common job-function involving “documentation” in relation to information work: Danish research libraries, for example, had documentation departments until about 1990. With the arrival of end-user searching, this function was downgraded in most places (cf. Hjørland 2000b), and the use of the term “documentation” disappeared almost totally.

The label “documentation” has generally been abandoned in favor of the term “information science”.⁹ One especially salient case of this was the change in name that the American Documentation Institute (founded in 1937) underwent when it became the American Society for Information Science (ASIS) in 1968 (Farkas-Conn, 1990). Although the general trend has been to replace “documentation” with “information science” in the English-speaking world, a small but growing group of researchers has argued that the term ’documentation’ should be preferred as a designator for the field (more about this in Section 5 below). In 1997, Tromsø University in Norway decided to use the term “documentation science” for its educational program, thus attempting revive the term.

Some benefits of the term “documentation” are that it is related (both historically and logically) to the term “bibliography” discussed above, and that it emphasizes aspects of scientific and scholarly communication that are relatively distinct from the more technical aspects of computer science and information technology; it thus both is expressive of a unique focus for LIS and provides a perspective more connected to the history and aim of the discipline.

3.5 Information Technology (IT) / Information and Communication Technology, (ICT)

A historical examination of the meaning of IT is useful:

In fact, the great majority of references to information technology have always been concerned with computers, although the exact meaning has shifted over time (Kline, 2006). The phrase received its first prominent usage in a Harvard Business Review article (Haigh, 2001; Leavitt & Whisler, 1958) intended to promote a technocratic vision for the future of business management. Its initial definition was at the conjunction of computers, operations research methods, and simulation techniques. Having failed initially to gain much traction (unlike related terms of a similar vintage such as information systems, information processing, and information science), it was revived in policy and economic circles in the 1970s with a new meaning. Information technology now described the expected convergence of the computing, media, and telecommunications industries (and their technologies), understood within the broader context of a wave of enthusiasm for the computer revolution, post-industrial society, information society (Webster, 1995), and other fashionable expressions of the belief that new electronic technologies were bringing a profound rupture with the past. As it spread broadly during the 1980s, IT increasingly lost its association with communications (and, alas, any vestigial connection to the idea of anybody actually being informed of anything) to become a new and more pretentious way of saying "computer". The final step in this process is the recent surge in references to "information and communication technologies" or ICTs, a coinage that makes sense only if one assumes that a technology can inform without communicating (Haigh, 2011, 432-433).

Today IT is often used retronymously about media for recorded knowledge and libraries. Johann Gutenberg’s invention of the movable type printing process in 1450, for example, is today often mentioned in histories of information technology (e.g., Butler 1997). But it is important to consider that IT implies a specific way of conceptualizing media and libraries.¹¹ It is a conceptualization that may be useful for automating libraries but problematic for understanding the qualitative, content-oriented functions for supporting learning, research, and cultural development.

There is today a tendency to consider IT as a new discipline independent from computer science. The establishing of special journals and educational programs is an expression of this trend. The Journal of Information Technology and the foundation of the IT University of Copenhagen¹² in 2003 serve as examples.

There are different attitudes about the relation between LIS and IT. Some researchers who espouse a “systems driven paradigm”¹³ may understand LIS as part of IT while others, for example, Buschmann (1993) are very critical of this view. It is my own attitude that the strong confusion of LIS (or IS) with IT has deprived the field of some of its core perspectives and thus caused a crisis of identity for the field. As Warner (2010) notes, current work on information retrieval (IR) often overlooks perspectives derived from LIS tradition. Warner (2000) and Finnemann (1999) emphasized that IT should not be seen only as a driver of development, but that it is given form and function by social, cultural, and political needs. The technological determinism often inherent in the notion is strange since the computer is a cultural artifact, a product of human ideas and physical work. This view may provide a platform for establishing one or more disciplines concerned with the humanistic aspects of IT. In Denmark (at least) “humanistic IT” (or humanistic informatics)¹⁴ is an emerging field which so far has lived in isolation from LIS, though there are now signs of a rapprochement between the two fields.