acteristic of, today's information technology and the uses ... a new and to some degree revolutionary ... 2 years or so and introduces the Otlet-themed issue of the.
The Historical Development of Information Infrastructures and the Dissemination of Knowledge: A Personal Reflection
by W. Boyd Rayward 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.
Boyd Rayward is research professor in the GSWS, University of Illinois, where he can be reached at 501 E. Daniel St., Champaign, IL 61820; phone: 21 7-244-9741; email: wrayward@ alexis.lis.uiuc.edu
y research over the years has focused on hisM torical 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
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have argued that in Otlet’s world of paper, card and cabinet technology he provided a theoretical basis for, and described many of the functionalitiescharacteristic 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 ( 1 868-1944) and Hypertext,” and “The origins of information science and the International Institute of Bibliographyhternational Federation of Documentation (HD).” 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 speculationssuggest 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 experiencedand 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 Trait4 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
of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Wide Web and the functionalities they repThe advent of the computer, telecomresent that is as important as any of the roles munications, the Internet and the Web has attributed to such pioneering and iconic figprofoundly affected access to and systems ures as H.G. Wells, Vannevar Bush, Ted for the management of information. These Nelson and others. The World Wide Web: developments represent the emergence of how readily he would have embraced this a new and to some degree revolutionary simple evocative locution for what he called communications infrastructure. Libraries the International Network for Universal are necessarily a part of it. I have tried to Documentation! examine the initial confrontation between International Organizationand Dissemwhat were for some time two antagonistic ination of Knowledge: Selected Essays of groups. The first group was librarians and Paul Otlet was designed to make some of libraries as organizations formed by and his thinking available in the English-speakwithin complex, deeply rooted traditions of ing world. A collection of my own papers codified professional practice and belief. on Otlet-relatedmatters has been translated The second group was computer scientists by Pilar Amau Rived into Spanish as Hasta and engineers who had only relatively la Docurnentacion Electronica. A recent recently descended onto the world of work, article, “Knowledge Organization and a vigorously touting the miracles that their New World Polity: The Rise and Fall and revolutionary new machines could produce. Boyd Rayward at the 2004 ASISIT Rise of the Ideas of Paul Otlet,” is an attempt These new innovations seemed to promise Annual Meeting h e m he accepted the so much to librarians, who were filled with to assess the historiography that has develASISIT Research Award. oped around Otlet and his work in the last anxiety at the escalating costs and the vol2 years or so and introduces the Otlet-themed issue of the ume of materials they confronted and alive with hope from bi-lingual TransnationalAssociations/AssociationsTransnawhat was promised; I try to explain why in the event so little tionales, the journal of the Union of InternationalAssociations. was produced by computer scientists and engineers - at least at first. What was the nature of the attitudes, expectations and Historiographical Questions Related to library and practices that led to collisions within these two communities Information Science of interest and what was needed for partial assimilation of My studies of Otlet’s work made me aware that asking, one by the other or at least accommodation between them to “What is a library or bibliography or information or librarianbe achieved? An attempt to answer such questions is “A ship or library and information science?” is to ask i n w t i n g hisHistory of Computer Applications in Libraries: Prolegomena” torically contingent questions. My first exploration of some of that introduced a two-issue compilation of articles on the histhese questions took a kind of “evolutionist” view in “The tory of computing in libraries for the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. Development of Library and Information Science: Disciplinary I have also argued that the current developments in inforDifferentiation, Competition and Convergence,” in Machlup mation technology allow us to examine museums and archives and Mansfield’s The Study of Informution: Interdisciplinary as well as libraries in a new light. As the boundaries between Messages. Later in “The History and Historiography of them as organizations begin to blur in the digital world, I sugInformation Science: Some Reflections,” which introduced an issue that I edited of Informution Processing and Management gest that we can begin to conceptualize their functions as interrelated in new (and old) ways (“Electronic Information and on the history of information science, I tried to give a broader Functional Integration,” “From Docent to Cyber Docent”). 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 Future Directions to manage information, of which the library is an historically My aim is to seek to further develop and to integrate two important example. I think of all of these elements as society’s informationinfrastructure- before the term was taken over and sets of historically separate studies. One has elements that are limited in its designation by the telecommunications industry focused on the mid and latter half of the 17th century in (“History and Historiography of Information Science”). The England and France. The other has elements that are focused first of two more recent studies explores the idea of emergent on the period in Europe between the two world wars in the communities that are both national and international in their 20th century. Both were periods of epistemic transition, to interest in historical study of information systems and science, echo Foucault, in which great changes were beginning to appear in the information infrastructure of the time. These while the second explores the idea of how we might think about pioneers in a field like library and information science changes reflected profound disturbances in society and equally (“Scientific and Technological Information Systems”and “When profound changes in the nature and speed of knowledge proand Why Is a Pioneer?”). duction and dissemination.
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The need in the national capitals and in regional centers for new social settings within which the informal exchange of information can take place.. .is becoming apparent. Toward the end of the first period we are beginning to see emerge from the epistolatory practices and ideology of the “Republic of Letters,” new approaches to scientific publishing and scholarly communication, centered at least initially in new scientific academies and later scholarly associations, that were eventually to become fundamental to the creation and advancement of modern science and scholarship. From the floods of pamphlets and broadsides of the period, we see newspapers and popular journals, as we will know them, beginning to emerge and to differentiate functions and audiences. What will eventually become systems of the book trade and later official national bibliography are adumbrated. The need in the national capitals and in regional centers for new social settings within which the informal exchange of information can take place (but which also introduce some kind structure for what might be called personal communicative relationships in the world of letters and learning) is becoming apparent. This structure is reflected in the interests, relationships and behaviors of the clienteles - the habitues of particular bookshops, aristocratic salons and drawing rooms, coffee
shops and even alehouses of the time. The diverse functions that initially characterized these locales were eventually and perhaps relatively quickly supplanted by new forms of publication and new and highly differentiated bibliothecal organizational formations, one of the most enduring of which will be the public library. The second period is characterized by the existence of fully mature scholarly communication and library systems, both at the local and national levels, and by complex national and international systems of scientific publication and bibliographical services. But it is a period in which the effectiveness of the now long-established organizational arrangements for managing public knowledge as they have developed since the invention of printing and the emergence of great knowledge institutions that had begun to take shape in the 17th century arrangements centrally involving, for example, universities, scientific associations and academies, the publishing industry, and libraries and museums - are being questioned. In Europe among their interrogators are Paul Otlet, H. G. Wells, Otto Neurath and others who are seeking to find ways of over-
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coming barriers to social as well as scientific and technical progress inherent in the knowledge apparatus as it was then constituted. For Otlet, Wells and others microfilm and indeed other technologies, such as Neurath’s ISOTYPE visual language, offer the prospect of a revolutionary technological “fix” to the existing inefficiencies of the systems of scientific and scholarly communication. The work that I have done so far only touches on some of these matters. In Information Processing and Management, “Some Schemes for Restructuring and Mobilizing Information in Documents: A Historical Perspective,” I examine the utopian information management ideas of John Dury and Samuel Hartlib (and their colleagues in mid-17th century London) and of Leibniz, as well as those of more recent figures such as William Learned and H. G. Wells. I have gone back to look closely at Bacon’s ideas about the nature of knowledge and how his ideas might be related to issues of scientific communication and knowledge organization (“Francis Bacon”).
I have also mounted what I hope is a cogently argued negative critique of Wells’ idea of a World Brain. Much remains!
Conclusion The underlying goal of these kinds if studies is to examine the ways in which all societies are, in some sense, information societies. To do so, we focus on periods in which for some articulate and influential persons the information infrastructure of the time seems to be breaking down and is prompting them both to criticize what exists and to speculate about what is needed. What comprises information infrastructure?How does it assume institutional forms that historically integrate people, technologiesand various kinds of practices involving collecting, preserving, organizing and making information available for use? And how does this complex infrastructure underlie social stability and change, both as cause and effect? These questions are grand, perhaps ultimately irresolvable,but how fascinating they remain even if one is still merely nibbling around the edges!
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