The origins of information science and the International Institute of Bibliography/International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID)

• Authors: W. Boyd Rayward
• Venue: Journal of the American Society for Information Science - Special topic issue: history of documentation and information science: part I
• Year: 1997

This article suggests that the ideas and practices embraced by theterm “documentation,” introduced by Paul Otlet and hiscolleagues to describe the work of the InternationalInstitute of Bibliography (later FID) that they set up in Brussels in1895, constituted a new “discursive formation,” to echoFoucault. While today's special terminology of information science wasnot then in use, this should not obscure the fact that key concepts forinformation science as we now understand this field of study andresearch—and the technical systems and professional activities inwhich it is anchored—were implicit in and operationalized by whatwas created within the International Institute of Bibliography in 1895and the decades that followed. The ideas and practices to be discussedwould today be rubricated as information technology, informationretrieval, search strategies, information centers, fee-based informationservices, linked data bases, database management software, scholarlycommunication networks, multimedia and hypertext, even the modern,diffuse notion of “information” itself. The article arguesthat important aspects of the origins of information science, as we nowknow it in the U.S. and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, werecontained within or became an extension of the discursive formation thatwe have labeled “documentation.”—Author's Abstract