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

Abstract

This article suggests that the ideas and practices embraced by the term “documentation,” introduced by Paul Otlet and his colleagues to describe the work of the International Institute of Bibliography (later FID) that they set up in Brussels in 1895, constituted a new “discursive formation,” to echo Foucault. While today's special terminology of information science was not then in use, this should not obscure the fact that key concepts for information science as we now understand this field of study and research—and the technical systems and professional activities in which it is anchored—were implicit in and operationalized by what was created within the International Institute of Bibliography in 1895 and the decades that followed. The ideas and practices to be discussed would today be rubricated as information technology, information retrieval, search strategies, information centers, fee-based information services, linked data bases, database management software, scholarly communication networks, multimedia and hypertext, even the modern, diffuse notion of “information” itself. The article argues that important aspects of the origins of information science, as we now know it in the U.S. and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, were contained within or became an extension of the discursive formation that we have labeled “documentation.” © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.