Suzanne Briet Research Articles

The reception of suzanne briet in the United States

AbstractEditor's SummaryA library pioneer of the mid‐20th century, Suzanne Briet was a driving force in expanding and modernizing library service and early information science in France. She is most well known for insightful writings on the concepts of bibliography and of documents and documentation. Despite international connections, Briet's writings, almost exclusively in French, received little recognition in the United States during her lifetime. One influential commentator's review suggested misunderstanding of her key ideas. But historical interest in information science, largely from within ASIS&T, and translation and online distribution of her seminal writings have renewed scholarly interest in Briet's work and established a place for her among notable information scientists.

Interrogating Spatial Analogies Relating to Knowledge Organization: Paul Otlet and Others

The author provides an examination of how ideas about place and space have been used in thinking about the organization of knowledge. The spatial analogies of Paul Otlet (1868-1944) in relation to his overall vision are traditional and conventional. Notions of space, place, position, location, and movement are frequent in the work of other leading innovators (Martin Schrettinger, Melvil Dewey, Wilhelm Ostwald, Emanuel Goldberg, and Suzanne Briet) concerning specific practical aspects of knowledge organization. Otlet's spatial imagery is more original and more ingenious when applied to technical problems compared to his overall vision.

Scoring the Work: Documenting Practice and Performance in Variable Media Art

This paper examines the issues inherent to documenting integral characteristics of variable media artworks. The author begins by revisiting Suzanne Briet's vision of documentation as a socially constructed practice central to the creation and dissemination of knowledge. This perspective lends insight into the nature of the document in the digital age and suggests a new cultural technique for working with variable media art as both document and documented. Janet Cardiff's 40 Part Motet (2001) provides case material for this discussion, and Richard Rinehart's proposal of the score as a documentary medium is suggested as a means of capturing the elements of practice and performance associated with variable media.

Women Professionals in Documentation in France during the 1930s

This article describes the roles of five women activists who helped transform librarianship in France away from a profession of male archivists. Heirs to the nineteenth-century movement promoting education by encouraging the use of books, they were all activists within Catholic or secular traditions. They knew the ideas of Paul Otlet (1868–1944), and some of them were influenced by American library developments. Suzanne Briet (1894–1989) created reference service at the national library. Louise-Noëlle Malclès (1899–1977) pioneered reference and bibliography at the Sorbonne. Yvonne Oddon (1902–82) developed a major museum library. Myriem Foncin (1893–1976) advanced map librarianship. Georgette de Grolier pioneered public library outreach. They changed attitudes, wrote influentially, and advanced professional education.

European Modernism and the Information Society: Review Article

European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the Future is a collection of chapters about the pioneers of information control and information retrieval. It is recommended reading for those interested in the scholarly conversation about Paul Otlet, Otto Neurath, Patrick Geddes, H G Wells, the English Fabians, Suzanne Briet, Wilhelm Ostwald, Franz Maria Feldhaus and L S Jast. It is also recommended for several chapters that give an overview of developments in the early 20th century.

Document, documentation, and the Document Academy: introduction

A series of efforts starting in the late nineteenth century to manage the increase in documents came to be knows as “documentation.” Leaders included Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet. The concern was with access to evidence and the meaning of “document” was broadened to include any sign preserved to represent phenomena. Legal deposit, when extended to new modern media, required new techniques and led to a new program in documentation at the University of Tromso, Norway, in 1996. Niels Lund, Michael Buckland, and others collaborated in forming the Document Academy and organized a series of conferences.

Suzanne Briet: An appreciation

Suzanne Briet: An appreciation

What is Documentation? English Translation of the Classic French Text (review)

Reviewed by: What is Documentation?: English Translation of the Classic French Text Jonathan Furner What is Documentation?: English Translation of the Classic French Text. By Suzanne Briet . Translated and edited by Ronald E. Day and Laurent Martinet with Hermina G. B. Anghelescu . Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2006. xi, 71 pp. $25.00. ISBN 0-8108-5109-1. The name of the French librarian and documentalist Suzanne Briet (1894–1989) is well known to the contemporary Anglophone information studies community, primarily thanks to those scholars such as Michael Buckland, Ronald E. Day, Birger Hjørland, Mary Niles Maack, and W. Boyd Rayward who have engaged with Briet's writings in the two decades following her death. Buckland, in particular, has caught the imagination of many readers with his analysis of Briet's invocation of an antelope in a zoo as an example of the kind of thing that, in the extended sense in which documentalists use the term, can usefully be considered as a document. Briet's major work—a forty-eight-page pamphlet called Qu'est-ce que la documentation? (Paris: Éditions Documentaires Industrielles et Techniques, 1951) that serves as the manifesto for a second generation (following Paul Otlet's first) of participants in the European documentation movement—was published by an arm of the Union française des organismes de documentation (UFOD), an organization that Briet cofounded three years before she took early retirement from the Bibliothèque nationale at the age of sixty. A Spanish translation appeared in Argentina in 1960, but English speakers have had to wait until now for this thoughtful translation by Day and Laurent Martinet (with the assistance of Hermina Anghelescu). Briet trained as a historian, and her writing has remarkable aesthetic qualities. Translation is never an exact science, of course, but translators of technical works are seldom required to exercise as much literary skill and cultural sensitivity as Day and Martinet demonstrate with What Is Documentation? One of Briet's most important insights was that individual documents may be interpreted in different ways by different people wishing to put them to different uses for different purposes. This variability of interpretation is characteristic of documents even at the level of individual words, and the different decisions made by different translators at the word level can have significant consequences. For instance, the pivotal definition of "document" on which Briet settles in short order—"tout indice concret ou symbolique, conservé ou enregistré, aux fins de représenter, de reconstituer ou de prouver un phénomène ou physique ou intellectuel" (Qu'est-ce que la documentation? 7)—is rendered in Buckland's 1991 paper "Information as Thing" (Journal of the American Society of Information Science [JASIS] 42, no. 5:351–60) as "any concrete or symbolic indication, preserved or recorded, for reconstructing or for proving a phenomenon, whether physical or mental" (355); in Buckland's 1997 paper "What Is a 'Document'?" (JASIS 48, no. 9:804–9) as "any [End Page 107] physical or symbolic sign, preserved or recorded, intended to represent, to reconstruct, or to demonstrate a physical or conceptual phenomenon" (806); and in Day and Martinet's 2006 edition as "any concrete or symbolic indexical sign, preserved or recorded toward the ends of representing, of reconstituting, or of proving a physical or intellectual phenomenon" (10) (all emphases added). Buckland's latter choice of "sign" as a translation of the French indice reminds us that the anonymous "linguists and philosophers" whom Briet identifies as sources (10) are usually presumed to be of the structuralist persuasion; interestingly, however, the use of the French indice in a semiotic context derives not from Saussure (who spoke of signes) but from Peirce. In that light, it might be argued that Day and Martinet's addition of "indexical" as a qualifier of "sign" does not wholly deliver on the precision it promises, since the Peircean taxonomy distinguishes clearly between indexical signs (such as photographs) and symbolic signs (such as ordinary words). In Day and Martinet's edition, Briet continues: "Is a star a document? Is a pebble rolled by a torrent a document? Is a living animal a document? No. But the photographs and the catalogues of stars, the stones...

What is a ?document??

Ordinarily the word “document” denotes a textual record. Increasingly sophisticated attempts to provide access to the rapidly growing quantity of available documents raised questions about what should be considered a “document.” The answer is important for any definition of the scope of Information Science. Paul Otlet and others developed a functional view of “document” and discussed whether, for example, sculpture, museum objects, and live animals, could be considered “documents.” Suzanne Briet equated “document” with organized physical evidence. These ideas appear to resemble notions of “material culture” in cultural anthropology and “object-as-sign” in semiotics. Others, especially in the U.S.A. (e.g., Jesse Shera and Louis Shores) took a narrower view. New digital technology renews old questions and also old confusions between medium, message, and meaning. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The centenary of “Madame Documentation”: Suzanne Briet, 1894-1989

Buckland, M. The centenary of ‘Madame Documentation’: Suzanne Briet, 1894-1989. (1995) Text (without photos) of article published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science 46, no. 3 (April 1995):235-237. Published version may differ slightly. French version: Le centenaire de Madame Documentation : Suzanne Briet, 1894-1989. Documentaliste: Sciences de l'information 32, no. 3 (Mai/Juin 1995): 179-181. The Centenary of Madame Documentation : Suzanne Briet, 1894-1989. Michael Buckland, School of Library and Information Studies, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-4600 Abstract: This is a biographical account of Suzanne Briet, 1884-1989, librarian, documentalist, historian, organizer, and feminist. One of the first few women appointed as librarian at the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, Briet was a leader in the development of Documentation in the 1930s and until she retired in 1954. Her manifesto on the nature of Documentation, Qu'est-ce que la documentation? (Paris, 1951), remains significant for information science theory. This year was the centenary of the birth, on February 1, 1894 in France, of Renee-Marie- Helene-Suzanne Briet, a significant pioneer of information science in the days when it was called documentation. She was known for a while under her married name, as Suzanne Dupuy (or Dupuy-Briet). Briet qualified as a secondary school teacher of English and History, but after teaching in Annaba, Algeria, from 1917 to 1920, she became a librarian. Qualifying in 1924, she was one of the first three women appointed as professional librarians in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. The feminization of librarianship occurred later in France than in the USA, essentially between the two World Wars. In addition, many new ideas were being introduced at that time, some influenced by North American practice and encouraged by the Paris Library School that operated, under American Library Association sponsorship, from 1923 to 1929. It must have been an exciting and interesting situation in spite of the political and economic difficulties and, later, the Second World War. (See Maack 1983, Delmas 1992; Documentaliste 1993, Richards Briet's main professional achievement at the Bibliotheque Nationale was symbolic of her interest in service and modernization: She planned, established, and supervised from 1934 to 1954 the Salle des Catalogues et Bibliographies, which was created by remodeling a basement (Cain 1936, photos on pp.33-34). Bibliographies which had previously been kept in closed stacks, she made available. She organized supplementary indexing and developed a bibliographic advisory service. The cross of the Legion of Honor was conferred on her in this room in 1950. From the late 1920s onwards Briet was active nationally and internationally in the development of what was then called Documentation but would now be called Information Science. She participated in the founding, in 1931, and in the subsequent leadership of the Union Francaise des Organismes de Documentation (UFOD), the French analogue of the American Documentation Institute (founded in 1937 and now called the American Society for Information Science). She was a leader in developing professional education for this new speciality. She developed (and UFOD adopted) a plan for what would have been the first school

Information retrieval of more than text

Information retrieval has been primarily concerned with text and text-like data. Image-handling reminds us that information retrieval should have a broader scope, and it did in the neglected work of European pioneers such as Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet. The terminology of “multimedia” needs attention to distinguish phenomena, facts, representations, forms of expression, and physical medium. © 1991 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.