Search (15 results, page 1 of 1)

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Abstract

Nowadays, tremendous information sources are preserved, ranging from those of a traditional nature like libraries and museums to new formats like electronic databases and the World Wide Web. Making these sources consistent, easily accessible, and as complete as possible is challenging. Almost a century ago, people like Paul Otlet were already fully aware of this need and tried to develop ways of making human knowledge more accessible using the resources and technology available at that time. Otlet's ideas about a Universal Network of Documentation and the Universal Book are clear examples of such efforts. Computer science currently provides the means to build digital spaces that consist of (multimedia) information sources connected through the Internet. In this article, we give a nontechnical overview of the current state of the art in information management. Next, we focus on those aspects of Otlet's work that deal with the organization of knowledge and information sources. Then we study the potential connections between Otlet's work and the state of the art of computerized information management from a computer scientist's point of view. Finally, we consider some of the problems and challenges that information management still faces today and what computer science professionals have in common with, and can still learn from, Otlet and his work.

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Abstract

In 1983 Boyd Rayward described the early diffusion abroad of the Dewey Decimal Classification (and indirectly of the Universal Decimal Classification) in Australia, Great Britain, Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Russia. Here, I discuss the enormous interest in the decimal system in the Netherlands that went far beyond its original role for the classification of bibliographic knowledge. I will present Johan Zaalberg (1858-1934) and Ernst Hijmans (1890-1987) as two advocates for the use of the decimal system in the administration of public organizations and private companies and its role in the development of scientific management in the Netherlands.

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Abstract

This article explores how linguistics has influenced information retrieval (IR) and attempts to explain the impact of linguistics through an analysis of internal developments in information science generally, and IR in particular. It notes that information science/IR has been evolving from a case science into a fully fledged, "disciplined"/disciplinary science. The article establishes correspondences between linguistics and information science/IR using the three established IR paradigms-physical, cognitive, and computational-as a frame of reference. The current relationship between information science/IR and linguistics is elucidated through discussion of some recent information science publications dealing with linguistic topics and a novel technique, "keyword collocation analysis," is introduced. Insights from interdisciplinarity research and case theory are also discussed. It is demonstrated that the three stages of interdisciplinarity, namely multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity (in the narrow sense), and transdisciplinarity, can be linked to different phases of the information science/IR-linguistics relationship and connected to different ways of using linguistic theory in information science and IR.

Source

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 68(2017) no.3, S.660-680

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Abstract

Shelf arrangement, from a bibliographic perspective, constitutes a reading proposal of the collection to the users as well as a resource for management and access to the documents. However, the centrality of the call number testifies the near forgetfulness of the different proposals that came before it and the role of the collection of documents and the target audience in the elaboration of the organization, in addition to the overlapping of the bibliographic classification to shelf arrangement. This work is justified by the need to restore shelf arrangement, seeking to understand its fundamental aspects from the literature in which the activity was systematized. Thus, this paper aims at contributing to reorient the shelf arrangement as an activity of information organization, exploring its conformation in the Francophone literature, from the midnineteenth century up to the 1930s. As for the methodology, this is an exploratory research made possible through the historical-conceptual investigation of shelf arrangement found in the Francophone manuals of librarianship of that period. This study concludes that the activity was placed by that line since the nineteenth century, when its own terminology was developed under the consideration of the intervention of the contexts, using methods and guided by the diversity of proposals.

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Abstract

In Information and Intrigue Colin Burke tells the story of one man's plan to revolutionize the world's science information systems and how science itself became enmeshed with ideology and the institutions of modern liberalism. In the 1890s, the idealistic American Herbert Haviland Field established the Concilium Bibliographicum, a Switzerland-based science information service that sent millions of index cards to American and European scientists. Field's radical new idea was to index major ideas rather than books or documents. In his struggle to create and maintain his system, Field became entangled with nationalistic struggles over the control of science information, the new system of American philanthropy (powered by millionaires), the politics of an emerging American professional science, and in the efforts of another information visionary, Paul Otlet, to create a pre-digital worldwide database for all subjects. World War I shuttered the Concilium, and postwar efforts to revive it failed. Field himself died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. Burke carries the story into the next generation, however, describing the astonishingly varied career of Field's son, Noel, who became a diplomat, an information source for Soviet intelligence (as was his friend Alger Hiss), a secret World War II informant for Allen Dulles, and a prisoner of Stalin. Along the way, Burke touches on a range of topics, including the new entrepreneurial university, Soviet espionage in America, and further efforts to classify knowledge.

Content

Raising a perfectly modern HerbertAn unexpected library revolution, at an unexpected place, by an unusual young fellow -- The great men at Harvard and Herbert's information "calling" -- Challenging the British "Lion" of science information -- New information ideas in Zurich, not Brooklyn or Paris -- Starting an information revolution and business, the hard way -- Big debts, big gamble, big building, big friends, a special librarian -- Lydia's other adventurous boy, family responsibilities, to America with hat in hand, war -- From information to intrigue, Herbert, WWI, a young Allen Dulles -- Returning to a family in decline, meeting with the liberal establishment -- To the centers of science and political power, and a new information world -- More conflicts between old and new science -- Wistar and the Council's abstracts vs. Field's elegant classification, round 1 -- A Concilium without Herbert Field, Nina and the Rockefeller's great decisions -- A voyage home and the Council's vision for world science vs. the Concilium, round 2 -- The information consequences of "capitalism's disaster" and the shift to applied science information -- The 1930's ideological journey of the Fields and their liberal friends -- Intrigue begins, in Switzerland, England, and Cambridge -- New loves, a family of agents, science information in war, librarians stealing books?, Soviet espionage without cost -- Looking forward to more intrigue, the postwar stories of big science, big information, and more ideology.

LCSH

Classification / Books / Science
Information storage and retrieval systems / Science
Information science / History
Science / Political aspects / History / 20th century
Science and state / History / 20th century

Series

History and foundation of information science

Subject

Classification / Books / Science
Information storage and retrieval systems / Science
Information science / History
Science / Political aspects / History / 20th century
Science and state / History / 20th century

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Date

22. 2.2013 12:10:07

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Abstract

In this book, Ronald Day offers a critical history of the modern tradition of documentation. Focusing on the documentary index (understood as a mode of social positioning), and drawing on the work of the French documentalist Suzanne Briet, Day explores the understanding and uses of indexicality. He examines the transition as indexes went from being explicit professional structures that mediated users and documents to being implicit infrastructural devices used in everyday information and communication acts. Doing so, he also traces three epistemic eras in the representation of individuals and groups, first in the forms of documents, then information, then data. Day investigates five cases from the modern tradition of documentation. He considers the socio-technical instrumentalism of Paul Otlet, "the father of European documentation" (contrasting it to the hermeneutic perspective of Martin Heidegger); the shift from documentation to information science and the accompanying transformation of persons and texts into users and information; social media's use of algorithms, further subsuming persons and texts; attempts to build android robots -- to embody human agency within an information system that resembles a human being; and social "big data" as a technique of neoliberal governance that employs indexing and analytics for purposes of surveillance. Finally, Day considers the status of critique and judgment at a time when people and their rights of judgment are increasingly mediated, displaced, and replaced by modern documentary techniques.

Content

Paul Otlet : friends and books for information needsRepresenting documents and persons in information systems : library and information science and citation indexing and analysis -- Social computing and the indexing of the whole -- The document as the subject : androids -- Governing expression : social big data and neoliberalism.

Footnote

Vgl. auch den Beitrag: Day, R.E.: An afterword to indexing it all: the subject in the age of documentation, information, and data. In: Bulletin of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 42(2016) no.2, S.25-28. Rez. in: JASIST 67(2016) no.7, S.1784-1786 (H.A. Olson).

LCSH

Information science / Philosophy
Information science / Social aspects

Series

History and foundation of information science

Subject

Information science / Philosophy
Information science / Social aspects

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Abstract

This article examines changing views on "systematic" or classified shelf-arrangement in German library science from Kayser's 1790 work Ueber die Manipulation bey der Einrichtung einer Bibliothek to the 1914 Versammlung deutscher Bibliothekare in Leipzig, at which Georg Leyh delivered the seminal paper, "Systematische oder mechanische Aufstellung?" Systematic arrangement was, with few exceptions, held up as an ideal throughout the nineteenth century; but by 1914 it could be agreed to belong to a past era in which, in the words of Leyh, libraries ran as a "Kleinbetrieb" [small business] (Leyh 1913, 100, "Das Dogma von der systematischen Aufstellung II-IV." Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 30:97-135). In particular, this article seeks to explore how changing views on the ideal of systematic shelf-arrangement in German library science during this period reflected evolving conceptions of librarianship. For nineteenth-century writers such as Ebert, Molbech, and Petzholdt, systematic classification and arrangement had meaning against the backdrop of an encyclopedic tradition within which libraries and librarians played an important role in organizing and presenting a rational overview of the universe of knowledge - an overview that was to be both physical and intellectual. The waning of the ideal of systematic arrangement at the turn of the twentieth century was associated with a sense of loss, as an intellectual or "scholarly" tradition of librarianship was seen to give way to more utilitarian and "bureaucratic" expectations. The changing fortunes of the ideal of systematic arrangement in German library science between 1790 and 1914 may be seen to illustrate how progress and loss are often inextricably linked in the history of libraries and librarianship

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Abstract

The dream of universal knowledge hardly started with the digital age. From the archives of Sumeria to the Library of Alexandria, humanity has long wrestled with information overload and management of intellectual output. Revived during the Renaissance and picking up pace in the Enlightenment, the dream grew and by the late nineteenth century was embraced by a number of visionaries who felt that at long last it was within their grasp. Among them, Paul Otlet stands out. A librarian by training, he worked at expanding the potential of the catalogue card -- the world's first information chip. From there followed universal libraries and reading rooms, connecting his native Belgium to the world -- by means of vast collections of cards that brought together everything that had ever been put to paper. Recognizing that the rapid acceleration of technology was transforming the world's intellectual landscape, Otlet devoted himself to creating a universal bibliography of all published knowledge. Ultimately totaling more than 12 million individual entries, it would evolve into the Mundaneum, a vast "city of knowledge" that opened its doors to the public in 1921. By 1934, Otlet had drawn up plans for a network of "electric telescopes" that would allow people everywhere to search through books, newspapers, photographs, and recordings, all linked together in what he termed a réseau mondial: a worldwide web. It all seemed possible, almost until the moment when the Nazis marched into Brussels and carted it all away. In Cataloging the World, Alex Wright places Otlet in the long continuum of visionaries and pioneers who have dreamed of unifying the world's knowledge, from H.G. Wells and Melvil Dewey to Ted Nelson and Steve Jobs. And while history has passed Otlet by, Wright shows that his legacy persists in today's networked age, where Internet corporations like Google and Twitter play much the same role that Otlet envisioned for the Mundaneum -- as the gathering and distribution channels for the world's intellectual output. In this sense, Cataloging the World is more than just the story of a failed entrepreneur; it is an ongoing story of a powerful idea that has captivated humanity from time immemorial, and that continues to inspire many of us in today's digital age.

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Source

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 61(2010) no.4, S.835-849

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Abstract

This paper outlines the life and work of Paul Otlet (1868-1944). Otlet was a founder of the scholarly disciplines of bibliography, documentation, and information science. As a result of the work he undertook with Henri La Fontaine (1854-1943)-specifically, the establishment in 1895 in Brussels of the International Institute of Bibliography, which aimed to construct a Universal Bibliographic Repertory-Otlet has become known as the father of the Internet. Otlet's grand project, as stated in his Traité de documentation (1934), was never fully realized. Even before his death, the collections he assembled had been dismembered. After his death, the problematic conditions in which Otlet's personal papers and the collections he had created were preserved meant that his thought and work remained largely unacknowledged. It fell to W. Boyd Rayward, who began to work on Otlet in the late 1960s, to rescue him from obscurity, publishing in 1975 a major biography of the pioneer knowledge entrepreneur and internationalist progenitor of the World Wide Web.

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Source

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 62(2011) no.12, S.2313-2326

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Footnote

Beitrag einer Special Section: Select Papers from ISKO France 2017: Onzième Colloque international d'ISKO-France: Fondements épistémologiques et théoriques de la science de l'information-documentation: hommage aux pionniers francophones Lieu du Colloque, Siège de l'UNESCO, 7 Place de Fontenoy, Paris, 11-12 juillet 2017.

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Abstract

Scrutinizing the ways in which early printed reference works were designed is a way of bringing typography and book history into the domain of library and information science. The core subject of this discipline is the concept of user-oriented organization of knowledge; it has a close connection to information-seeking behavior and retrieval. By studying the typographic arrangement of knowledge in early printed reference works, one can approach the history of the storage, organization, and retrieval of scientific information. The article discusses the typographic "architecture" of the dictionaries published by the Antwerp printer Christophe Plantin and, more specifically, the three dictionaries of the Dutch language compiled by Plantin's learned proofreader Cornelis Kiliaan (ca. 1530-1607). Kiliaan was one of the first authors to introduce etymology and comparative linguistics into his dictionaries. By analyzing the typographic macrostructures and microstructures of his works, it is possible to discover the lines along which they developed-in the words of Paul Valéry-into machines à savoir. The article also compares Plantin's dictionaries with the international benchmark for lexicographic publishing in the Renaissance world, viz. the translation dictionaries compiled and printed by the Parisian publisher Robert Estienne.