1. The origins of Information Science

2. Documentation
Paul Otlet
Henri La Fontaine

3. Documentation Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine
Brussels 1892
1895 International Institute of Bibliography
techniques for the organization of documents
classification with UDC

4. Documentation - USA
FID (1938) – International Federation for Information and Documentation
(1937) American Documentation Institute (ADI)

6. Vannevar Bush 1945
The problem – information explosion – the unabated, exponential growth of information and information records, particularly in science and technology
how to make more accessible a bewildering store of knowledge
The solution – MEMEX
Vannevar Bush 1945 – Pres. Roosevelt’s Science Advisor

7. MEMEX a machine that can store vast amounts of information, in which a user has the ability to create information "trails": links of related text and illustrations. This trail can then be stored and used for future reference.

8. Documentation Information Science
1968 –ADI renamed – the American Society for Information Science (Eugene Garfield and others)
1960s – interest in the information problem by scientists and government; rise in technology

9. Documentation Information Science
Transfer of information is an inseparable part of
research and development. All those concerned with
research and development—individual scientists,
engineers, industrial and academic research
establishments, technical societies, Government
agencies—must accept responsibility for the transfer
of information in the same degree and spirit that
they accept responsibility for research and
development
(US President’s Science Advisory Committee, 1963)

10. Documentation Information Science
technological advances – devices and systems for information processing
development of national information systems
3rd generation computers for space program – massive data storage

11. Information Science Much of what is now practiced as information
science would cease if not for the computer:
automatic indexing, file structuring and searching,
sorting and merging, query negotiation, content
analysis, computer augmented cataloging, etc
(Kochen, 1974)

12. Information science computational tradition document tradition
Michael Buckland
Information science
document tradition
document management concerned with collecting preserving, organizing, representing, selecting, reproducing interpreting, translating, summarizing and disseminating
importance of knowledge and multiple objectives assumed in the use of documents
acknowledges the importance of technology but also human beings
computational tradition
attempts to transfer computational techniques to problems of managing documents

13. Origins of Information Science
Librarians
organize, analyze and provide access for all kinds of users to the contents of documents
Documentalists
tend to exploit a wider variety of media and formats
work mainly with scientific and technical documents and users
Information Scientists
mainly from documentalists
aware of the wider aspects of a scientific investigation of the processes of generation, representation, retrieval and use of information

14. Information science and related disciplines
Communication
Epistemology
Mathematics
Information
Science
Sociology
Computer
Science
Psychology
Linguistics
(Ingwersen, 1992)