Documentation (field)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
One of the meanings of the word documentation is a field of study, a scientific discipline and a profession. The field of ”documentation” is associated with the movement founded by Paul Otlet (1868-1944) and Henri Lafontaine (1854-1943):
"The term "documentation" is a neologism invented by [Paul] Otlet to designate what today we tend to call Information Storage and Retrieval. In fact it is not too much to claim the Traité [de Documentation, 1934] as one of the first information science textbooks" (Rayward, 1994, 238).
As designation for the profession and research discipline has the term information science (IS) gained ground at the expense of "documentation". One indication is the name shift of "American Documentation Institute" (founded in 1937) to "American Society for Information Science" / "ASIS" in 1968 (after a longer process). In some European countries (e.g. France and Spain), the term is still used in this sense.
The name documentation is stille maintained in, for example, "Journal of Documentation". Recently there has been a movement within information science to return to the name (and concept) of documentation, see for example Ørom (2007).
[edit] Literature
Berard, R. (2003). Documentation. IN: International Encyclopedia of Information and Library Science. 2nd. ed. Ed. by John Feather & Paul Sturges. London: Routledge (pp. 147-149).
Björkbom, C. (1960). Dokumentation. Pp. 423-434 IN: Nordisk Håndbog i Bibliotekskundskab, Bind III. Red. af Svend Dahl. Udg. af Nordisk videnskabeligt Bibliotekarforbund. København: Alfred G. Hassing A/S.
Briet, S. (1951). Qu'est-ce que la documentation? Paris: Editions Documentaires Industrielle et Techniques.
Farkas-Conn, I. S. (1990). From Documentation to Information Science. The Beginnings and Early Development of the American Documentation Institute - American Society for information Science. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Garfield, E. (1953). Librarian versus documentalist. Manuscript submitted to Special Libraries. http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/papers/librarianvsdocumentalisty1953.html
Graziano, E. E. (1968). On a theory of documentation. American Documentalist 19, 85-89.
Hjørland, B. (2000b). Hvad blev der af videnskabelig dokumentation? DF-revy, 23.(7), 191-194. http://www.db.dk/binaries/hvad%20blev%20der%20af%20videnskabelig%20dokumentation.pdf (Retrieved 2007-11-17).
Lund, Niels Windfeld (2009). Document theory. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 43, (forthcoming).
Otlet, P. (1934). Traité de Documentation: le livre sur le levre, theorie et pratique. Bruxelles: Editions Mundaneium (reprinted 1989).
Rayward, W. B. (1994). Visions of Xanadu: Paul Otlet (1868-1944) and hypertext. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 45(4), 235-250.
Simon, E. N. (1947). A novice on "documentation". Journal of Documentation, 3(2), 238-341.
Woledge, G. (1983). Bibliography and Documentation - Words and Ideas. Journal of Documentation, 39(4), 266-279.
Ørom, A. (2007). The concept of information versus the concept of document. IN: Document (re)turn. Contributions from a research field in transition. Ed. By Roswitha Skare, Niels Windfeld Lund & Andreas Vårheim. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. (Pp. 53-72).
