Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- Forewords: Information science and 21st century information practices: creatively engaging with information
- The emerging discipline of information
- The scope of information science
- A fascinating field and a pragmatic enterprise
- A slippery and ubiquitous concept
- The future of information science
- List of acronyms
- 1 What is information science? Disciplines and professions
- 2 History of information: the story of documents
- 3 Philosophies and paradigms of information science
- 4 Basic concepts of information science
- 5 Domain analysis
- 6 Information organization
- 7 Information technologies: creation, dissemination and retrieval
- 8 Informetrics
- 9 Information behaviour
- 10 Communicating information: changing contexts
- 11 Information society
- 12 Information management and policy
- 13 Digital literacy
- 14 Information science research: what and how?
- 15 The future of the information sciences
- Additional resources
- Index
2 - History of information: the story of documents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- Forewords: Information science and 21st century information practices: creatively engaging with information
- The emerging discipline of information
- The scope of information science
- A fascinating field and a pragmatic enterprise
- A slippery and ubiquitous concept
- The future of information science
- List of acronyms
- 1 What is information science? Disciplines and professions
- 2 History of information: the story of documents
- 3 Philosophies and paradigms of information science
- 4 Basic concepts of information science
- 5 Domain analysis
- 6 Information organization
- 7 Information technologies: creation, dissemination and retrieval
- 8 Informetrics
- 9 Information behaviour
- 10 Communicating information: changing contexts
- 11 Information society
- 12 Information management and policy
- 13 Digital literacy
- 14 Information science research: what and how?
- 15 The future of the information sciences
- Additional resources
- Index
Summary
The written word – the persistent word – was a prerequisite for conscious thought as we understand it
James Gleick (2011, 37)Technology trends and their social impacts can be described in broad terms, but such summaries are extreme simplifications, imagined aggregations of the myriad details of any number of individuals, their actions and the consequences. And each detail involves a personal history far to rich and detailed to be fully comprehended. It is only by attempting to reconstruct the details of specific developments, and of actual persons in their complex and ever-changing contexts, that one can begin to comprehend what was going on.
Michael Buckland (2006, 3)I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
Thomas JeffersonIntroduction
In this chapter we will give some historical context for the rest of the book, by looking at the development of recorded information, and the documents which carry it, throughout time. We will do this only very briefly and informally; there are many detailed treatments of the history of information provision and dissem - ination, and we will not try to replicate these in any way. We will give a historical perspective on specific topics in several of the chapters which follow; the history of information science itself has already been mentioned in the first chapter.
It is sometimes suggested that, since information science is a relatively young discipline, there is no need to think about the history of anything which came before, say, 1950. We disagree. Some appreciation of the history of information and documents, as well as being of interest in its own right, can help give a perspective on current problems and solutions. Although contexts and technologies may change, many information issues remain constant over time, and a historical perspective can be of practical, as well as academic, value. It is not possible to understand current information provision, and plan for its improvement, without appreciating how it has come to take the form which it has, and what commonalities and analogies there may be with past information environments. And we are not, in fact, faced with the choice posed by the opening quotation from Thomas Jefferson: reflecting on the information past can help us envisage the information future.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Introduction to Information Science , pp. 19 - 36Publisher: FacetPrint publication year: 2012