My interests in this area cover the nature, organization and use of documents and information resources of all kinds, applying the insights of documentation, going back to Otlet and Briet, to new forms of digital documents and collections. This includes the historical development of documents and recorded information, and documentation institutions, with a particular interest in the nineteenth century, when much of our present information environment took shape. Because of my educational and work background, I have a particular focus on resources in science and healthcare. I am also interested in the idea of landscapes as documents, and in the documentation activities of nineteenth century park designers, such as Joseph Paxton and Edward Kemp.
I teach on courses at CityLIS on documentation, information resources and information organisation, and on information in specific subject domains.
Examples of my publications in this area are:
D Lee, D Bawden and L Robinson, Orthogonality, dependency and music: an exploration of the relationship between music facets. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2021, 72(5), 570-582.
D Lee, L Robinson and D Bawden, Modelling the relationship between scientific and bibliographic classification for music, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2019, 70(3), 230-241..
D Bawden and L Robinson, ASLIB, in JD McDonald and M Levine-Clark (eds.), Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science (4th edn.), Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2017 [online]
D Bawden and L Robinson, Into the infosphere: theory, literacy, and education for new forms of document. In Ogledi o informacijskim znanostima: Zbornik radova u Čast Tatjane Aparac-Jelušić [Views on Information Science: Proceedings in honour of Tatjana Aparac-Jelušić], MD Ivanović and SF Tanacković, (eds.), Universities of Osijek and Zadar, 2016, pp 177-186
D Bawden, “A point along a line”: moving knowledge organization to the next level, Knowledge Organization, 2016, 43(3), 210-211
D Bawden, Aslib: a de facto national library/information organization. Alexandria, 2016, 26(1), 15-17
D Bawden, Storing the wisdom: chemical concepts and chemoinformatics, Informatics, 2015, 2, 50-67
D Bawden, “An ever-expanding universe of information”: Joseph Paxton and his followers in the communications revolution, Paper presented at ‘Paxton150: histories and futures of public parks’, Sheffield University, 11 September 2015
and some older ones which are still relevant:
D Bawden and L Robinson, Pharmaceutical information; a 30-year perspective on the literature, Annual Reviews of Information Science and Technology, 2010, 45, 63-119
T Weller and D Bawden, Individual perceptions: a new chapter on Victorian information history, Library History, 2006, 22(July 2006), 137-156
T Weller and D Bawden, The social and technological origins of the information society: an analysis of the crisis of control in England, 1830-1890, Journal of Documentation, 2005, 61(6), 777-802
The Occasional Informationist 