Of making many books there is no end, as the writer of Ecclesiates reminds us, but occasionally a very worthwhile new one comes along. So it's a real pleasure to see Niels Windfield Lund's new book Introduction to Documentation Studies (Facet, 2024). [Full disclosure: the foreword is written by Lyn Robinson and myself.] Lund… Continue reading Lund on Documentation
Tag: documentation
Rocking documentation redux: rock value
In a post of some years back, I mused on how rocks and minerals could be regarded as documents, conveying information, and as informational entities in their own right, and drew attention to the way in which their documentary/informational status had been discussed by a variety of thinkers, from Suzanne Briet to Luciano Floridi. Some… Continue reading Rocking documentation redux: rock value
Documentation and the museum object
A rather sad post for the first one after a break. CityLIS PhD student Christopher Serbutt sadly died last year, after a long period of ill-health, so that there was a posthumous award. Titled The changing place of information: an examination and evaluation of how the context in which an object is set affects the… Continue reading Documentation and the museum object
The Janus face of documentation
Documents are generally agreed to be one of the main foci, in not the main focus, of interest for the information sciences, since the ideas of documentation were first developed by Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine. We have recently seen a revival of interest in document theory, through the insights of scholars such as… Continue reading The Janus face of documentation
Documents and people, Otlet and Heidegger
This is an amended review of Ron Day’s new book, Indexing it all: the subject in the age of documentation, information and data (MIT Press). The full review will appear in Information Polity. The significance and continuing influence of the documentation movement of the early twentieth century has become increasing commented upon in recent years.… Continue reading Documents and people, Otlet and Heidegger
Physical plus digital, but more physical than you might think
Until quite recently, the world of recorded information was physical: print-on-paper, plus the paper card ‘machinery’ well described by Marcus Krajewski’s book Paper Machines. Mechanised documentation – punched cards, edge-notched cards, and the like – added some automation, but were still very much physical objects. Then the information world became a bit digital, with computer… Continue reading Physical plus digital, but more physical than you might think
The declining impact of the impact factor?
This is an amended version of an editorial to be published in Journal of Documentation. Impact factors have been, for quite a few years now, the single metric most closely associated with the ‘quality’ of an academic journal, or similar dissemination mechanism. This simple, perhaps simplistic, measure has been receiving an increasing level of criticism… Continue reading The declining impact of the impact factor?
The city, the world, what cannot be measured, and the information environment
An interesting critique under the title 'The city, the world and what cannot be measured', written by Adam Frank in a blog post for the US National Public Radio Service in the last days of the old year (Frank 2011), discusses a speech given in 2010 by the Václav Havel, the former Czech president who… Continue reading The city, the world, what cannot be measured, and the information environment
The mapping of science and the information sciences
It is just over fifty years since Derek de Solla Price produced his best known work: Little Science, Big Science. It was on the required reading list for my information science masters course, and – I suspect like many other students of the subject at that time – I wondered what it was doing there.… Continue reading The mapping of science and the information sciences
The document in the cave?
When I talk with my students about the history of recorded information, we usually agree that the rock and cave art of prehistoric times is a good starting point. The people who created such art clearly had a technology for conveying a form of communication across long periods of time, if not across space. As… Continue reading The document in the cave?
The Occasional Informationist 