School of
Information Management & Systems
Previously School of Library & Information Studies
Michael Buckland,
Professor.
Documentation, Information Science and Library
Science in the USA
Summary of:
Michael K. Buckland.
Documentation, Information Science and Library
Science in the USA
Information Processing and Management
32, no. 1 (1996): 63-76.
Reprinted in:
Historical Studies in Information Science, ed. by T. B. Hahn & M. Buckland.
Also text.
Why were technical and technological experimentation and
innovation, notably but not only by the European documentalists,
substantially ignored in library science in the U.S.A. until after the
Second World War? What would explain the intense but generally
unsatisfactory controversy involving "information science versus
library science" after the Second War World? Why was technical
and technological innovation a vital force in librarianship in the late
nineteenth century and in late twentieth century, but not, it seems,
inbetween?
Analysis suggests that these three issues are closely related.
One reason design and technology were of limited interest within
library science in the U.S.A. in the second quarter of this century
is that the most influential academic group was engaged in a
vigorous, well-funded drive to develop a new school of thought
with a new and different emphasis. By the 1930s the Graduate
Library School at the University of Chicago and the European
documentalists represented different schools of thought with
different interests. Such differences are to be expected in any
field that is alive.
The period after the Second World War was tension-filled,
we suggest, because the dominant non-technological, social
science oriented paradigm in U.S. library science, what we might call
the school of Chicago, was challenged, rivalled, and
changed by the return, in part from outside of library science, of a
serious interest in design and technology.
The matters that had interested the European documentalists emerged
as a powerful force in U.S. library science twenty years later than
in Europe. There were by now new and more powerful machines.
There was, after a few years, a new name: "information science".
The individuals leading the change commonly come from outside
of librarianship and there was little association with war-devasted
Europe. The European documentalists of the 1930s, who had
written mainly in French and German, were largely forgotten.
We suggest that the temporary de-emphasis of design and
technology contributed to a prolonged failure of identity and
direction in the academic departments of library and information
studies. What can be the purpose of a university-based professional
school if research is not centered on the design of improved services?
The absence of this central concern leads to a lack of purpose beyond
sustaining a continuity of training in procedures, a preoccupation
with "professionalism", and little convincing basis for a
research agenda. Absent a central concern with design and technique,
a coherent vision for research and for university-based professional
education is also absent.
Go to
History of information management
or to Michael Buckland's
home-page.