History of Information Science

摘要

After a decade of stimulating interest, establishing an infrastructure, and encouraging the creation of a body of literature, a group of information science professionals, in tandem with library history organizations around the world, has achieved the first stages of academic recognition for a field of study, the history of information science. That field encompasses more than the history of theory, methods, and techniques. It includes institutions, people, politics, and economics. Although information science is an international activity, the existing literature and this chapter attend mainly to its development in the United States and Western Europe. The number of historical works published in the last decade, 1994-2004, is now in the hundreds and the list continues to grow. There are too many to cite and the attached bibliography contains only a sampling of the literature. Several events signaled that the mid-1990s was a landmark period for the historical study of the diverse set of activities and institutions in the United States and Europe that have been at the core of what has been variously named documentation, information retrieval, informatics, and information science. Major events in the early and mid-1990s were the appearance of special historical issues of the Journal of Documentation, Information Processing & Management, the Journal of the American Society for Information Science (JASIS), the Documentaliste, and then the publication of a volume of historical articles by the American Society for Information Science, Historical Studies in Information Science (Hahn & Buckland, 1998; Rauzier, 1993; Rayward, 1996; Vickery, 1994).