Briet 1951

Briet, Suzanne. What is Documentation? Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006.

Preface

founder of European Documentation, Paul Otlet (1868-1944) -- "emphasis on the book as the trope and cornerstone for documentation"

second generation, Suzanne Briet, "What is Documentation" -- "offers a vision beyond that of libraries and books, seeing in documentation an unlimited horizon of physical forms and aesthetic formats for documents and an unlimited horizon of techniques and technologies (and of 'documentary agencies' employing these) in the service of multitudes of particular cultures" (v)

"In contrast to the collection ethos and tradition of European librarianship, particularly before the Second World War, European documentation stressed services to the users within the contexts of cultural and intellectual expression and of social development. In contrast to librarianship on boths ides of the Atlantic, documentation encourages and foresaw the use of new technologies and new media in the delivery and production of information and knowledge. It emphasized the multiple physical forms and formats of documents and the importance of interlinking those forms through intermediary representations." (vi)

"integration of technology and technique" -- french word technique

"For Briet, documentation surpasses librariarnship by its attention to multiple forms and formats for documents and by a widened array of techniques to handle these. Documentary forms are becoming increasingly fragmentary, in contrast to the previous historical dominance of the book, and they are becoming recombined through standardized intermediaries." (vii)

'A Necessity of Our time': Documentation as 'Cultural Technique' in What Is Documentation?, by Ronald E. Day

similarity between Briet's notion of documentation as happening within a social and discursive network and Latour's Actor Network Theory (49-50)

Otlet wants centralized universal bibliography; for Briet, "a universal bibliography is better served by a network model of multiple documentary organizations or agencies" (50)

emphasis on the user experience, not often seen in European Documentatation

documentalist should not just be a subject specialist but a cultural specialization

human sciences value accumulation, represented by books; science values revolutionary overturn of old ideas

"Whereas 'the book' for Otlet was the privileged material object, as well as a trope that stood for all forms of documentation, the practice of documentation, and the whole of human knowledge, for Briet, the book is largely a relic of an earlier type of scholarship that lingers in the human sciences, and its form has since become dispersed in other documentary forms more suited to more networked and 'revolutionary' types of intellectual production. The documentation agency sees books as but one -- a historically specific and important, but isolated -- form of document." (51-2)

"The gravitational center of libraries is books and book collections, and the central orientation of librarians, even today, is toward these forms. The gravitational center of documentation centers is the social or professional network that is serviced and the various types of materials of any physical type or form that may be used therein." (52)

"The medieval intellectus (the universe as contemplated by the intellect, substantiated in, and disgnified as 'the book') is replaced by multiple authorship and the social accumulation of knowledge; the book as the container and the trope for knowledge (Otlet) is replaced by networks of multiple documentary-form objects. Equally, this new emphasis upon networks of knowledge rather than a centralized 'book' or site of knowledge means a new importance given to 'bibliography' (using the pre-documentalist' term) as not only a documentary event but also a cultural and social event." (55-6)