Editorial: Festschrift Coda

Citation

Buckland, M.K. (2024), "Editorial: Festschrift Coda", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 80 No. 3, pp. 696-697. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2024-273

This charming bouquet of thoughtful essays inspires retrospection. It also concentrates on the more personal aspects of a professional life that has, in a way, been backwards. Most people start by focusing on what most interests them and then, later in life, accepting institution responsibilities. For me, it was the other way around. From 1963 to 1987, my agenda was determined by the library or institution that employed me. But in 1988, when I returned to the Berkeley School as a tenured professor without any assigned administrative duties, I could choose my own agenda.

In 1974, the Berkeley campus determined that the school of librarianship would become a school of information, and I was recruited to advance a strategic shift that had been accepted but only vaguely defined. This transition has remained an enduring concern. BC. Brookes and Patrick Wilson both believed, as I do, that a serious academic department should continuously question its fundamental assumptions, reconsider its rationale and re-examine its boundaries. Then and since, I have been worried that existing schools of information have been neglecting such work at their peril. Vivien Petras' essay addresses a very central concern with a welcome combination of critical analysis and common sense.

Reading these essays, especially that by Niels Windfeld Lund, induced recognition of a significant shift in my own thinking around 1988, from collections to documents. A concern with libraries and similar services means a focus on collections: selection, arrangement, access, use and relegation. But expansion to information science required increased attention to what could be collected and why. This is not a new thought. It had, I suppose, been implicit all along, and it had been anticipated explicitly, I later found, notably by Suzanne Briet and Paul Otlet. But their insights had been long forgotten. In brief, attention to Briet's antelope, Lund's dokvit and the Document Academy was both timely and necessary for the field, even though this was not widely recognized, especially where expansion to “and information science” was more in name than in substance.

A shift in emphasis from collections to documents leads naturally to consideration of what documents do, how they do it and what is done with them, as is reflected in the essay by Ron Day, in his many years of dedicated inquiry and in parallel work by Bernd Frohmann and others.

How documents work requires careful, detailed case studies and analysis as illustrated in the essay by Roswitha Skare and in her prior work on context and paratext. She rightly stresses that the study of documents requires acceptance of the complementary and ultimately inseparable trinity of material, social and mental facets.

There is much that remains to be done, of course, and two areas particularly ripe for conceptual work are represented. One is the complex area of context and the relationship between documents and context in Joacim Hansson's exploration of classification schemes as documents that contextualize. The other, addressed by Julian Warner, is the fundamental distinction between semantic labor (subjective judgments) and syntactic labor (routinized procedures) and how, when and with what consequences the latter can be a suitable substitute for the former.

There is frequent mention in these pages of Suzanne Briet and her ideas about what could constitute a document. But an important aspect of the Briet story is how, despite being eminent in her time, she and her ideas had been thoroughly forgotten even by the French. The case of Emanuel Goldberg, who designed and built a search engine in Dresden around 1930, is even more dramatic. For this reason, Tatjana Aparac's plea for the recuperation of the history of documentation in Germany is particularly welcome. History and theory need each other. A sense of identity depends on having a past. A sense of community depends on a shared past. The situation has been slowly improving, but theorists in information science have commonly neglected the history of their theories, and historians have too often neglected intellectual history. It is also a reminder of the very many individuals who have helped me in the past and who are no longer around to be thanked.

Fidelia Ibekwe's plea for an open-minded pragmatic approach – whatever works is the right approach! – is a particularly welcome antidote in a field that has stumbled in dealing with theory, methodology and status, and this brings us back to the issues in the first essay on the identity of information by Vivien Petras.

Finally, it is apt that this Festschrift appears in the Journal of Documentation, a prestigious publication with a commendable name and the outlet for my first professional publication more than half a century ago.