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The paper deals with questions about the historical dimension of the library and information studies (LIS) education seen from a Danish point of view and the perspective of primarily public representation. The arguments come from a sketch of the tradition of the librarians’ education and roles, an adaptation of contemporary historical thought combined with a refined concept of representation of history, and a short experiment study of final theses of LIS students within historical areas. It concludes with some educational objectives for the fundamental necessity of a broad, reflexive and democracy oriented cultural history perspective.

The purpose of the paper is to analyze how the Neo-documentalist movement, initiated in 1996 by Michael Buckland, Boyd Rayward and Niels Lund, has evolved in its 27 years history, how the choice of documentation as name of the new program in Tromsø has made a difference in the LIS field and how different documentation scholars around the world has participated and approached the movement until now.

The paper has approached the “Neo-documentalist movement” in a historical perspective from 1996 to 2023 discussing what difference does the choice of a concept make, when the concept of documentation is chosen instead of information in the name of a program and for the general discussion of the object of an academic field like Library and Information Science.

The analysis shows that it did make a difference to choose the concept of documentation as name of the program in Tromsø and the Neo-documentalist movement contributed to a new focus and discussion of the informative objects, the documents and their creation, not only in Tromsø, but in different parts of the world across linguistic borders.

The paper is original by the fact that it is the first time that the neo documentalist movement has been reviewed on a global scale across linguistic barriers. It has value by a discussion of the ways in which a choice of concept matter in relation to defining a field and the research agenda.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a discussion on the concept of complementarity and to show how it can work in a concrete document analysis.

Starting out with the question of whether it is correct to refer to Bohr's principle of complementarity in the field of document analysis, the paper discusses literature written on the subject, before it uses an example to show that it would be more accurate to view complementarity as a relationship between parts that form a whole, thereby not mutually exclusive.

The paper finds that the various approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive. They could be investigated either parallel to one another or nearly simultaneously, even though synchronous observation is not possible. The extent to which a complementary document analysis with an equal weighting of all aspects is actually feasible remains an open question.

The principle of complementarity is rather new in document analysis. The concept introduced by Niels W. Lund is discussed here for the first time.

This conceptual article aims to discuss how the concept of a document and documentation along with a general document model could inform us in the design and engineering of information or rather documentation systems.

This paper presents a broad and complementary document model, derived from the last couple of decades' discussion on what is a document and what is documentation. This model is used as a basis for a method, a conceptual tool or a template for analysis of socio‐technical systems.

The authors contend that the document systems analysis is a holistic approach compared to the traditional systems design and engineering reductionist approach, and also in the context of sociotechnical systems design. The document model is a taxonomy of the constituents of the document and, the authors argue, a potential communication tool in systems design.

The document model presented in this article is discussed more or less solely in the context of information systems design, specifically sociotechnical systems. Moreover, the authors have tried to fit the theory and model within this context here, even though the concepts and thoughts can have much more general implications.

This presentation of a novel document model and framework is presented as a potential tool for systems analysis and design. The authors regard this as a realistic vision for the framework, but at the current stage of development for the model it is probably more useful as draft for such a tool or framework; a point of departure for the discussion of practical – and theoretical – implications of a broad and holistic document model.

A novel, unpublished document model, derived from theoretical discourses of document ontology in the “neo‐documentalist” movement spawned from a particular research community in Tromsø, Norway, is presented and discussed in the light of information systems design.

The purpose of this paper is to begin a conversation about the term “nondocument.” It analyzes this term’s possible concepts, components and contexts.

This conceptual paper draws upon the work of documentation studies scholars, including Michael Buckland, Bernd Frohmann and Niels Windfeld Lund, to begin an exploration of the term “nondocument,” framed within the context of the 2013–2014 Israeli–Palestinian peace negotiations brokered by the USA. It is comprised of seven sections revolving around different questions regarding non-document.

The document at the center of the 2013–2014 Israeli–Palestinian peace negotiations aimed to establish a framework for an eventual final-status peace agreement. There was skepticism, however, about the document’s proposed reservations inscription permitting either party to express reservations with any part of the framework. It was claimed that this reservation inscription made the document self-negating and therefore a non-document. This document was arguably a hybrid entity: a document-non-document. It was a document in the context of the negotiations. It became a non-document in the context of the collapse of the negotiations.

The 2013–2014 peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine, brokered by the USA, revolved around a diplomatic document outlining provisions for a final peace settlement. The two parties were skeptical of a proposed provision permitting reservations to be expressed over other provisions within the document. An official involved in the negotiations stated that this provision made the document a non-document. But what exactly is meant by this term? This paper takes the opportunity to begin exploring such a notion. The aim, however, is not to definitively define non-document but instead to raise questions and provoke further discussions of this term.

The concept of non-document is underdeveloped. This paper presents questions and conceptual tools to help develop this term whilst providing possible points of departure for further examinations of how documents are or might be non-documents. These questions and tools also point in directions for various other approaches to phenomena that could be regarded as documents in some respects but not in others, or the ways in which something could is “almost” but “not quite” a document, or even help determine what is “not document.” Ultimately, this term could help expand other “conventional” approaches to documentation.

The purpose of this paper is first to provide a critical conceptual discussion of different use of the notion of text, especially in the case of expressions including words as well as images, second to consider the notion of document as an alternative to the notion of text, and finally to lay out a theoretical ground for a broad discipline of documentation studies.

The approach took the form of a conceptual analysis of a number of works in media and literary studies.

There were found a number of cases of contradictory use of the notion of text within the same work, talking about text in a broad overall sense covering all media as well as text as a distinctive concept separating words from images, while it was found through a conceptual history of the notion of document that the latter notion not only covers a written paper, but multiple media.

In future research, one should consider the use of document as the concept for the expressions as a whole and dedicate the notion of text solely for the verbal part of the expressions and make more empirical analysis within this conceptual framework to see if it makes a difference in practice to change the overall concept from text to document.

Having a broad concept of document, it would be possible to be more flexible regarding the choose of proper media for documentation.

By making a critique of the notion of text and suggesting a broader concept of document as well as documentation, the paper provides a ground for reconsidering the classical disciplinary structure, divided into humanities as well as the information sciences and social sciences.