European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the Past

Boyd Rayward was on familiar territory as he gathered together this eclectic collection of papers. He informs us that the book arose from a small invitational conference held at the University of Illinois in May 2005, with a title the same as the book (p. 21). It contains 17 chapters each offering a study on particular European scholars and intellects, which pioneered early European thinking on information society matters. Some of the chapter authors are well known to us, e.g. Michael Buckland, Alistair Black and Rayward himself. Others not so; but all are experts in the subject area of their chapter and their obvious enjoyment in studying the intellectuals about whom they write is evident.

This is a most interesting collection of papers that would appeal to those who wish to learn about the history of the information society as we in librarianship see it. Indeed Frank Webster's chapter asks why the absence of a history of the information revolution? This title goes some way towards repairing that omission. Parts of it can be “pretty heavy going”, but only if you are uninitiated and have not heard of information specialists such as Paul Otlet, a key figure in the book. This Belgian lawyer and bibliographer saw “the document at the centre of a complex process of communication” (p. 75), conceived a new scientific discipline operating at the level of documents (p. 78) and created with his colleague Henri La Fontaine an international organization: the International Institute of Bibliography, the precursor to the International Institute for Documentation, in 1937 the International Federation for Documentation (FID), and later the International Federation for Documentation and Information, and an “enormous enterprise that lead to the creation of a universal bibliographic catalog on cards” (p. 13) and the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC).

Yet Otlet's latter concept was not original, having be “already proposed by Ferdinand can der Haeghen” (p. 89). Uyttenhove and van Peteghem's chapter on van der Haeghen, a librarian from Ghent in Belgium, introduces us to other European librarians who criticized the project on a universal bibliography, not only for the perceived size of the project and its complexity, but also that it was anti American.

The chapters include discussions of the work of the prolific bibliographer and Scot Patrick Geddes, who shared with Otlet and other European scholars an interest in modernist architecture, not only as a means of creating knowledge buildings, but also the use of the word architecture “as a metaphor for the organization, transformation and globalization of knowledge” (p. 128). Some of the chapters contain reproductions of the many sketches and diagrams these thinkers produced to convey their ideas.

Ronald Day's chapter is on Suzanne Briet a French documentalist whose work on the document moved away from a centralised model (as proposed by Otlet and others) to a networked model for universal bibliography served by multiple documentary organizations or agencies. Day's discussion of Briet's work reminded me of more modern approaches to distributed collections, inter library loan schemes and other decentralized models, and of the special library and librarian. A later chapter by Muddiman traces the development of public science and the origins of documentation and information science for the period 1890‐1950 with names like S.C. Bradford, Brian Vickery, Jason Farradane and organizations such as Aslib described.

The enormous contribution of European thinkers to information science/studies is oft overshadowed by Dewey classification, Library of Congress subject headings and other American influences in librarianship. It is evident from reading this book that the European contributions were in parallel with the computerised and internet approaches that we have today, without the technology. I have often heard fellow academics in our discipline bemoan the fact that much of what is being trotted out today in data and information management follows the principles that we have learnt over time. Why does out field go essentially unacknowledged as today's work continues? Steve Fuller believes that “LIS practitioners have been weak in demanding…respect and so their work is easily used for ends that they would probably wish to question” (p. 59). Fuller further suggests that we face a public relations problem in academia: “(t)he field has become so accustomed to seeing itself as a ‘service profession’ that it underplays the distinctive perspective is adds to a general understanding of the production, distribution and organization of knowledge” (pp. 69‐60 (his emphasis)). While I suspect that Fuller is correct, I don't like reading such statements. It is one thing to reinvent and embellish the information wheel, but have the gurus of today have ever bothered to read our literature, as we who work in cross‐disciplinary areas, read the work of others?

It is obvious that the “information society” is not a creature of today, but has its history in times past, with significant bibliographical and learned activity in the period from the late 1890s. It is salutary to read author van den Heuvel's analysis of “the ways in which Tim Berners‐Lee's ideas of a semantic web and Otlet's approach to the globalization of knowledge resonate” (p. 15). Is it any wonder that scholars in our field despair when little acknowledgement of the work of our pioneers goes unnoticed?

This book should be essential reading for all professional librarians. It contains much more than I have been able to cover in this review, including a comprehensive discussion on the part H.G. Wells played in the reconstitution of the world's knowledge and his Encyclopaedia of the World Brain (Rayward, p. 223). Its appearance is timely. It places the world wide web and terms like “information architecture” and “information society” firmly in the context of the historical work of the European scholars it covers; it elucidates the thinking behind the specialist library/information approach (an area dear to my heart); and covers the development of the divide between the librarian and the information scientist/documentalist. It reports the significant historical development in thinking that belongs to the broad spectrum that is the library profession; a proud history and worthy of celebration.