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

This work is a dense and eclectic collection of articles, well edited and chosen by eminent American LIS educator, Professor W. Boyd Rayward, to illuminate and explain the interlocking concepts of modernisation and modernism and their pervasive effects upon information generally.

Information, in the burgeoning industrial society of the industrial age had to be organised effectively and the figure of Belgian bibliographer, Paul Otlet, and his seminal efforts to create a Universal Bibliographic card catalogue looms large. His pioneering efforts led to the founding of the International Institute of Bibliography which finally evolved into the International Federation of Documentation and Information (which “went out of existence under mysterious circumstances in 2000‐2001”).

This book attempts to deal with a wide, far ranging spectrum of topics centred around Information and Documentation and their evolution. It is hard going for the reader, not least in struggling to comprehend such phrases as “the heart of modernity is the postulate of ontological discontinuity” – but that is what you get if you let sociologists loose on a book. There are some good, interesting articles, e.g. the well written paper by David Muddiman on the rise in the UK of organisations such as ASLIB, DSIR and the National Lending Library for Science and Technology, and the birth of “Information Science” as a discipline. Similarly Boyd Rayward offers an interesting account of H.G. Wells' modernist thinking and his vision of an “Information Society” (including a World Brain!).

In conclusion, a serious, specialised and well produced book which can be heavy going – a bit of a curate's egg really. Yet it deals with some interesting and well argued topics, particularly those with a historical perspective. George Santayana famously declared that “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, and an understanding of how LIS got to its present position is useful for all LIS practitioners and students.