What is Documentation? English Translation of the Classic French Text

Citation

Windfled Lund, N. (2007), "What is Documentation? English Translation of the Classic French Text", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 63 No. 5, pp. 800-802. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410710827826

While a translation into English of the small book by the French documentalist, Suzanne Briet (1984‐1989) of “Qu'est‐ce que la documentation” from 1951, has been online for some time, it has now for the first time been published as a whole in English translation. The core text is accompanied by a preface by one of the translators, Ronald E. Day, a biography by Michael K. Buckland, an essay about the text with an emphasis on the “Cultural Technique” by Ronald E. Day, and finally a selective bibliography by Michael K. Buckland. Its position as a classic text seems more to be the case in the Anglophone world than in the Francophone world. It has not been reprinted or republished in French after its first publication in 1951. It was “Rediscovered” by Professor Michael Buckland from University of California, Berkeley, in two classic articles “Information as thing” JASIS, Vol. 42, No. 5 (June 1991), pp. 351‐60 and “What is a document?” JASIS, Vol. 48, No. 9 (September 1997), pp. 804‐809, considering different definitions of document, especially formulated by Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet. Since, then, Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet have been considered the major legacy for the new documentation movement, in USA led by Michael Buckland, Ronald E. Day, W. Boyd Rayward as well as recently in France by the RTP‐DOC network, very much via the American rediscovery of the two Francophone document scholars.

Since, Buckland and others drew attention to the work of Suzanne Briet, most discussions have been on the definition of document and notably on the case of whether an antelope is a document or not. But as Ronald Day has demonstrated in his own writing and in his essay in this publication, just as important as her definition of a document, is her contribution to a coherent formulation of the tasks of the documentalist, focusing on the cultural technique of documentation, and her arguments for a new profession in documentation compared to the well‐known profession of librarianship:

Filing and classification are of the greatest importance in the dynamic work of the documentalist. But it is in documentary distribution and what is conventionally called documentary production that there is a genuine professional creation (p. 22).

The proper job of documentation agencies is to produce secondary documents, derived from those initial documents that these agencies do not ordinarily create, but which they sometimes preserve. We are now at the heart of the documentalist's profession. These secondary documents are called “translations, analyses, documentary bulletins, microfilms”(p. 25f).

Thus, one may consider this publication as a whole as a secondary document derived from the original publication of 1951 made available for an Anglophone document community. It comes at a time with many discussions on the future of the library as well as the archive and museum, physically as well as in virtual or digital format. The notion of documentation and documentalist have to a large degree been forgotten for decades in favor of information. By drawing this manifesto out in the light, it may be possible to have a more general discussion of the future of librarianship as well as what is currently known as information science.

While there are some sceptical comments on the ideas and work of Otlet today, there are almost no critical comments on the work by Briet, to the contrary, she is more or less celebrated as in the final paragraph in the preface by Ron Day:

Thus, Briet's book points in many directions: it advocates on behalf of European Documentation against the traditional boundaries and foci of librarianship and the education of library professionals, it engages in cultural analysis and critique, and it marks and foresees the transition from the culture of the book to the culture of documents in multiple forms and formats. It appears to simply be a professional manifesto, but it is so much more, and it is worth repeated reading for its complexity and subtlety. It is not only an important book of the past, but it is also an important book for the present and the future (p. 9).

Reading the subtitle on the frontpage “English translation of the classic French text” you may wonder: what is this classic French text?

In the bibliographic details on page ii, one is told that the French title is “Qu'est‐ce que la documentation” but no information about publisher or date for first publication. We have to wait till we read on page vi in the preface of this translation, that the text “originally appeared in 1951 from a small professional press, ÉDIT”. One may argue that this comment on formalities regarding original title and bibliographic details is not essential in a review of an important work. But, the subtitle in itself as well as the lack of basic bibliographic details in front of the book reveal a problematic tendency in this publication. Firstly, there is a tendency to a “we all know it is classical” style leading into a celebration of the author before readers have been given the opportunity of reading it and making a personal judgement of the text. Secondly, this “small detail” demonstrates a serious problem in the core text by Briet herself. She writes about the importance of creating documentary collections, relating many documents to each other. Nevertheless, she does not mention her sources when she writes about the definition of document like this:

This definition has often been countered by linguists and philosophers, who are, as they should be, infatuated with minutia and logic. Thanks to their analysis of the content of this idea, one can propose here a definition, which may be, at present time, the most accurate (p. 10).

I know this is a manifesto, but if she had been so kind as to presenting the references to “their analysis” then it would have been possible to approach her text more accurately without guessing who these linguists and philosophers may have been. It may have been F. de Saussure and others within semiotics, but we will never know. On the same page, she mentions Raymond Bayer, a French philosopher and specialist in aesthetics and sciences of art, but with no special reference to some of his writing.

Despite these shortcomings, “What is documentation?” is important reading today for everybody around the world dealing with documentation. It is a very good original document which deserves a production of many secondary documents questioning and challenging the claims and statements by Madame Documentation, Suzanne Briet.