Citation
Bawden, D. (2015), "Plus ça change in researching documentation", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 71 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-08-2015-0098
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Plus ça change in researching documentation
Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Documentation, Volume 71, Issue 6.
Some of our readers may not be aware that Journal of Documentation was originally published by Aslib, an organisation which for 70 years was, among other things, at the forefront of information research in Britain. While preparing the background of an article on the history of Aslib to appear in Taylor and Francis’ Encyclopaedia of Library and Information Science next year (Bawden and Robinson, 2016), I came across a reference to an intriguing study carried out by the Aslib Research Department back in the 1960s (Vickery et al., 1969). It was led by Brian Vickery, a leading force in British information research, who later became Professor of Librarianship, and Director of the School of Library, Archive, and Information Studies at University College London (Robinson and Bawden, 2012).
This was a wide-ranging examination of the availability of, access to, and use of metals information in Britain. What caught my interest was that it was conducted by a remarkably modern-looking mixed methods empirical approach, including semi-structured interviews with information providers, a questionnaire survey of information officers, a broadly based survey of users again by questionnaire, and a detailed examination of secondary services. As with all Aslib research, this was carried out with the very pragmatic purpose of directly supporting and improving practice, rather than developing or examining theories and models. And, in accordance with the prevailing information research paradigm, the study was positivistic in nature, gathering data to identify the objective “facts of the matter”; albeit that this approach was tempered by the use of interviews to ascertain opinion and personal perspective.
These two factors might cause modern information researchers, with an enthusiasm for phenomenology, critical theory, ethnography, grounded theory, and the like, to wish to put this kind of study in the box marked “historical interest only”. This, I think, would be a mistake. Some studies and their methods, such as this one in my opinion, are timeless, in that what they offer is simply a good way of finding out what needs to be known, in order to improve the communication of information. They may not provide conceptual breakthroughs, nor apply the latest intellectual fads; but they can be very useful nonetheless. There is still room for them in the information research spectrum.
David Bawden
References
Bawden, D. and Robinson, L. (2016), ASLIB. In Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, 3rd ed., Taylor and Francis, New York, NY, (in press)
Robinson, L. and Bawden, D. (2012), “Brian Vickery and the foundations of information science”, in Gilchrist, A. and Vernau, J. (Eds), Facets of Knowledge Organization, Emerald, Bingley, pp. 282-300
Vickery, B.C., Slater, M., Presanis, A. and Fisher, P. (1969), “Metals information in Britain”, Research Report No. 5035. Aslib, London.