What is documentation?

'What Is Documentation?' Briet, Suzanne (1951, English translation 2006) What is Documentation? Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press Inc. By Suzanne Briet

Thoughts

• Anticipation of the need for search engines; reflection on the age of 'information overload'
• Discusses the profession of documentation; experts who guide researchers to relevant info. This role is now played for most people by Google, but in a very skewed way (eg, it knows where our gaps of knowledge lie but does not attempt to fill them - rather, it reinforces them.)
• Talks about the dream of a 'universal bibliographic catalogue' - ie, very early dream of what the internet could be - but how specialized, smaller catalogues ended up being more useful. Where do we stand in relation to this dream now? Where has the ideal, of the sum of human knowledge being accessible online, gone?

Annotation

I. A Technique of Intellectual Work

• Popular definitions of 'documentation': "A document is a proof in support of a fact"; "all bases of materially fixed knowledge, and capable of being used for consultation, study, and proof."
• Contemporary philosophers have questioned this, calling it instead "any concrete or symbolic indexical sign..."
• Raymod Bayer says that "in our age of multiple and accelerated broadcasts, the least event... imediately becomes weighted down under a "vestment of documents"."(p.10)
• Since the seventeenth century [thanks to Gutenberg], the abundance of written documents has required a scientific method of prospecting and of classifying books and manuscripts..."(p.11)
• "catalogues... are obligatory documentary tools, and they are the practical intermediaries between graphical documents and their users. These catalogues of documents are themselves documents of a secondary degree." (p.11) [Google now plays this role online]
• A "Universal Bibliographic Catalog...which everyone had considered a dream and which did not offer a comparable attraction to the most localized of union catalogues."(p.12) [again, anticipation of universal search engines - but worth remembering how much is left out of Google results.]
• Discussion of 'information overload' and the need to decide which works are the most important to look at - "Carnegies advised never to undertake an enterprise 'before having thoroughly examined all the works' which may have already been done on the subject in question. The problem may be, rather, of selecting the best works. ...Order, marking, selection: three steps essential in intellectual occupations." (p.15) [early example of the developing need for curators/ search engines]
• Importance of "orientation guides" to prevent the "'chaos' and documentary bottleneck" that would result without researchers having summarized access to each others' work. (p.15) Also of documentary workers, who should themeslves be experts in the field as well as in the "competencies, interests and gaps of the researchers" (p.16) - See Google personalized search - except it exacerbates, rather than closing, gaps.