Book review: Niels Windfeld Lund, Introduction to Documentation Studies

Citation

Day, R.E. (2024), "Book review: Niels Windfeld Lund, Introduction to Documentation Studies", Journal of Documentation, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-08-2024-0192

At one time, studies of the use and development of documents united the field of what is now known as Library and Information Science (“LIS,” or sometimes simply Information Science), but during the second half of the 20th century, this moniker of “documentation” was discarded for that of “information,” which seemed to point to non-physical forms of the content of documents. Ever since, the term “information” has dominated the domain and anyone interested in documents is thought to be existing in a fringe, retrogressive, region of thought and practice or in older specialties, such as librarianship or records management. But what is information science interested in, since the term “information” is so broad as to reference just about anything that is informative (namely, anything at all) in the universe? Alas, the definition that is often offered is that it is about “the relation of information, people and technology,” a definition that could have been applied to the interests of the ancient Sumerians as well.

But this last observation should not be so easily discarded as a mere quip. Rather, it points to the great importance of Niels Windfeld Lund’s book, “Introduction to Documentation Studies,” as well as to the works of others in what has been called “neo-documentation,” such as the works of Michael Buckland and Bernd Frohmann (as Lund’s book emerges from not only a singular intellectual effort but as part of an international effort which he has led). The importance of Lund’s book is that of rethinking information science through what he calls a “complementary” relationship to documentation and to communication. From this, Lund proposes at the end of his book a new field: documentation, information and communication (“DIC”).

Somewhat misleadingly titled as an “introduction” (it isn’t an historical introduction, but rather an introduction to a new way of understanding documents and documentation), Lund’s book is a short, but thought provoking, treatise that challenges the traditional understanding of documentation and the relation of documentation to information and communication. Lund is no passerby to these issues, as he is the founder (with Michael Buckland) of “The Document Academy,” which has been holding annual international conferences for the past 25 years. He was also the founding director of Documentation Studies at the University of Tromsø, Norway.

Lund’s book consists of a theoretical introduction and six case studies in which he deploys his theoretical analysis. Lund argues that documentation should be understood in a “complementary” relationship with information and communication, and the three approaches together help us understand any phenomena. (Lund’s case studies cross a broad range: music, literature, art, science, politics and documentary identity, and they span the range from physical recordings to social performances.) He analyzes DIC in terms of social, mental and physical affordances for expression, seeing each of these types of expressions in any human event. Documents are understood as means of signifying, which are singular and may be enduring (written inscriptions) or ephemeral (protests), and they follow traditional genres and practices, or as Lund calls them “modes,” for expression. Documents are distinct entities, but they also belong to documentary complexes. Documents themselves may have “docemes,” which are discrete parts of documents that may be transposed into other documents (a notion which recalls Paul Otlet’s “monographic principle” and Bruno Latour’s “inscriptions”). Documents are produced by human or machine agency and occur through physical mediums (e.g. music through pianos or literature through writing). They are products of systems and subsystems of production in which they must be analyzed. (One of Lund’s preferred examples of this is the subsystem of the family and its expressive habits.) Because documents often record events, they also allow for critical reflection on our actions and habits in systems and subsystems and also allow us critical reflections on these systems and subsystems.

One of the most notable aspects of Lund’s book is to show that document production occurs through systems and subsystems rather than as isolated instances of “information,” which are somehow magically meaningful to a “user,” “seeker” or “experiencer” of information whose “behavior” is that of making sense of informational objects. Instead, Lund grounds “information” in relations to document production and expression. This socio-technical “systems” approach (indebted to the works of Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre, among others) also represents a break from Paul Otlet’s philosophy of Documentation or “Documentology” and so from the LIS tradition. For Otlet, the meaning of a document is contained in its contents. Indeed, in Lund’s and others’ works in neo-documentation, a systems or networks perspective occupies a notable epistemic ground distinct from both the “reader-reception” approach of sense-making in information behavior studies and the content representation (or what Frohmann (2004) termed, “epistemic content”) approach of user studies in LIS. (In truth, these two approaches in LIS overlap, as sense-making in information behavior studies is often, as Frohmann argued, though not always, understood as an issue of seeking epistemic content.) What has been lacking in core LIS, save for such theorists as Geoffrey Bowker, Johanna Drucker and a few others, have been accounts of information that view its production as grounded in social and institutional “contexts” of document production, despite the obvious fact that document production underlies and is the product of such “information” phenomena. (An even deeper understanding of this is to see document studies in light of the contingencies for the production of documental expressions, a powerful theme that Lund usefully returns to at the end of his book.)

As Michael Buckland succinctly put it in his book Information and Society (Buckland, 2017): “What is meant by an information society is that the way we live has become increasingly characterized by the use of documents in many forms” (p. 168) How documents are related to use, what use they are put to and how they position and put us to use, and the traditions and networks that underlie these events, could be viewed as the concerns of Lund’s book and others in neo-documentation. As mentioned at the beginning of this review, at the very end of his book, Lund proposes a new discipline, “DIC”, where the interrelations of these functions are studied together in their different arrangements, values and contingencies in different situations. One would be hard pressed not to support such a new discipline, and it would certainly be an improvement on current characterizations of the field of information studies.