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EUROPEAN ORIGINS OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE

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STUDIES IN INFORMATION

Series Editor: Jens-Erik Mai

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Title Page

STUDIES IN INFORMATION

EUROPEAN ORIGINS OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE

BY

FIDELIA IBEKWE

School of Journalism & Communication, Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France

Series Editor: Jens-Erik Mai

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

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First edition 2019

Copyright © 2019 Emerald Publishing Limited

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78756-718-4 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78756-717-7 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78756-719-1 (EPub)

ISSN: 2055-5377 (Series)

Acknowledgements

The field work on this multi-country research would not have been possible without the financial support from the 2016 History Fund of the Association for Information Science and Technology which enabled me to travel to Croatia, Spain and Denmark in order to interview Library and Information Science (LIS) scholars.

I owe special thanks to Tatjana Aparac Jelušić, Virginia Ortiz-Repiso Jimenez and Niels Lund Windfield, who smoothed my path to interviewees in their respective countries. Their hospitality and readiness in contacting their colleagues and in organising the interviews ensured that everything went smoothly during my stay. I also thank them for providing documentary materials on their pioneers and for reading earlier drafts of the history on their country. Likewise, my heartfelt gratitude to all the interviewees, for without them, it would have been impossible to obtain some undocumented information on the historic context of the development of the field in their country. They are by order of appearance of the chapters in the book: Tatjana Aparac Jelusic and Neva Tudor-Šilović (for ex-Yugoslavia), Niels Windfield Lund (for Denmark, Sweden and Norway), Ernest Abadal, Tomás Baiget, Agustí Canals, Virginia Ortiz-Repiso Jimenez, José Antonio Moreiro, Maria-Antonia García Moreno, Fernando Ramos, Mercedes Caridad Sébastian (for Spain) and Fernanda Ribeiro (for Portugal).

Let me also acknowledge the invaluable help of Thomas Dousa, librarian extraordinaire at the University of Chicago Library, in tracking down obscure documentary resources and providing access to publications that were outside my reach.

Several other colleagues read drafts of this book especially as it pertained to the origins of LIS in their own country. The chapter on Nordic LIS owes much to Birger Hjørland for his painstaking attention to details and corrections to earlier drafts. I am also indebted to Peter Ingwersen, Louise Limberg and Ragnar Andreas Audunson who also corrected earlier drafts of this chapter and provided supplementary documentary evidence.

Finally, this book owes much to Michael Buckland, Emeritus Professor at the iSchool of Berkeley, California (USA). Our serendipitous meeting in a hotel lobby during the ISKO conference in Montreal in 2008 has proved to be very fruitful. His passion for the European pioneers of documentation and Information science, in particular for the French ‘Madame documentation’. Suzanne Briet proved to be highly contagious and has led me to venture into what was until then unknown territory for me: the history and foundations of LIS. The numerous citations to him in this book are a testimony of his unfailing generosity in sharing his current research work, for reading earlier drafts of this manuscript and for gently pointing out errors, omissions and useful additions to the book.

The final result certainly falls short of the time, efforts and encouragements I received from all these scholars who guided my faltering steps into a cross-country history of LIS. I was not able to take into account all of the suggestions I received. Therefore, any remaining errors, omissions and imprecisions are entirely my responsibility as author. My hope is that the finished product, imperfect as it is, will sow the seeds of a promising plant that other more resourceful scholars across the world will nurture.

List of Figures

List of Tables

List of Abbreviations

About the Author

Fidelia Ibekwe obtained a BA in Foreign Languages and Literatures from the University of Port-Harcourt in Nigeria (her native country). She then moved to France to pursue her post-graduate education, obtaining a MA in French Literature (Lettres Modernes) from Stendhal University in Grenoble. She then moved to Information and Communication Sciences where she obtained her PhD and her Habilitation à Diriger des recherches. She has previously been Associate Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the University of Nancy 2 and at Jean Moulin University in Lyon. She is currently a Full Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the School of Journalism and Communication, Aix-Marseille University in France. Her research interests span theoretical, historical and empirical topics. She has worked and published research articles on text mining, terminology extraction and modelling, automatic indexing and information retrieval using natural language processing, statistical and probabilistic models. She is currently researching various issues relating to the history and theoretical foundations of information science, the uses of information and communication technologies and the impact of open and big data on science and on society.