The History and Heritage of Scientific and Technological Information Systems

This volume contains the proceedings of the second Conference on the History and Heritage of Scientific and Technological Information Systems, jointly organised by ASIST and CHF. Although the publication date on this book is November 2004, the conference itself was held in November 2002.

After Boyd Redward's introductory chapter, there follow 32 articles, organised into five main themes: interdisciplinary perspectives; organising and managing information; chemical informatics; national developments in information systems and services; and developments in international information systems and services. The book concludes with a short review by Redward of a film by Francoise Levie, L'Homme qui voulait classer le monde (The Man who Wanted to Classify the World), an hour‐long account of the life of Paul Otlet, which was shown at the conference.

The emphasis of the conference topics was on the developments between 1945 and the early 1990s, a period, it need hardly be said, during which a remarkable transformation came over the information systems of science and technology, affecting a much wider area of information provision. To a very large extent, all of the significant developments in information science and information management during this period had their origins in scientific, technical and medical (STM) information systems. (There is relatively little attention given to medical and healthcare information in this volume, only two papers taking this as a central theme.) An advantage of dealing with this relatively recent period of history is that many of the participants are still professionally active. One of the most interesting aspects of this book is the prevalence of first hand “how it was” accounts.

This therefore, is a persuasive and illuminating example of the writing of information history. It is also, to a considerable extent, concerned with the history of science and technology itself, rather than purely its information support systems; this is particularly so in some of the papers which deal with specific technical solutions to scientific information problems.

The contributions are a highly eclectic and diverse group, in terms of subjects, approach and methodology, and style of presentation. This gives the volume great interest and readability, but from the viewpoint of a information historian might perhaps be a source of frustration.

Rayward's opening overview of scientific and technological information systems “in their many contexts” argues that we have now reached a point where various perspectives on the history of information science can be examined: “the literature, the general nature of the discussion represented in it, and the actual substance of the discussions themselves – specifically what each paper and book seems to have been about – can now be examined historically, can be given context and perspective”. Although Rayward does not use the word, this seems to to a suggestion that, for the first time, we may have a historiography of information science: a ability to contextualise the development of ideas and argument about a concept, rather than just the development of the concept itself. This is a important development for the information sciences as an academic discipline, as well as for the area of information history itself.

The four contributions in the opening “interdisciplinary perspectives” section demonstrate well the diversity of the contributions in this volume. They include contributions focussing on aspects of the life and work of significant individuals – Stafford Beer and the lesser‐known Emanuel Goldberg, a pioneer on mechanised storage and retrieval – an analysis of “boundary work” between information science and information theory, and an intriguing account, by Jeffrey Yost, of the way privacy issues were treated in the early years of medical informatics.

The seven papers in the section on “organising and managing information” deal with topics more immediately central to information and documentation: abstracts and indexes, technical reports, database management systems, and so on. Particularly interesting is an account by Peggy Aldrich Kidwell of the development of the technologies of information from the nineteenth century onwards, as illustrated by artefacts from the collections of the Smithsonian Institution.

The influence of the Chemical History Foundation as co‐sponsor of the meeting is reflected in the section on “chemical informatics”. As someone whose specialisation in information science began in this area, I took particular interest in the seven papers here, and in particular the description of “what is not recorded in the annals” of the development of chemical information systems by Mike Lynch. This is an excellent example of the “I was there so I know how it was” style of accoun, which may be used with others to create an information history of the period, and, in its own right, provides a personal perspective of the history of chemical information.

Other papers deal with more detailed aspects of the topic, the story being brought up‐to‐date by Richard Swanson's account of chemical informatics applied to combinatorial chemistry, essentially a story of the 1990s. A magisterial account of the reason why chemical information systems have very often led the development of information systems in general, and why lessons learned in librarianship and documentation have had to be relearned elsewhere is given by Robert Fugmann. His paper “learning the lessons of the past” is a good example of a quite different style of historical study based on analysis of issues over a very wide field.

The cynical reviewer tends to assume that a section with the title “national developments  … ” in an American book will refer to largely, if not exclusively, US developments. This is far from the case here. Of 11 papers in this section, coverage includes Britain (the largest single group, with four papers), Australia, Germany, Finland, and Canada, with only three papers focusing on the USA. The fact that two papers deal with the Classification Research Group indicates what a lasting influence this has had. Outstanding in this section is Alistair Black's discussion of the development of technical libraries in British industry and commerce prior to 1950, based on a series of detailed case studies of primary documents in organisational archives, followed by an analysis of the issues and contexts of their development. Three other papers in this section ‐ Dave Muddiman's description of “Red” information science (also the subject of a Journal of Documentation paper; Muddiman, 2003), Rodney Blunt's account of the indexes of the code‐breaking group at Bletchley Park during the 1939‐1945 war, and the account of the German library and documentation professions by Marlies Ockenfeld and Hansjoachim Samulowitz –‐ are also notable for the clear and explicit way in which they include the contexts of the events and issues they describe.

Three papers in the “international” section deal with electronic access to scientific data intergovernmental co‐operation in developing information systems, and international agricultural information systems.

This is a volume, which will be valuable to anyone studying the development of systems of information and documentation, and not just in STM areas. It is also a useful cross‐section of approaches to investigating information history – technical, economic, philosophical, personal/oral, political, etc. and should serve to stimulate further research and scholarship of this sort.