LIBRARIAN VERSUS DOCUMENTALIST
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LIBRARIAN VERSUS DOCUMENTALIST
Submitted to Special Libraries
1953
Eugene Garfield
Many years ago, I attended a lecture by Alfred Korzybski, the founder of General Semantics. I
am sure that the large audience in attendance at Cooper Union Hall in New York will never
forget Korzybski's dramatic technique in getting across the idea that association-of-ideas
techniques can lead to poor semantic adjustments. Korzybski had placed a huge placard on the
stage which was an enlargement of the familiar Aunt Jemima pancake flour box. Aunt Jemima
remained on the stage all the time Korzybski spoke.
The boxing gloves I referred to symbolize my own reaction to the topic for this talk. When I see
or hear the word "versus" I immediately think of a prizefight. So, if it is a fight you want, I am at
least prepared.
The difficulty is in deciding which side of the versus I should be on, or whether my position
should be that of the referee. Indeed, I would question whether there need be any versus at all.
Perhaps the juxtaposition could be justified if there were clear-cut agreement on what a librarian
or documentalist is or ought to be. But this is by no means the case. Assuming that as librarians
you have each decided what you are in this hectic life, I would like to spend some time this
morning reviewing some of the conflicting conceptions of what a documentalist is.
As defined by the International Federation of Documentation of which the American
Documentation Institute is the American affiliate, the term "documentation" refers to the
creation, transmission, collection, classification and use of "documents"; documents may be
broadly defined as "recorded knowledge in any format." (V. Tate, Amer. Doc. v.1, p. 3 (1930)).
Mortimer Taube refined this slightly by defining documentation as the complex of activities
required in the communication of specialized information including the preparation,
reproduction, collection, analysis, organization, and dissemination of graphic records."
Both of these statements would imply that library science as part of a much broader network of
communications, is part of documentation. Taking a somewhat more philosophical view, Simons
has said: Documentation is virtually the custodianship and utilization of what Wells has aptly
termed the "world brain." It is the �open Sesame� to all the wisdom and knowledge needed by,
and stored up for, mankind." In sharp contrast with these opinions, Bradford was very explicit in
his firm belief that documentation is subsidiary to library science. In his monograph on
Documentation, he states:
The principal medium for recording progress is the periodical press,
which speaks in so irregular and incoherent a manners that it is
impossible without documentation, to obtain a clear and concise view of
any particular branch of knowledge, large or small. This disorder reigns
in the production of documents of all kinds. Documentation is the
necessary remedy. It will be observed at once that documentation is no
more than on. aspect of the larger art of librarianship. But it is a special
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LIBRARIAN VERSUS DOCUMENTALIST
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aspect needing a special study. For, while the wide subject of
librarianship is concerned with every aspect of the treatment of books,
the business of the documentalist is to make available the original
information that has been recorded in articles in periodicals, pamphlets,
reports, patent specifications and such records. Because the material,
with which it deals is so much the more voluminous, its methods must
be so much the more precise. So, by his unostentatious drudgery, the
documentalist contributes to the increased production of genius, and
becomes, by proxy, the benefactor of mankind."
I don�t think Bradford was thinking about the Washington brand of
documentalist. I think be has in mind a group of which I should like to
say wore later on.
Bradford was a librarian who became particularly interested in the specialized problem of
documenting the periodical literature of� science, that is, be was concerned with the problem of
indexing and abstracting the scientific literature. Like the other early European documental ists
he was preoccupied with the potentialities of UDC, the Universal Decimal Classification. He was
so taken away with UDCs worth that in one place in his book be paints an over-glamorized and
histrionic picture of the now famous classification marathon conducted by Paul Otlet and Henri
LaFontaine in 1895. Bradford implies that in six weeks they bad completely catalogued 400,000
documents.
Katherine Murra has more accurately indicated that they merely assigned the appropriate Dewey
numbers to some 400,000 cards they already had in their subject catalog. Nevertheless, this was
no small feat by the founders of the International Institute of Bibliography. And Bradford, the
scholar-librarian, made many significant contributions to documentation.
I have briefly presented some of the conflicting interpretations of the scope of documentation.
Whichever you may prefer, I would for a moment like to dwell on this latter important aspect of
documentation namely, the problem of indexing and abstracting of the scientific literature. There
can be little doubt that the library profession has for all intents and purposes ignored or glossed
over this problem, at least from a professional and educational point of view. In 1950, Shera
indicated that nothing was being done in the U.S. about training people for documentation. This is
basically still true, and the price we may have to pay for this negligence may someday be
extremely high. This country is today publishing the main indexes in the fields of chemistry,
medicine, biology, and psychology, we are finding it increasingly more difficult to handle this
work. There is a great lack of properly trained personnel needed to take up the varied tasks
involved in the preparation of indexing and abstracting publications. I can state from personal
acquaintance with the directors of our leading indexing and abstracting publications that this
situation becomes worse each day.
Working in the Field of Scientific Documentation
In the laboratories and in the field scientists increasingly are turning out the results of their
investigational work. Scientific researchers play a more important role in industry and in human
welfare than ever before. Scientific journals are multiplying and most of them are crowded with
information. The Journal of the American Chemical Society, for example, is now publishing over
3,000 papers per year. This is but one of thousands of scientific periodicals. New scientific
information is produced for use. It cannot be used effectively unless practical means of learning
what is published are provided. With so many thousands of papers appearing annually in 31
different languages and in so many expensive publications, scientists must be helped by abstracts,
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indexes, reviews, mechanized systems, and the like. This is being increasingly recognized.
As a matter of fact, there was never a time when the importance of the effective handling of the
literature of science was more fully recognized. There was a time when such work was
considered to be a step down from work in the laboratory, but this is certainly not true now. The
role of the scientific documentologist is as essential to scientific progress as is laboratory
experimentation. The documentologist's work is as exacting and as interesting for it presents
problems every day. New methods are being developed for handling scientific literature;
nomenclature problems and work are increasing; and skill in searching is playing a stronger role
in preventing unnecessary duplication of work in the laboratory and of making laboratory work
more fruitful by providing adequate related information. The need for such work is being
recognized increasingly on all sides, as by industry.
Human progress is made by cooperation. Cooperation in science depends on effective
documentation /and on trained workers who can efficiently put accumulated information to
work."
The Russians, I might add, are not in the same situation. Describe Institute of Scientific
Institutions. E. J. Crane I am often asked how I became interested in documentation, particularly
mechanized documentation. It was only recently I recognized that my previous interests in
subjects such as general semantics, I believe brought me quite logically to this field. Let me quote
from Alfred Korzybski's, "Manhood of Humanity" where be distinguishes man from the animals
and plants, and I think you will understand what I am driving at.
"And now what shall we say of human beings? What is to be our definition of man? Like the
animals, human beings do indeed have the space capacity, but, over and above that, human
beings possess a most remarkable capacity which is entirely peculiar to them I mean the capacity
to summarize, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past; I mean the capacity
to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for the
developments in the present; I mean the capacity to employ as instruments of increasing power
the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial and
error, trial and success; I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the
ever-increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once
the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. And because humanity is just this
magnificent natural agency by which the past lives in the present, and the present for the future, I
define HUMANITY, in the universal tongue of mathematics, and mechanics, to be the
TIME-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE."
Korzybski's analysis of the dynamics of human progress was extremely perceptive, but I felt that
be had failed to recognize that our ability to time-binders is dependent upon our own man-made
mechanical devices � that, the way we link the past with the present is through the document,
i.e., through Documentation. The continued preservation of our status as time�binders depends
upon our ability to continue preserving that link. Over the centuries the form of our documents
has evolved from clay tablets to papyri on up through the modern printed page and already is
more accessible.
When I see documentalists gathered together, I am always amazed and pleased at the diversity of
opinions they express and the seeming difference in their personalities. Yet I am invariably
reminded at such gatherings of the Faustian personality and its insatiable desire for "knowing." I
think that Dr. Faustus would have been a documentalist in our era. The renaissance man could
attempt to master all of human knowledge in a lifetime, but certainly 20th century man cannot
even conceive of doing this in one hundred lifetimes. But if be cannot know everything we can
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be satisfied with the ability to recall any small portion of the totality of knowledge �at any given
moment. Surely Faustus would have liked to have at his fingertips the record of all previous
human achievements, if he could simply reach down and consult his universal pocket
encyclopedia. It is not as electrifying as rote memory, but far from frustrating. We
documentalists envision an eighth wonder of the world � a mechanical brain that will recall any
or all of the world's wisdom at will. The essence of all this is that the documentalist chooses not
to be library bound as a modern army tends to be road bound but rather be wants information
available to him at all times wherever he may be. Documentation is not only concerned with the
organization of materials within the library, but also with making information accessible outside
the sacred halls. Classification alone does not satisfy the personality of the documentalist as it did
a man like H.E. Bliss. One could simply define a documentation as being that complex of
activities concerned with the organizational and mechanical facets of communicating
information. This definition does account for the versatility of interests of the documentalists
which already include: classification, indexing and abstracting, reproduction of and transmission
of documents, literature and patent searching, nomenclature, publication, and mechanization of a
wide variety of other activities too numerous to mention in detail. But this definition or
description is lacking in the same way that all the others I have mentioned � if attempts to
describe or prescribe. Actually that activity which we are really here to discuss is improperly
called documentation � but whatever its proper name may be, documentation is that force which
organizes chaotic information into what we recognize as intelligence be it scientific, national, or
personal. This, of course, raises some interesting questions -- for if documentation is a series of
mechanical activities which transforms disorganized information into intelligence, then what is
man or the human brain which leads him. I confess that the conception of man as a machine does
not appeal to me, but there seems to be some good evidence that we have underrated the
machine. Man is now on the defensive and it will take some effective documentation to get him
back on the offensive again.
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