Warden Boyd Rayward is an Australian librarian and scholar, best known as the biographer of Paul Otlet. [1] [2]
Rayward was born in Inverell, New South Wales, Australia in 1939 and studied Library Science at the University of New South Wales, graduating in 1964. He then transferred to the U.S. to continue his studies at the University of Illinois. He later earned a master's degree and doctorate in 1973 from the University of Chicago Graduate Library School. His dissertation was on Paul Otlet. [1]
Rayward was a member of the faculty of Information Sciences at the University of New South Wales from 1993 to 1999 and was appointed Professor Emeritus in 1999. He also worked as a teacher and researcher at several North American universities, including the University of Chicago (where he was dean from 1980 to 1986) and the University of Western Ontario. He is also a member or fellow of numerous professional associations like the American Library Association (ALA), the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) and the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST). [1]
His writing includes Mundaneum: Archives of knowledge, [3] "The Origins of Information Science and the International Institute of Bibliography/International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID)", [4] "Libraries in Times of War, Revolution, and Social Change". [5] Rayward's influence as a professor who formulated theoretical frameworks and a broader understanding of the library as a cultural agent has been documented by Michael Buckland. [6]
The Union of International Associations (UIA) is a non-profit non-governmental research institute and documentation center based in Brussels, Belgium, and operating under United Nations mandate. It was founded in 1907 under the name Central Office of International Associations by Henri La Fontaine, the 1913 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and Paul Otlet, a founding father of what is now called information science.
World Brain is a collection of essays and addresses by the English science fiction pioneer, social reformer, evolutionary biologist and historian H. G. Wells, dating from the period of 1936–1938. Throughout the book, Wells describes his vision of the World Brain: a new, free, synthetic, authoritative, permanent "World Encyclopaedia" that could help world citizens make the best use of universal information resources and make the best contribution to world peace.
Information science is an academic field which is primarily concerned with analysis, collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval, movement, dissemination, and protection of information. Practitioners within and outside the field study the application and the usage of knowledge in organizations in addition to the interaction between people, organizations, and any existing information systems with the aim of creating, replacing, improving, or understanding the information systems.
Bibliography, as a discipline, is traditionally the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology. English author and bibliographer John Carter describes bibliography as a word having two senses: one, a list of books for further study or of works consulted by an author ; the other one, applicable for collectors, is "the study of books as physical objects" and "the systematic description of books as objects".
Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet was a Belgian author, entrepreneur, lawyer and peace activist; predicting the arrival of the internet before World War II, he is among those considered to be the father of information science, a field he called "documentation". Otlet created the Universal Decimal Classification, which would later become a faceted classification. Otlet was responsible for the development of an early information retrieval tool, the "Repertoire Bibliographique Universel" (RBU) which utilized 3x5 inch index cards, used commonly in library catalogs around the world. Otlet wrote numerous essays on how to collect and organize the world's knowledge, culminating in two books, the Traité de Documentation (1934) and Monde: Essai d'universalisme (1935).
The Mundaneum was an institution which aimed to gather together all the world's knowledge and classify it according to a system called the Universal Decimal Classification. It was developed at the turn of the 20th century by Belgian lawyers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine. The Mundaneum has been identified as a milestone in the history of data collection and management, and as a precursor to the Internet.
The International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID) was an international organization that was created to promote universal access to all recorded knowledge through the creation of an international classification system. FID stands for the original French Fédération internationale de documentation.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to information science:
Renée-Marie-Hélène-Suzanne Briet, known as "Madame Documentation," was a librarian, author, historian, poet, and visionary best known for her treatise Qu'est-ce que la documentation?, a foundational text in the modern study of information science. She is also known for her writings on the history of Ardennes and the poet Arthur Rimbaud.
Herman Howe Fussler was an American librarian, library administrator, teacher, writer and editor, who was a pioneer in the use of microphotography. Fussler was ranked as one of the "100 of the Most Important Leaders we had in the 20th Century" by American Libraries. Fussler served as director of the University of Chicago libraries from 1948 to 1971, was Dean of the University of Chicago Graduate Library School, from 1961 to 1963, and was instrumental in the founding of the Regenstein Library. He helped create the Center for Research Libraries. He was an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The World Congress of Universal Documentation was held from 16 to 21 August 1937 in Paris, France. Delegates from 45 countries met to discuss means by which all of the world's information, in print, in manuscript, and in other forms, could be efficiently organized and made accessible.
Documentation science is the study of the recording and retrieval of information. Documentation science gradually developed into the broader field of information science.
Frederick Wilfrid ("Wilf") Lancaster was a British-American information scientist. He immigrated to the US in 1959 and worked as information specialist for the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, from 1965 to 1968. He was a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana, from 1972 to 1992 and professor emeritus from 1992 to 2013. He continued as an honored scholar after retirement speaking on the evolution of librarianship in the 20th and 21st century.
Information history may refer to the history of each of the categories listed below. It should be recognized that the understanding of, for example, libraries as information systems only goes back to about 1950. The application of the term information for earlier systems or societies is a retronym.
The University of Chicago Graduate Library School (GLS) was established in 1928 to develop a program for the graduate education of librarians with a focus on research. Housed for a time in the Joseph Regenstein Library, the GLS closed in 1989 when the University decided to promote information studies instead of professional education. GLS faculty were among the most prominent researchers in librarianship in the twentieth century. Alumni of the school have made a great impact on the profession including Hugh Atkinson, Susan Grey Akers, Bernard Berelson, Michèle Cloonan, El Sayed Mahmoud El Sheniti, Eliza Atkins Gleason, Frances E. Henne, Virginia Lacy Jones, Bill Katz Judith Krug, Lowell Martin, Miriam Matthews, Kathleen de la Peña McCook, Errett Weir McDiarmid, Elizabeth Homer Morton, Benjamin E. Powell, W. Boyd Rayward, Charlemae Hill Rollins, Katherine Schipper, Ralph R. Shaw, Spencer Shaw, Frances Lander Spain, Peggy Sullivan, Maurice Tauber and Tsuen-hsuin Tsien.
Traité de documentation: le livre sur le livre, théorie et pratique is a landmark book by Belgian author Paul Otlet, first published in 1934.
Watson Davis (1896–1967) was the founder of the American Documentation Institute (ADI), the forerunner of the Association for Information Science and Technology, and a pioneer in the field of Library and Information Science.
Herbert Haviland Field was an American zoologist who founded the Concilium Bibliographicum, a leading science information service in the early twentieth century and was the father of Noel Field and Hermann Field.
The Concilium Bibliographicum was established in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1895 by the U.S. zoologist Herbert Haviland Field in response to the lack of timely and complete bibliographies to serve the new sciences that had begun to emerge in the late nineteenth century. Initially using his own funds, Field assumed the task of surveying all science journals and to use the then new index-cards and the highly sophisticated but complex Universal Decimal Classification system to send packets, bi-weekly, to his subscribers who were each to build a cumulative card file that would allow access to complete bibliographic citations and subject identifiers for all the literature on zoology and related fields from 1895 to the present.
Pauline Atherton Cochrane was an American librarian and one of the most highly cited authors in the field of library and information sciences. She is considered to have been a leading researcher in the campaign to redesign catalogues and indexes to provide improved online subject access in library and information services as well as "a leading teacher and theorist in cataloging, indexing, and information access."