[Sighfis-l] Investigating the European origins of Information Science

[IBEKWE-SANJUAN Fidelia]

Dear all

I have been the lucky recipient of this year's ASIST History Research 
Fund award for a research on a book project on "Information Science: 
Origins, theories and paradigms. A Comparative approach"

This book which I will co-author with Thomas Dousa (PhD, iSchool of 
Illinois, Champaign-Urbana) will be anenglish adaptation of a book I 
write in French in 2012 on the origins of the French Information Science 
(IS) but with a broader ans comparative scope. The first part of this 
book will be dedicated to tracing the origins of IS in its modern sense, 
as a discipline in the higher education system in Europe.

Some scholars attributed to Jean Meyriat (1981) the efforts of defining 
the building blocks of French IS in the higher education system in the 
1970s and especially of coining the term “/informatologie/”. However, it 
appears that the term had already been in use in other parts of Europe 
for the same purposes (Bozo Težak in Croatia in 1961 apparently borrowed 
the term from Björn Tell in Sweden,..).

At the time when I wrote my French book in 2012, I could not investigate 
this trail further in order to unearth the web of “term and concept 
borrowings” which helped shape this higher education discipline. I would 
now welcome the opportunity to further investigate how European pioneers 
of IS may or may have not influenced each other in how they defined the 
IS discipline “at home” and how this had influenced the paths taken by 
IS in the different European countries. This, to my knowledge, is still 
an uncharted ground.

Note that my investigation will not cover the already well covered 
Briet, Otlet & Lafontaine period.

I'm solely interested in how the higher education programs in IS came 
about in different european countries from the 1970s upwards.


I would be grateful for any help you can render me in uncovering:


1) Relevant archival materials (early articles written by pioneers in 
your home country)

2) Resourceful people to interview who may have known some of the 
founding figures of IS in your country or even those founding figures 
themselves

3) If the resources available warrant it, I can make a trip to the 
country to personally interview or access the materials

4) I have some small funds to cover travel expenses and translations of 
materials that are not in english or french (the two languages I can 
speak and read).

Tentatively, I have listed these countries as potential places where 
such materials and resources could be found: Sweden, Denmark, Spain, 
Croatia, Italy, Germany, Ireland but if other countries have interesting 
materials, I'm of course willing to consider them. Ideally, I would like 
to carry out this field work in the first quarter of 2017.


Finally, I'm very grateful to Special Interest Group on the History & 
Foundations of Information Science (SIG HFIS) for awarding this grant to 
me which will make this research possible 
(https://www.asist.org/groups/history-foundations-of-information-science-hfis/).


Best regards

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Fidelia Ibekwe-SanJuan (Ph.D.)
Full Professor (Professeur des Universités)
School of Journalism & Communication (EJCAM)
http://ejcam.univ-amu.fr/en
Aix-Marseille University - France.
Homepage: http://fidelia1.free.fr/
IRSIC research team: http://irsic.univ-amu.fr/Fidelia-IBEKWE-SANJUAN?lang=fr
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