In-Class Ruminations (Blog Post #2)

The article that I have found to be most interesting in the class thus far was the Buckland piece “What is a ‘document’?” I had not read the article previous to this class, and though I know it seems naïve, it really opened my eyes to ideas that had been ruminating in my head, but I had been unable to articulate because I don’t yet have the foundations and vocabulary to do so. Questioning something as simple as the definition of the unit of study – a document – not only helps to identify the scope of the profession, but also identifies areas of uncertainty, dissent, and cultural differentiation of the field. These things are all important to me as a student as I formulate my own opinion and definition of the field. So often in the excitement of learning new technologies and theories, we forget (or at least I do!) to study the founders of a field; Buckland’s piece gave me just enough insight into the earlier theorists of documentation to make me realize how much I didn’t know. Additionally, I find it fascinating to see how each opinion of what constitutes a document interacts with the other – how earlier opinions inform later ones, and in what ways they differ.

Three opinions that Buckland presents in the article were particularly interesting to me: Briet, Otlet, and Ranganathan. I especially enjoyed Briet, with her unequivocal definition of a document in 1951: “any physical or symbolic sign, preserved or recorded, intended to represent, to reconstruct, or to demonstrate a physical or conceptual phenomenon.” I love that she defines, with simple yeses and nos, what is or is not a document. It takes audacity to lay out a black and white definition of the scope of a field, and while I don’t necessarily think that it is all that simple, I do think that her definition of what constitutes a document allows leniency for new technologies and formats – she is more forward thinking than her colleagues of what the future might hold. Otlet provided a foundation for Briet’s opinions by allowing, in 1934, that documents can also be objects provided that they inform the observer. This has obvious ramifications on Briet’s thinking, as allowing an object to be a document, rather than just written papers is fundamental to her idea that anything that is “evidence in support of a fact” is a document. Alternatively, Ranganathan is an interesting juxtaposition to Briet and Otlet, as he rejects their ideas of objects as documents and contends in 1961 that a document is a “record on a more or less flat surface,” and an “‘embodied micro thought’ on paper ‘or other material, fit for physical handling, transport across space, and preservation through time.’” I wonder if there is a cultural difference as to the way documentation is handled in India versus Europe. Whatever the reason, I find it fascinating that with a foundation of Briet and Otlet, (if in fact he read them, which I assume he did, if he was writing in the field), Ranganathan took a completely conservative view on the subject, relegating documents to physical pieces of paper. Would Ranganathan consider a picture of a clay pot with metadata attached a document, rather than the clay pot itself?