University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The Fate of the Document in Library and Information Science

Fuller, Steve

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/133128

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Title
The Fate of the Document in Library and Information Science
Author(s)
Fuller, Steve
Issue Date
2024-08
Keyword(s)
Borges, Briet, document, Kant, library and information science, Otlet, Swanson, undiscovered public knowledge
Date of Ingest
2026-04-23T13:12:56-05:00
Abstract
Library and information science is torn between two radically different understandings of one of the field’s foundational concepts, the document. The “library” side of the field sees the document as generative, while the “information” side sees it as residual, if not “dead on arrival.” The essay begins by tracing this difference to Kant’s distinction between the “purposive” and the “purposeful.” A purposive entity is one oriented toward an end, whose exact nature remains unknown, whereas a purposeful entity has a clear end whose degree of realization can be determined. In library and information science, the former marks a more humanistic approach to documentation, and the latter, a more scientific one, whereby a document’s value lies primarily in identifying the code of which it is an articulation. The essay concludes by arguing that Don Swanson’s notion of “undiscovered public knowledge” can serve as a master synthetic concept capable of bringing together the two rival understandings of the document.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
Series/Report Name or Number
Volume 73, Issue 1-2, August & November 2024
Type of Resource
text
Genre of Resource
article
Language
eng
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2025 University of Illinois Board of Trustees

Owning Collections

Library Trends 73 (1-2) August & November 2024: Design and the Philosophy of Information [Restricted] PRIMARY
This 2024 special issue of Library Trends was inspired by the contributions of Marcia Bates to our field and discipline. We are very fortunate to have her selected works gathered into three volumes (Bates 2018a, 2018b, 2018c). Thus, the vision for this issue was to treat Bates’s research “protoparadigm” as derived from Thomas Kuhn as a design sounding board, and I invited authors to freely explore these parameters. Additionally, I called for scholarship deriving from the emergence of Chinese information philosophy as another metatheory for LIS. I intentionally left the term “design” as open as possible, with some influence of Floridi’s (2019) definition of philosophy as conceptual design as a directive. Also, Bates (2002) has long called for good design for elements making up retrieval system interfaces and criticized models that do not actually improve information sources for users.