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1. Introduction: bibliography and information science
This review essay examines de Fremery’s (2024) book Cats, Carpenters and Accountants, the core claim of which is implied by its subtitle: Bibliographical Foundations of Information Science. This review evaluates de Fremery’s arguments put forward for the field of bibliography to serve as a foundational concept for information science. It also goes beyond the book to consider the actual as well as the potential relevance of the different fields of bibliography for information science.
The reader should be reminded that what today is called “information science” was formerly called “documentation.” (Library and Information science, LIS, is a merging of library science with information science, cf., Hjørland, 2013, p. 218; here LIS and information science are considered synonyms). Documentation is closely related to bibliography. The founder of the documentation movement, Paul Otlet, founded the Institut International de Bibliographie (IIB) in 1895 and wrote an article about bibliography as a science (Otlet, 1990 (1903)), which understood bibliography to be about documents in general, not just about books [1]. He also created (with Henri La Fontaine) the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), originally developed for classifying the cataloging cards in the Universal Bibliographic Repertory. One of the most important indicators of the relationship between documentation, and information science is the change in name of the American Documentation Institute (founded in 1937) in 1968 to the American Society for Information Science (today the Association for Information Science & Technology, ASIS&T). These facts show the close relations between bibliography, documentation and information science. Kline (2004, p. 19) also expressed that bibliography is one of the former names of information science.
In library schools, bibliography was often taught as a core subfield, closely related to literature searching. When the name of the discipline changed to information science or LIS, the role of bibliography seemingly became less important, with emphasis shifting toward user studies. This terminological shift in the name of the discipline was even accompanied by some voices claiming “the bibliographical paradigm” to be obsolete (e.g. Henri and Hay, 1994), a view critiqued by Hjørland (2007).
This article examines the question raised by Buckland and referred to by de Fremery (2024, p. 1): “What might be gained by reinvigorating bibliography?” It does so...