The two Paradigms
 Esses dois contributos tiveram efeitos
específicos, sendo comuns quanto ao
impacto perturbador no paradigm
dominante, trazendo,ambos, para a
área da documentação as mudanças
aceleradas do processo histórico
(político, cultural, sócio-económico,
demográfico e tecnológico)
The two Paradigms
 Those two contribuits had especific efects.
They had in common the disturbing impact
in the dominant paradigm, bringing both, to
the documentation area the speeding
changes of the historical process (political,
cultural, socio-economic, demographic and
technological)
The two Paradigms
 After the II world war was invented the
ARPANET and the ENIAC (the first computer),
was instaured the Cold War, there was the baby
boom, the secondary sector specialized and the
tertiary sector (services) boomed until our days.
The documentalist formation and the librarians as
entered finally in the university what implied an
obvious, but not very consistent demanding of
descientificity, etc, etc.
 O contributo de Otlet para este novo
paradigm foi crucial
The two Paradigms
 We consider that with the actual historical
conjecture (1990-…) of globalization or of the
network (Manuel Gastells) it is emerging in our
area a new paradigm that we assign of postcustody, informational and scientific
 The contribution of Otlet was crucial to this new
paradigm
The two Paradigms
 From Traité de Documentation: le livre sur le livre
(1934) I evidence the following principle of the
scientific:
 The organized documentation ought to offer
registered information: 1º universal to their
object; 2º Safe and True; 3º Complete; 4ª Fast; 5º
Actualized; 6º Easy to obtain; 7º gathered
anticipated and dispose to be communicated; and
8º available to a bigger possible number of
people.
The essential questions at the
custody paradigm
 Which kind of knowledge was and is produced under
the custody, historicist and technicist paradigm?
 First of all: practical, that is, common sense
 Principles of physical arrangement of books and
journal in bookshelves (the closet is a renascent
invention to the documental use) are valid to the
arrangement of all kind of objects and it results in a
basic psychic necessity of the human being that is
manifested in different forms.
The essential questions at the
custody paradigm
 The social science, according to the constructive
perspective, is not incompatible with common sense,
it can appear from practical experience, but will it be
to stay? Is Bachelard right in he said that science with
opinion has to pay the price of epistemological
rupture?
 hese questions are important to the debate about
epistemic possibilities of the documental professional
area.
The essential questions at the
custody paradigm
 Organizing documents and set rules to the
identification of it physical shape and its content
(cataloguing) are a way of knowledge, but of what
kind?
 Probably of this kind: empirical, common,
established in immediate experience, given
immediately by the senses and sometimes
wrongly. Is assembles the technological
knowledge
The essential questions at the
custody paradigm
 If we accept, as Le Coadic (2006,
http://prisma.cetac.up.pt/artigos2.php), that
science is a set of enunciates or a system of
enunciates that answer to a criteria of validity and
truth, such criteria that tend to being independents
of an subjective appreciation, can we consider the
custody, historical and technicist paradigm
propitious to this kind of scientifically?
The essential questions at the
custody paradigm
 Is a science that studies the phenomena and
problems that are behind of the facts, things
and specific cases and that tends to establish
universal and necessary relationships ( the
denominated scientific laws) compatible
with the strong features of the custody,
historicist and technicist paradigm?
The essential questions at the
custody paradigm
 Until the appearance of the visionary proposal of
Otlet and La Fontaine and of the disruption of
some archivists (from 1898) and with the
exclusive appropriation of the Archives by the
history writing, it seems obvious that the practice
of set in order, cataloguing and inventorying
books and documents, has obeyed, in its origin, to
the historic and literary knowledge criteria (the
rhetoric and classic erudition)
The essential questions at the
custody paradigm
 It is inside of the custody paradigm that has
appearing a progressive denial rumo to a new
paradigm
 The technicist element, emphasizing all the
process of organization and representation of
information, from cataloguing until the
sophisticated elaboration of classifications and
thesaurus, helped to specialized the profession.
The essential questions at the
custody paradigm
 Specializing a profession can tend to fit it or
wrongly to make it over scientific
 Through sophisticated progresses in the so called
documental languages (the CDU and its
derivations, the thesaurus, the Ranganathan facets
(1892-1972), etc) was born the pretension and
hope to convert the science library in a science
(the Ranganathan’s laws are the scientific eye of a
mathematician, but..)
The essential questions at the
custody paradigm
 Another element, associated to the previous one,
that harnessed and establish during all second all
of the XX century, a posture supposedly scientific,
already praised in the Otlet Tratado, was the
evaluation and mediation (by means of statistic
laws – info and cienenciometrics) of consumption
and production of scientific literature.
The essential questions at the
custody paradigm
 But how can the infometric laws raise a
scientific knowledge about the Library?
Those laws standardize the authorial
practice of scientists developed as teachers
and researchers in public and private
Universities and Laboratories
The essential questions at the
custody paradigm
 The social and political consciencialization of the
librarian and even the archivist, while agents settle to
the public service of all citizens as became
consequent the idea of a global and free access, that
could not be obstructed by the necessity of custody,
even if justified by preservation and withdrawal of
use/consult criteria
 Although, in practice, exists a tension/opposition
between full access and certain practices of custody
(secret, cloudy)
The essential questions at the
custody paradigm
 Many questions appear because of the nature of
the custody paradigm
 The crises of this paradigm has became gradually
more evident in the academic space of the degrees
in Documentation and Informational Science, and
the Masters and Douturamentos in the West
Europe and the United States of America
The essential questions at the
custody paradigm
 Why - the question is more and more pertinent - isn’t
possible to teach together Library and Archival
Sciences?
 Why there are authors that view Information Science
as a specific discipline that study only the processed
scientific electronic information?
 Why remain the divorce between the librarian and the
archivist in the field and the different and opposing
theories sensibilities of the teachers?
The informational and scientific
paradigm: is it possible?
 In the information Age with the informatics
spreading each time more in all activity sectors
and the internet imposing as a complex and
worldwide net involving the day to day life of all
human being, the concept of information gains an
extraordinary acuidade, its meaning is strategic,
but it is missing semantic agreement about it.
The informational and scientific
paradigm: is it possible?
 The documentation and information area cannot
stop being deeply affected by the impact of new
Information and Communication Technologies
and it is being so in the area of production of
contents as in the organization, representation, and
automatic search of contents and in the intensive
and extensive diffusion
The informational and scientific
paradigm: is it possible?
 The historical conjuncture that we are in pressures
in the way of the emergence of a new paradigm,
already harnessed in part by the anterior we have
just saw
 However, the questions increase:
 Is Documentation the same as Information?
 Is the Shannon’s communication mathematics
theory still valid for all type of information, even
the one librarians and archivists keep, treat and
diffuse?
The informational and scientific
paradigm: is it possible?
 How can the scientific knowledge of information
be characterized?
 Only the one that is materialized through concrete
objects, through concrete physical support (paper
or electronics)?
 Is it possible instaurar a scientific knowledge of
social and human information knowledge a partir
do potencial simbólico de cada individuo e das
suas relações sociais?
The informational and scientific
paradigm: is it possible?
 A ciência da documentação/informação é vista por
autores coevos como uma metaciência, uma ciência
pós-moderna ou uma interdisciplina porque o seu
objecto e os problemas que lhe são próprios são,
também, específicos de uma variedade de ciências
sociais e de outras ciências como a matemática e de
interdisciplinas como a informática
The informational and scientific
paradigm: is it possible?
 Um conhecimento difuso e interdisciplinar
apenas?
 Um conhecimento transdisciplinar
construído a partir dos conhecmientos
empíricos herdados da library practice, da
documentation, da museologia, da
arquivistica e do jornalismo (segundo Le
Coadic)?
The informational and scientific
paradigm: is it possible?
 Para Yves Le Coadic, chimic de formação e
documentalista antes de se dedicar à reflexão
epistemológica sobre a Information Science,
esta é possible com base em conceitos
científicos univocos e tendencialmente
objectivos e deve estudar os fenómenos
informacionais, ou seja, estuda o user, o leitor,
o auditor, o vistante do museu, o
teleespectador... E opera com leis estatísticas.
The informational and scientific
paradigm: is it possible?
 O positivismo mais ou menos temperado de
Le Coadic é muito pouco consensual pelos
teóricos mais em voga
 No meio das divergências e de uma falta de
consensualidade mínima que levou alguns a
considerarem o campo como préparadigmático urge estabelecer um esquema
problematizador para um roteiro
epistemológico minimamente satisfatório:
The informational and scientific
paradigm: is it possible?
 What is information? Belkin considered that is
important and crucial to give an answer
 Study information will perhaps be more radical
and widespread than, for example a Book History,
the Archive, the press, a History of Reading or
Sociology of the Library public, Archives or
Museums… And it will not be only a new
technology ( the information knowledge that run
in computers)
The informational and scientific
paradigm: is it possible?
 What can it be today’s Information Science? Why
was lost or forgotten, in a certain way, the
definition of the conferences Georgia Institute of
Technology (1961-1962) and retaken in 1968 in
the article of Harald Borko?
 Should not be made the singular and matrical
effort of retaken a Information Science capable of
investigating and explain the Information or is that
way a chimera and what can really exist are
Information Sciences?
The Model of Oporto, Portugal
 The educational model of Oporto is one of the
answers to this questions here resumed and
generally presented