A student from University of Northumbria’s Information and Library Management programme got in touch with a few questions about Information History for his dissertation on the subject. Here are his questions and my thoughts around them:

1. What, in your view, are the current debates in Information History?

I think the main debate concerns the nature of ‘Information History’ itself: how it connects or differs from ‘Library History’.

Is ‘Information History’ the politically correct designation for essentially the same area of study (encompassing modern systems of information retrieval in the same way that ‘World History’ would take this morning’s developments into account) or is it an entirely separate school of discourse? If it is a separate school, does data on ‘Library History’ continue to be generated for future historians or will they be concerned exclusively with ‘Information History’?

2. How would you like to see the subject develop?

I’d like to see the field come together more seamlessly with other areas of library and information science. Library and Information History isn’t taught in library schools to the extent that it may once have been and I think that’s a shame. Maintaining a collective knowledge of the history of information makes our discipline an exciting one. It puts us into an historical context: shows how our daily professional activities, no matter how mundane they may seem when we’re doing them, are grounded in the human timeline.

3. Why, in your opinion, has Information History (however defined) tended to focus on Nineteenth Century studies?

The journals do seem to contain a lot of nineteenth-century studies, though I don’t know how objectively we can claim there is a tendency to focus upon them. If this is the case, however, it’s probably a combination of three things:

‣ records of Nineteenth-century librarianship (Mechanic’s Institutes; significant developments in academia; developments in open access) are both thorough and intact (compared to, say, the libraries of the Ancient world, for which records were not as meticulously kept and for which a lot of evidence has not survived),

‣ a disproportionate interest among investigators in this period, probably due to ninteenth-century developments being temporally ‘graspable’ yet slightly – teasingly – beyond living memory. The legacy of these libraries is all around us – in the the way we work, in the architecture of our older library buildings – so it’s a highly stimulating and relevant era of study.

‣ it was probably in the Nineteenth Century that scholars began to take an earnest interest in library and information history, library science being properly founded by Dewey in 1887 and the application of subject-specific classification by people like Thomas Jefferson. It may have been the start of earnest study, so the discipline of library history may be grounded to that time intellectually if not necessarily.

4. What do you think has been the benefit of this approach?

Of the proposed tendency to focus on the nineteenth century? I suppose the main benefits have been to capture data and to analyse it before it is lost; and also to offer graspable historical perspective for present-day librarians and library scholars: an investigation into the history of our discipline provides context to what we’re doing. It gives meaning. By focusing on the immediate past of the Victorian era, we can trace the evolution of our present-day libraries and information systems back to a different time without leaping dramatically back into the comparatively quite different libraries of middle ages or antiquity.