European Modernism and the Information Society

W. Boyd Rayward is Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.

Contents: European modernism and the information society: conceptual interdependence: introduction, W. Boyd Rayward; Understanding the information domain: the uneasy relations between sociology and cultural studies and the peculiar absence of history, Frank Webster; On the cultural and intellectual context of European documentation in the early 20th century, Michael Buckland; A tale of 2 narratives: prolegomena to an alternative history of library and information science, Steve Fuller; The role of facts in Paul Otlet's modernist project of documentation, Bernd Frohmann; Ferdinand van der Haeghen's shadow on Otlet: European resistance to the Americanized modernism of the Office International de Bibliographie, Pieter Uyttenhove and Sylvia van Peteghem; Towers and globes: architectural and epistemological differences between Patrick Geddes's outlook towers and Paul Otlet's mundaneums, Pierre Chabard; Building society, constructing knowledge, weaving the web: Otlet's visualizations of a global information society and his concept of a universal civilization, Charles van den Heuvel; ' A necessity of our time': documents and culture in Suzanne Briet's Qu'est-ce que la documentation?, Ronald E. Day; Networking knowledge before the information society: the Manchester Central Library (1934) and the metaphysical-professional philosophy of L.S. Jast, Alistair Black; Documentation and Utopia: Fabian anticipations of the information society, Alistair S. Duff; Public science in Britain and the origins of documentation and information science, 1890-1950, Dave Muddiman; The march of the modern and the reconstitution of the world's knowledge apparatus: H.G. Wells, encylopedism and the world brain, W. Boyd Rayward; The modern museum in the age of its mechanical reproducibility: Otto Neurath and the Museum of Society and Economy in Vienna, Nader Vossoughian; Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft: an encyclopedia in Otto Neurath's pictorial statistics from 1930, Sybilla Nikolow; Visualizing so