The two Paradigms

1. 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)

2. 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)

3. 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

4. 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 post-custody, informational and scientific • The contribution of Otlet was crucial to this new paradigm

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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

9. 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?

10. 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?

11. 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)

12. 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.

13. 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..)

14. 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.

15. 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

16. 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)

17. 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

18. 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?

19. 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.

20. 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

21. 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?

22. 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?

23. 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

24. 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)?

25. 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.

26. 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 pré-paradigmático urge estabelecer um esquema problematizador para um roteiro epistemológico minimamente satisfatório:

27. 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)

28. 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?

29. The Model of Oporto, Portugal • The educational model of Oporto is one of the answers to this questions here resumed and generally presented