Conference presentation: Congreso: Estudios de la Informatión: Teoriá, Metología y Práctica, organized by the Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliotecológicas y de la Información, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico City.

Keynote address, ISKO France, 1999. English title: Form, Meaning, and Structure in Knowledge Selection Systems.

Librarians have many and varied difficulties. For some library problems research is not the best remedy. Improved coordination, clarification of values, or drawing on existing research results may suffice. When research is indicated, it pays to be selective. Investing in research, like any other kind of investment, should be judged in terms of the probability of success, the likely delay before results are achieved, and the impact on the population of competent researchers, as well as the perceived importance of the problem. New technology permits new forms of service, generates new data for analysis, and supports new tools for researchers. Normal research is repetitious and progresses incrementally. A bolder strategy is to seek significant advances in library service by challenging researchers to achieve a deeper understanding of important, but inadequately understood, library phenomena. Five Grand Challenges are proposed: 1. Library service: Could library services be made more meaningful? 2. Library theory: Who knew what when? 3. Library design: Have digital libraries been designed backwards? 4. Library values: How neutral can libraries be? and 5. Library communities: How do communities differ?

Vannevar Bush's famous article, “As We May Think” (1945), described an imaginary information retrieval machine, the Memex. The Memex is usually viewed, unhistorically, in relation to subsequent developments using digital computers. This study reconstructs the little‐known background of information retrieval in and before 1939 when “As We May Think” was originally written. The Memex was based on Bush's work during 1938–1940 in developing an improved photoelectric microfilm selector, an electronic retrieval technology pioneered by Emanuel Goldberg of Zeiss Ikon, Dresden, in the 1920s. Visionary statements by Paul Otlet (1934) and Walter Schürmeyer (1935) and the development of electronic document retrieval technology before Bush are examined. © 1992 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Copyright © 1992 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Emanuel Goldberg developed a camera at Ica in the 1920s that enabled amateurs to make their own movies, and then he enlisted his own family to show how to do it.

Since ancient times intellectual work has required tools for writing, documents for reading, and bibliographies for finding, not to mention more specialized techniques and technologies. Direct personal discussion is often impractical and we depend on documents instead. Document technology evolved through writing, printing, telecommunications, copying, and computing and facilitated an 'information flood' which motivated important knowledge organization initiatives, especially in the nineteenth century (library science, bibliography, documentation). Electronics and the Internet amplified these trends. As an example we consider an initiative to provide shared access to the working notes of editors preparing scholarly editions of historically important texts. For the future, we can project trends leading to ubiquitous recording, pervasive representations, simultaneous interaction regardless of geography, and powerful analysis and visualization of the records resulting from that ubiquitous recording. This evolving situation has implications for publishing, archival practice, and knowledge organization. The passing of time is of special interest in knowledge organization because knowing is cultural, living, and always changing. Technique and technology are also cultural ("material culture") but fixed and inanimate, as can be seen in the obsolescence of subject headings, which remain inscribed while culture moves on. The tension between the benefits of technology and the limitations imposed by fixity in a changing world provide a central tension in knowledge organization over time.

Presented at the 11th Biennial Conference of the French ISKO Chapter. Epistemological and theoretical foundations of Information –Documentation science: a tribute to francophone pioneers, Paris, 11-12th July 2017.