UC Berkeley

Schools of Documentation, Librarianship, and Information Management have inherited multiple traditions: bibliography, documentation, librarianship, information retrieval, computing, informetrics, communications, archives, information systems, publishing, and more. We are concerned with documents (books, records, data, speech, symbolic objects) and with the creation, dissemination, and utilization of knowledge in society. The scope is large if we consider who uses documents and why. We deal with very complex matters: human understanding and belief, information technology, and social policies. There are intellectual problems and practical problems of social significance and complexity. New technologies (writing, printing, digitization, telecommunications) constitute new means, not new ends. We can and should rethink and redesign everything as technology changes what is feasible. These schools have focused on a small number of students. Professional education discourages interest in the nature of the field. The ideal professional program would be within a broader concern with the production, distribution, and utilization of knowledge. It would be scholarly and scientific and critical, drawing on formal techniques (algorithms) and social sciences (cultural anthropology, policy analysis sociology), and also humanities (rhetoric, semantics, epistemology). Our importance comes from the importance of our problems and the relevance of our instruction, research and public service to those problems.