ABSTRACT
The European documentalist movement around Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine at the end of the 19th century is often considered the beginning of modern information sciences, and developed an expansive discourse on documents. Renate Wöhrer demonstrates that especially at the beginning of the 20th century, documents in their varied forms experienced an increase in use in numerous societal fields. This occurred in the course of professionalizing business operations and reorganizing offices in industry and administration, in newly created documentation centres at the interface between libraries and archives as well as in the areas of law enforcement and the judiciary. Here, Wöhrer explores the question of to what extent this increasing presence of documents, their formal and material differentiation as well as the increasing contemplation about documents led to documents’ specific complex of functions becoming a paradigm in the 1920s resulting, for example, in construing social situations as a “documentary meaning.” As a result, the concept of document dissolves out of material and functional boundaries profoundly.
