ABSTRACT
The most cutting of Suzanne Briet observations in What Is Documentation? must be in regard to the dream and the attempt of the father of European documentation, Paul Otlet, to assemble a universal bibliography. The documentary 'fertility' of the original 'fact' or object is. from its discovery through its continuous unfolding in social and cultural spaces, dependent upon these discourses, their differences, and their affordances for expressing the 'fact's' identity. Given this 'cultural or functional specialization' within a practice, Briefs concept of the 'cultural necessity' of documentation might, however, also be read as having a grander, more historical, referent than restricted fields of practice in science or scholarship; 'Culture', with a capital 'C'. Documentation is a segment of culture, but it includes the domain of librarians: the librarian is a particular case of the documentalist - both are distributors of culture.
