Inheritance and prospects for documentation in Italy

Abstract

The article takes its cue from the paper by José Lopez Yepes, Il concetto di documentazione e il suo riflesso nella formazione di professionisti e ricercatori in Spagna, [The concept of documentation and its effect on the formation of professionals and researchers in Spain], published in the «Bollettino AIB» in 2005, to illustrate the situation of documentation discipline in Italy. The main reference is to the work of Paolo Bisogno, his sharp capacity for theoretical reflection, within a more extensive panorama of international epistemological debate. Starting with Paul Otlet's teaching, but also his early direct experience in the United States and France, Bisogno identified the new technologies for the management and diffusion of information as the preferred areas of disciplinary interest: from the experience of information retrieval, and therefore of data bases already in the Sixties, up to the sensational establishment of the "paradigm" of the Net. Bisogno's perspective addressed both a professional approach, marked by the acquiring of practice and knowledge linked to new computer technology, and within the sphere of scientific research also for reasons of social development (R&D); and also a distinctively speculative approach that tended to include the discipline within more extensive circles: the history of technique, the philosophy of science, the history of ideas and, in recent years, the theory of information.
Bisogno's inheritance is still valid today, and possible lines of future research are identified within the tracks left by this tradition. The Net is increasingly the preferred subject of study: while maintaining fruitful dialogue with the "fellow" disciplines and, especially, with librarianship; but also receiving stimuli offered by multidisciplinary approaches, and especially by so-called "cultural studies".