Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T00:26:09.933Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Reconnecting library architecture and the information space

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2016

Wouter Van Acker
Wouter Van Acker*
Affiliation:
Ghent University, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Jozef Plateaustraat 22, B-9000 Gent, Belgium
*
Email: w.vanacker@ugent.be
Get access

Abstract

This article explores how our understanding of the materiality of knowledge has changed during the 20th century and how these meanings got incorporated into the concept of information. Special attention is given to Paul Otlet, the founding father of documentation, and to Norbert Wiener, the founding father of cybernetics. Furthermore, there is the question of what these changes that surround the notion of information imply for the architectural conception of the library. If the current discourse treats the library no longer as a space of books but as an information space, what implications does this evolution have for the architecture of the contemporary library? What is this information space that architects are required to articulate and to interpret?

Type
Research Article
Information
Art Libraries Journal , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , 2010 , pp. 29 - 34
Copyright
Copyright © The Art Libraries Society 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Hugo, Victor, Notre-Dame de Paris (Paris: Hachette, 1861), 1:207.Google Scholar
2. Bieri, Susanne and Fuchs, Walther, Bibliotheken Bauen: Tradition und Vision; Building for books: traditions and visions (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2001);Google Scholar
Webb, Terry, Building libraries for the 21st century: the shape of information (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000).Google Scholar
3. Nunberg, Geoffrey, ‘Farewell to the information age’ in The future of the book, ed. Nunberg, Geoffrey, 103-138 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 111.Google Scholar
4. Muddiman, Dave, ‘Public science in Britain and the origins of documentation and information science, 1890-1950,’ in European modernism and the information society: informing the present, understanding the past, ed. Rayward, W. Boyd, 201-222 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 202.Google Scholar
5. Ibid.Google Scholar
6. The publication in 1880 of the Index-catalogue of the library of the Surgeon-General’s Office by American medical librarian Billing, John Shaw can be considered as the beginning of the activity of documentation. The Index-catalogue combined a bibliography of journal articles and a library catalogue in the form of a dictionary.Google Scholar
7. Otlet, Paul, L’organisation rationnelle de l’information et de la documentation en matière économique: rapport (Bruxelles: Hayez, 1905).Google Scholar
8. Shera, Jesse, Foundations of the public library: the origins of the public library movement in New England, 1629-1855 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949);Google Scholar
Ditzion, Sidney Herbert, Arsenals of a democratic culture: a social history of the American public library movement in New England and the Middle States from 1850 to 1900 (Chicago: American Library Association, 1947);Google Scholar
Black, Alistair, A new history of the English public library: social and intellectual contexts, 1850-1901 (London: Leicester University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
9. Fayet-Scribe, Sylvie, Histoire de la documentation en France: culture, science et technologie de l’information 1895-1937 (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2000), 54.Google Scholar
10. Wiener, Norbert as quoted in Hayles, N. Katherine, How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 14.Google Scholar
11. Nunberg, ‘Farewell,’ 122.Google Scholar
12. Frohmann, Bernd, ‘Discourse and documentation: some implications for pedagogy and research,’ Journal of library and information science education 42 (2001): 13–28.Google Scholar
13. Webster, Frank, Theories of the information society (London: Routledge, 1995), 101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14. Black, A new history.Google Scholar
15. Lyotard, Jean-François, The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 4–5.Google Scholar
16. By the term ‘practices’ I refer to what Andrew Pickering has described as a heterogeneity of ‘skills and social relations, machines and instruments, as well as scientific facts and theories’. Pickering, Andrew, Science as practice and culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).Google Scholar