Every discipline needs a history: Information management and the early information society in Britain

Although saddled with the image of passivity and technological innocence, librarians have in truth been at the forefront of exploiting technological opportunities in recent decades. Yet education for librarianship, certainly in Britain, has been under pressure from the appearance of new disciplines-such as information management, information systems, and knowledge management-which claim, by comparison, to be technologically adroit. For a body of knowledge to claim the status of a discipline it needs to have not just a past, but also a history. Disciplines entailing expert practice require a history of that practice to claim legitimacy. Whereas disciplines as varied as management and medicine and, in the information sphere, documentation, bibliography, information science, and librarianship each have a body of historical knowledge attached to them, the discipline of information management does not. The history of information management, with the exception of work undertaken in the United States, has concerned historians little and teachers and practitioners of information management even less. The field is largely open, therefore, for research, certainly in a British context, on the origins and development of information management: defined here as the management of documentation, both internally and externally generated, in organizations. Such research is best rooted in the contention that the current digital information society is less a historical discontinuity than the product of historic information societies and the Particular information revolutions that characterized them. Of particular interest to the project is the information management revolution in business at the start of the twentieth century, two themes of preliminary research on which are described here: the emergence of in-house technical libraries, or information bureaus and the development of new techniques and technologies for the communication, organization, storage, and analysis of information within in the organizational setting. The chapter concludes with suggestions on how teaching and research in the history of information management can improve education in the field.