Professor Alistair Black gave an invited talk at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Information Studies on April 24 as part of the school’s Social Studies of Information Research Group speaker series. His presentation, “Information History: A Subject in Search of an Identity,” addressed the “fractured identity” of information history and its emergence in the field of library and information science.
Abstract: In response to the arrival of what some see as a new age, a digital age, historians have begun to study its roots, antecedents, and pre-computer heritage. The past is replete with the introduction, demise, and transformation of systems of information (not to be confused with the narrower computer-mediated world of information systems). The history of systems of information, which for digestibility we can be label "information history," is deficient in neither scale nor scope. Systems of information have played a critical role in major developments in human organization and thinking, including: the transition to, and subsequent evolution of, capitalism; the growth of the modern, nation-state; the rise of modernity, science, and the public sphere; and the origins and spread of imperialism. Given the momentous importance of systems of information in history, it is curious that the engineering and shaping of information history “as a subject” has mostly occurred in the modestly-sized domain of education for information professionalism. Yet information historians exist in a wide range of disciplines, even if they are not conscious of such an identity. This fractured identity is detectable in attempting to categorize some of my own “information history” research, an example of which will be provided in the form of the history of the staff newsletter and magazine in corporations and other organizations in the first half of the twentieth century. Such a topic could arguably find a home in a number of disciplines, something that prompts consideration of the future of history in iSchools.
Black has been a full professor in the iSchool at Illinois since January 2009, having previously taught and researched for nineteen years at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. He is author of the following books: A New History of the English Public Library (1996) and The Public Library in Britain 1914-2000 (2000). He is also coauthor of Understanding Community Librarianship (1997); The Early Information Society in Britain, 1900-1960 (2007); and Books, Buildings and Social Engineering (2009), a socio-architectural history of early public libraries in Britain. With Peter Hoare, he edited Volume 3 (covering 1850-2000) of the Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland (2006). He served as chair of the Library History Group of the Library Association (1992-1999) and of the IFLA Section on Library History (2003-2007) and as editor of Library History (2004-2008) and North American editor of Library and Information History (2009-2013). He is the current editor of the journal Library Trends. Presently, his research focuses on the history of corporate libraries and staff magazines and the design of public libraries in the 1960s.