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Information & Culture: A Journal of History, Volume 50, Number 1,

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DOI: 10.1353/lac.2015.0001

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 1

The Many Histories of Information

William Aspray

This article discusses the historiography of information. It argues that

information history is represented by (at least) six well-defined subdisci-
plines (archival history, book and publishing history, communication his-
tory, computing history, information science history, and library history),
each in agreement about its own methods and core literature, but which it
shares with none of the other five. The article identifies books that could
be read in graduate-level courses on information history that are taught
either chronologically or thematically. It also identifies historical ques-
tions that cut across the six subdisciplines.

Every age was an age of information, each in its own way.

—Robert Darnton, “An Early Information Society:
News and Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris”

If information itself defies precise definition, what chance is there

that its definition might be historicized? There is a danger that in-
formation history, like information, can be conceptualized in such
vague and heterogeneous ways that it is rendered unwieldy and thus
unsuitable for the award of disciplinary status. . . . [It] might even at-
tract accusations of naivety and scornful laughter.
—Alistair Black, “Information History”

As the editor of Information & Culture: A Journal of History, I am some-

times asked what the history of information is about. On this, the fiftieth
anniversary of the journal, my goal is to reflect on the academic study
of information history. My answer may be distressing to those who want
to define the field precisely, for to my mind information history has
as many definitions as information does. Information studies scholars

William Aspray is the Bill and Lewis Suit Professor in Information Technologies in the
School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. He is editor of Information
& Culture: A Journal of History. Most of his research concerns information behavior or
the history or policy of information and information technology.
Information & Culture, Vol. 50, No. 1, 2015
©2015 by the University of Texas Press
DOI: 10.7560/IC50101
2 I&C/Many Histories of Information

have worked valiantly for more than a half-century to establish a precise

definition of information—without coming to any final consensus. As
Luciano Floridi’s Information: A Very Short Introduction explains, there are
commonsensical notions of information that are closely associated with
semantics; but there are also other, more specialized definitions that ap-
pear in various academic disciplines, such as communications engineer-
ing, genetics, and economics.1 The situation is even more complicated
than Floridi indicates. Within the academic discipline of information
studies, researchers across different subfields of information studies,
such as information retrieval, digital libraries, and knowledge manage-
ment, use imprecise working definitions; and these working definitions
are often inconsistent with one another. There are no doubt similar in-
consistencies in the working definitions of information used in various
information professional practices.
In a thoughtful essay titled “Information History,” Alistair Black ob-
served that, “unlike other sub-sets of history, [information history]
commands no immediately identifiable canon of literature or meth-
odological discourse.”2 Indeed, many historical fields involve a collec-
tion of readings, methods, frameworks, and approaches that are widely
agreed upon by their practitioners; in those cases, variation and dis-
agreement appear primarily at the “edges” of the field, where there is
contested turf with other subdisciplines. Information history is not like
these other historical fields.3 Up until now, there has been little agree-
ment about what might be central to information history in terms of
its literature or its methods.4 This is not to say that information history
is vacuous or that it is premature to study it. What I do in the remain-
der of this article is make five passes at information history, each one
addressing a different aspect of the discipline. At the end of this effort,
I will still not have arrived at a definitive picture of information history;
nevertheless, I hope these passages will provide some enlightenment.

Pass 1: Information Studies as a Home for Information History

Upon accepting the editorship of the journal, I expected that schol-
ars in the interdisciplinary information school movement might be the
ones to have made the greatest progress in understanding information
history from a broad perspective. For several reasons, I had hoped to
find this understanding manifest in the intellectual products of the
Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T). ASIS&T
is the long-standing professional organization with which the iSchool
movement is most closely associated.5 Not only does it have the word
 3

“information” in its name, but several recent iSchool deans have served
as president of the association. However, I found that while those schol-
ars closely associated with ASIS&T have produced excellent historical
work along one vector within information history—one closely associ-
ated with the intellectual history of information science and in particular
the relationship between documentation studies, library science, and in-
formation retrieval—by and large they have not engaged in the broader
study of information history that I have been seeking in the journal.
Perhaps it is only natural for the ASIS&T historical group to be primar-
ily interested in how its intellectual field has developed over the past
seventy-five years. However, I believe there are three additional reasons
that ASIS&T’s organized historical studies have remained focused on
the intellectual history of information science and not taken a broader
view: the small number of doctorally trained historians participating
actively in ASIS&T’s historical activities; a structural incompatibility
between ASIS&T’s coupling of history with foundations of information
science; and the ahistorical cast of at least some subdisciplines within
information studies, such as information behavior.
Since 1972 ASIS&T has sponsored a special interest group known as
the History & Foundations of Information Science. My conversations
with members of this group have led me to believe that the special inter-
est group was not the result of a convenient grouping of several small
interest groups (an “other” or “miscellaneous” category) but is instead
based on a belief that there is a fundamental symbiosis between the his-
tory and the foundations (philosophy) of information science.6
Some other academic disciplines have held similar beliefs. For exam-
ple, after some initial successes, notably Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Sci-
entific Revolutions, initially published in 1962, there was great hope that
the history of science and the philosophy of science would inform one
another.7 During the 1960s and 1970s, various joint history and philoso-
phy of science programs were formed, including the one I attended as
a doctoral student at Princeton University (as well as those at other uni-
versities such as Indiana, Melbourne, and Pittsburgh).
Unfortunately, the honeymoon was short-lived. A field of Kuhnian
studies emerged, with increasingly baroque analyses by philosophers of
the multiplicity of ways in which Kuhn had used the term paradigm. But
these studies did not serve as the basis for a wider integrated field of
history and philosophy of science. The historians of science tended not
to recognize the implicit philosophical positions in the ways in which
they framed problems, while the philosophers tended not to be sensi-
tive enough to the historical context and were too ready to generalize
4 I&C/Many Histories of Information

from small numbers of not necessarily representative case studies. The

sociological turn of the history of science profession—with heightened
emphasis on science and technology studies and social history—meant
that the history of science turned increasingly away from intellectual his-
tory, which was probably the best place for historians and philosophers
of science to come together.
There were some successes: Imre Lakatos’s Proofs and Refutations stimu-
lated historians of mathematics to distinguish formal proof from the social
construction of mathematical knowledge.8 The various writings of John
Earman and Clark Glymour on nineteenth- and twentieth-century physics
were both historically and philosophically sophisticated.9 Kyle Stanford’s
Exceeding Our Grasp used careful historical analysis of nineteenth-century
scientific work to bring new insights to the philosophical study of scien-
tific realism.10 For the most part, it proved difficult for historians and phi-
losophers of science to study topics in ways that supported one another’s
work. They served more as political allies than as intellectual collabora-
tors. Over the years, amidst the disappointment that arose over how little
the historians and philosophers have found in common and offered in
support of one another’s work, these two disciplines have drifted apart.
Nevertheless, even today—fifty years after Kuhn’s publication—there
continue to be calls for the integration of history of science and philoso-
phy of science.11
The information scientists appear to have the same hopes for a sym-
biosis between history of information science and foundations of infor-
mation science, but I have not seen a big payoff. The strongest historical
scholarship being written by scholars affiliated with the ASIS&T special
interest group focuses on intellectual history, which does seem prom-
ising for accommodation of the philosophers. For example, Charles
Bourne, Trudi Bellardo Hahn, and Michael Buckland have contributed
significantly to our understanding of the intellectual origins of informa-
tion science out of library science, documentation, and information re-
trieval.12 However, I do not see how this work has provided case studies
or concepts for the philosophers. This community of scholars, including
both the historians and the philosophers, has engaged to only a limited
degree in the broader study of information history beyond the intellec-
tual history of information science.
A second reason why a broader conception of information history
may not have taken root is associated with the nature of traditional
scholarship in information studies. Consider one of the principal sub-
fields of information studies, known as information behavior.13 If one
looks at the books that are widely regarded by information behavior
 5

scholars as encapsulating their subfield, one sees that the principal

end goal of information behavior scholarship is to create, occasionally
to test, and even more occasionally to employ simple theories of be-
havior that have been abstracted away from their historical context.14
The historian’s goal is to give an interpretive rendering of a particular
and highly contextualized set of events, while the information behavior
scholar removes this contextualized detail and distills from this rich con-
text a simple model based in theories of psychology or sociology with
the intention of applying the model across many settings, independent
of most contextual factors. The goals of the two fields are so dissimilar
that there is little wonder that the broadly conceived history of informa-
tion would have difficulty in entering into a productive relationship with
traditional information behavior studies.
A third reason for the historical focus within ASIS&T may be the
background of the scholars who are leading these pursuits. It is a dis-
tinguished list of (mostly senior) information scientists who for the past
several decades have been the principal driving force behind the work
of the ASIS&T special interest group. This group includes, among oth-
ers, Michael Buckland, Toni Carbo, Trudi Hahn, Boyd Rayward, and
Robert Williams. All of these scholars received their doctoral degrees
in library and information science fields. They are in stark contrast with
another set of (mostly younger) faculty members who teach in informa-
tion schools but who have their doctoral training in history, including
Geoffrey Bowker, Gregory Downey, Nathan Ensmenger, Thomas Haigh,
Eden Medina, and this author, among others. With the exception of
Haigh, none of them has been actively involved with the ASIS&T spe-
cial interest group. These scholars all have a strong orientation toward
information technology, as opposed, say, to traditional information
institutions, such as libraries and archives, and they have a particular
interest in social issues. They tend to find science and technology stud-
ies (as represented by the Society for the Social Studies of Science and
the journal Science, Technology, and Human Values) and history of technol-
ogy (as represented by the Society for the History of Technology and
the journal Technology & Culture) to be more closely aligned with their
interests than ASIS&T and its formal historical activities.
Haigh, who serves on the advisory board of the special interest group,
has addressed this same issue in his presentation titled “Challenges and
Opportunities in Information History,” delivered at the 2009 ASIS&T an-
nual meeting.15 He points out that while the history of science, history of
technology, and history of computing were all dominated in their early
years by practitioners in science, technology, and computing, in later
6 I&C/Many Histories of Information

years the profession was dominated by a younger generation of scholars

trained professionally in history. So far, this change has not completely
happened in the history of information science. The impact, Haigh ar-
gues, is that the two groups of information historians use different meth-
ods, address different questions, and speak to different audiences. He
argues that the ASIS&T-oriented historians pay more attention to in-
tellectual history and the STS-oriented historians to social and cultural
history. ASIS&T-oriented historians tend to frame their arguments with
concepts from the technical discipline and tend to have a deep under-
standing of the technical material; while the STS-oriented historians
tend to frame their arguments from historical fields and have a widely
varying command of the technical material. The former group has as
its intended audience primarily practitioners of information science and
tends to celebrate heritage and pioneers; the latter group has other his-
torians and sociologists as its intended audience and tends to question
and problematize received assumptions from information science.
As Haigh would note, these distinctions are only general patterns, not
absolute characterizations of these two groups. The differences, I want to
emphasize, are in the types of research and intended audience, not in the
quality of the research. As the sociologist David Edgerton has made abun-
dantly clear, there is an important place in the world for old ways of doing
things, working shoulder to shoulder with new ways—despite a persistent
rhetoric of the impending displacement of the old by the new.16

Pass 2: Action at the Margins

As Black suggests in his 2006 essay, in most robust academic disci-
plines there is an agreement on the literature and methods that are cen-
tral to the field. However, practice at the edges of the field might use a
different approach, a different conceptual framework, or a different set
of methods from those employed in the core. One might argue that in-
formation history is characterized by an inverted model in which there
is currently little at the core, with little agreement across information
historians about methods or canonical literature. Information history
is also characterized by (at least) six well-defined subdisciplines, each
in agreement about its own methods and core literature, but which it
shares with none of the other five.17 The six subdisciplines are archival
history, book and publishing history, communication history, comput-
ing history, information studies history, and library history.18 (Haigh has
made a similar observation and referred to it as “the Balkanization of
 7

information history.” Let us just hope that information history does not
have its own Gavrilo Princip.) As you can see from the second column in
table 1, each of these fields has its own distinct set of research questions.
The characterization of the questions raised in each of these disciplines
as indicated in this table is by no means complete but is intended to
generally characterize the most common types of questions.
The right-hand column of table 1 presents professionalization ele-
ments (societies, journals, prizes) of each of these six subdisciplines.
One can see from the table that each of the subdisciplines has its own
conferences, journals, and awards distinct from the other groups. These
professional paraphernalia help each group to preserve its insularity
from all the other subdisciplines. The right-hand column also shows
that the fields are unevenly well established, with the book, commu-
nication, and library history subfields being the best established, com-
puting history somewhere in the middle, and archival and information
science history the least well established. Mostly, each of these groups
talks within its subdiscipline but not much to the other subdisciplines.
Occasionally, a study is of interest to more than one of the other subdis-
ciplines. An example is JoAnne Yates’s book Control through Communica-
tion, which won awards from both the communication and the archival
historians.19 I cannot think of a book that is commonly read by three or
more of these subdisciplines.

Pass 3: A Course in Information History Organized Chronologically

One of the required courses for the master’s degree program in in-
formation studies at the University of Texas at Austin is Perspectives on
Information. It is a course that examines the formal definitions and
working definitions of information from various academic and prac-
tice disciplines related to the information field. When I first taught this
course in the spring of 2014, in addition to giving a brief overview of
these definitions, I introduced the students to the many different types
of information through an historical examination of the creation and
use of various information artifacts and systems (books, libraries, maps,
statistics, postal systems, television, the Internet, etc.). I did not intend
this course to fully represent the broad history of information. The
course used history as a tool for a different purpose. Since the course
needed to cover many other topics, only part of the semester was avail-
able for historical study. Nevertheless, some readers might be interested
in seeing the required historical readings from the course:
 Table 1
The Six Subdisciplines of Information History
Subfield Research questions
Computing history Design and construction of information technology;
computers in use in various domains; intellectual history of
computing in academic disciplines; professionalization and
ethics; social shaping of information systems; social impacts
of information systems; work involving the use of computers
Library history Histories of particular libraries; biographies of librarians
and library science scholars; the library in society;
professionalization; gender, race, and class in both
employees and users; intellectual history of library theory
and practice (e.g., classification); library work
Archives history Histories of archival institutions; emergence of the
profession; relations to other information professions such
as librarians and records managers; notions of memory and
collective memory; archives and technology (emerging);
archives and issues of gender and race
Information studies Intellectual history of the information studies discipline
history out of libraries, documentation, and information retrieval;
history of information management; history of information
systems; impact of the cold war
Professionalization (not including museums)
Society for the History of Technology Special Interest Group
in Computers, Information, and Society; IEEE Annals of the
History of Computing; MIT Press and Springer computing
history book series; Computer History Museum Prize (book
award); Adelle and Erwin Tomash Fellowship in the History
of Information Processing
In the United States, the American Library Association
History Roundtable, Eliza Atkins Gleason Book Award,
Justin Winsor Library History Essay Award, Phyllis Dain
Library History Dissertation Award, biennial conference
of the ALA Library History Round Table; in the UK,
8 I&C/Many Histories of Information
Library and Information History Group of the Chartered
Institute of Library and Information Professionals, Library
and Information History journal; internationally, the Library
History Section of the International Federation of Library
Associations and Institutions. Also active groups in Germany,
Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Argentina, among other
places
Society of American Archivists History Round Table,
International Conference on the History of Records and
Archives
ASIS&T History and Foundations Special Interest Group;
special conferences such as those sponsored by ASIS&T and
the Chemical Heritage Foundation
Book, reader, and Composition, mediation, reception, survival, and the Library, Book History, Bibliologia, Media History, Printing
print culture history transformation of written communication in material History, Quadrat, Memoires du Livre; Society for the History
forms (parchment, printed books, new media); studies of of Authorship, Reading, and Printing; American Printing
individual readers and authors, as well as communities of History Association; Bibliographical Society (UK); Book
scholars; early history of printing; history of publishing and History Research Network (UK); Canadian Association for
the book trade; literacy; working-class reading and writing the History of Book Culture; Dictionary Society of North
America; Early Book Society; Hibolire (Norwegian, Baltic,
Russian); International Reading Association Special Interest
Group on History of Literacy; Printing Historical Society
(UK); Society for Book Research in Austria; Society for
Textual Scholarship; various bibliographical societies in
Spain, UK, Australia, New Zealand, United States; DeLong
Book History Prize
Communication There are at least three varieties of study here: (1) business Societies: Mercurians (Special Interest Group of the
and communication and technical history of mass communication technologies Society for the History of Technology), International
technology history that create infrastructures, such as steamboats, postal Communication Association, Journal of Communication
systems, railroads, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, Inquiry, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television
television, and the Internet; (2) media history studies that
are about the interaction of particular media (newspapers,
movies, television, radio) and social thought or about media
work or the nature of media institutions; (3) the broader
history of human communication, which starts with the
pre-Socratics and Sophists on the understanding of human
communication, writing, oral versus print cultures, the rise
of the printing press, and more. Whether these should be
three separate fields or one is an open question. Most of this
scholarship has a field-centric intellectual approach, not an
institution-centric approach. Most focus on English-language
literature about events in America and Europe; there are few
comparisons of national traditions or international history
9
10 I&C/Many Histories of Information

• Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before

the Modern Age (2010)
• Daniel Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of
Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850 (2000)
• Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., and James W. Cortada, eds., A Nation
Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United
States from Colonial Times to the Present (2000)
• JoAnne Yates, Control through Communication: The Rise of System in
American Management (1989)
• Frank Webster, Theories of the Information Society (3rd ed., 2012)
• James W. Cortada, How Societies Embrace Information Technology: Les-
sons for Management and the Rest of Us (2009)
• Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data,
and the Politics of Global Warming (2010)
• David Weinberger, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That
the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person
in the Room Is the Room (2011)

There are obvious limitations to this reading list. Only western Europe
and North America are covered, and the chronological coverage be-
gins only in 1500. I compiled this reading list before preparing table
1. When one categorizes these books by the six subdisciplines listed in
table 1, one sees, for example, that the reading list underrepresents li-
brary history and overrepresents communication history. I have listed
in appendix 1 some additional books that one could read in a chrono-
logically oriented course on information history. The course reading list
provided above and the list that forms appendix 1 include far too many
books to read in a single semester; nevertheless, many gaps remain in
the coverage represented by this literature.

Pass 4: A Course in Information History Organized Thematically

It is certainly possible to organize an information history course the-
matically rather than chronologically. Appendix 2 gives some examples
of books that one might use if one wanted to teach an information his-
tory course thematically. Many of the books listed above and in appen-
dix 1 might fit here, but for the sake of brevity they are not listed in
appendix 2. A semester-long course could cover more themes and far
more readings. I have made no effort to organize these themes into a
logical order to be assigned in class. Of course, one could make many
additions to this list.20
 11

Pass 5: Crosscutting Questions in Information History

The previous two sections have discussed how to compile a syllabus

for a graduate-level course in information history. This is a process of
mixing and matching books selected from the six information subdis-
ciplines. Unless the instructor or students can add value that enables
them to compare and contrast across these individual books, the course
may not fulfill a goal of building a central core. I have listed below some
examples of questions that operate across the information subdisci-
plines and enable comparisons across the subdisciplines. This may be
one approach to building a central core for information studies.

• In what ways have the tools of computing been introduced into

and changed the practices and economies of traditional informa-
tion institutions such as libraries and archives? Have they displaced
other specialized technologies that were in use in these fields?
• How have computers and the Internet changed the nature of
work carried out by traditional information occupations such as ref-
erence librarians? Are there similarities to the work practices and
patterns of change of other information professions?
• How has the introduction of born-digital records or digitized re-
cords caused new problems for archivists and librarians?
• Are the different types of information institutions so distinct from
one another—as they are supposed to be and were always supposed
to have been?
• To what degree has the rise of the Internet created disinterme-
diation in the need for information institutions such as libraries,
archives, universities, and professional and scientific societies? Has
the availability of information online eliminated or changed infor-
mation professions such as management consultants?
• To what degree are concepts such as algorithmic thinking and
modularity, which range across many different domains, a result of
the rise of the computer? To what extent has computing been simi-
lar to many other fields in adopting or re-creating these concepts?
• How does the study of information business change if we expand
beyond the software and hardware industries and include, for ex-
ample, various kinds of publishers, consulting firms, and producers
of business and media equipment, products, and services?
• Are there similar patterns across the professionalization of the
different information disciplines? Are the exogenous forces shap-
ing them the same?
12 I&C/Many Histories of Information

• How does gender play out in the different information professions?

Is there something to be learned from comparing the majority male
profession of computing to the majority female professions of librari-
anship, for example? Why are information professions gendered?
• How have people whose work is dominated by digitization or
computerization (computer support people, chief information
officers, digital humanities scholars, computational scientists, sci-
entific data managers, library automation specialists, etc.) found
recognition, autonomy, and professional status in their traditional
organizations (businesses, libraries, science, humanities)?
• To what degree is this story of information a Western story or a
study of Western cultural imperialism? Do we gain a different un-
derstanding by taking a world perspective or by removing a
Western-centeredness to the story?
• What is the information historian’s perspective on the notion of
the late twentieth century as an information age?
• To what degree has digitization changed the function of the tradi-
tional information institution, for example, the library as a
provider of culture and education transformed to a place for pro-
viding entertainment, technology access, and job skills?
• Are there similarities in the structure of various information in-
dustries and strategies of the firms in them, and do they undergo
similar changes over time?
• In what ways and to what extent are information technologies
changing the practices of reading and publishing?
• How has the Internet changed the advertising, newspaper, maga-
zine, and other media industries?
• What can we learn from cross-industry comparisons of the intro-
duction and use of computer technologies?
• How has the availability of computers and the Internet changed
the ways in which education is delivered or what constitutes educa-
tion? For example, does the use of technology enable less time to
be spent on skill training and more on concept learning and be-
ing more creative? Does technology enable education to be more
widely distributed across society? What function remains for the in-
person, residential university in the age of the Internet?

Conclusions
The material above suggests three final questions to address. The first
is raised in Black’s epigraph at the beginning of this article: Is there a
 13

danger in defining information history so broadly that the definition

does not have academic utility? In a private conversation with the author
many years ago, Julian Bigelow of the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton aphorized his critique of the field of cybernetics: that it of-
fers “more extent than content.” This same aphorism might be applied
to the broad definition of information history suggested here. My reply
is that information history is still inchoate and that it would be harm-
ful to draw tight boundaries prematurely. This is the spirit in which the
journal is soliciting and accepting papers at the moment: to be broad-
minded about the definition of information until there are enough ex-
amples to begin to draw clearer lines around the field. It is quite pos-
sible that today’s working definition (the history of anything that might
be studied in an iSchool) is too broad or less than useful in some other
way and may need to be modified. For now, the plan is to continue to
experiment with a broad definition.
The second question is whether there is an implied criticism of the
six fields of archival, library, information science, computer, communi-
cation, and book and reading history in the sections above. The answer
is that I intend to make a slight criticism, but I also recognize the value
of the focus of the scholarship in each of these communities. The value
is in speaking directly to the interests of the other members of one’s his-
torical subdiscipline and to the interests of its practitioners. There may
be a passion within information science for the intellectual history of
the debates between Marcia Bates and Birger Hjørland over the nature
of information, but many others interested in information history may
not share that enthusiasm. A specialty group focused on the study of in-
formation science history means that these issues can receive the atten-
tion that some people want them to receive. However, there are dangers
in narrowly focused subdisciplines: the narrow focus may lead one to an
unselfcritical belief in the importance of particular kinds of informa-
tion institutions, as one sometimes finds in the literatures on library his-
tory, archival history, and computer history. It may also lead one to miss
important trends or comparisons that cut across two or more of these
subdisciplines, for example, the impact of war on institutional and aca-
demic developments. Finally, it may lead to large swaths of information
history (under a broad definition of the field), such as information in
everyday life and the information ecologies of professions, being largely
untouched by any of these historical subfields.
The third and final question is whether this analysis is incorrect in
its giving equal status to each of these six fields as subdisciplines, that
is, whether one of the subdisciplines might grow to be a field that
14 I&C/Many Histories of Information

encompasses all of the other subdisciplines and become identified with

the entire field of information history. I can easily eliminate five of these
subdisciplines from being candidates for the master position in informa-
tion history: library history and archive history are too focused on par-
ticular kinds of information institutions; computer history is too focused
on the construction and use of a particular technology; information
science history is too focused on a particular academic discipline and
limited set of practices; and book and publishing history is too focused
on a particular information artifact. The only possible candidate among
these subdisciplines is communication history.21 But even communica-
tion history is not totally suited to serve as a master discipline. Commu-
nication history does not seem an appropriate place to study the history
of cultural memory, which archival historians study, or the techniques
and effectiveness of mathematical methods such as information re-
trieval, which falls under the scope of information science historians, or
the issues of information ecologies of professions, which currently seem
to fall under none of these subdisciplines.
In the meantime, the journal will continue to experiment with
a broad scope for information history. In an era when information is
highly valued as a concept, a metaphor, and an economic commodity,
people are interested in understanding how information has shaped
and is shaping their lives. A unified information history may provide
scholars with a means to understand how the disparate activities that
occur in the six spheres mentioned above (and perhaps in many other
spheres as well) fit together. A unified information history is no doubt
of particular value to the schools of information that have been created
over the past two decades, schools that explicitly identify themselves with
the concept of information. For other scholars (e.g., business historians,
historians of technology, gender studies scholars), it may turn out to be
more productive to examine information issues in the context of their
traditional historical lenses, but by giving them an information turn.
However, this is an empirical issue to decide.22 I encourage authors to
write for the journal and push the limits of information history. Some-
day, with greater empirical evidence at hand, we may be ready to focus
on a more precise definition of what information history is and how it
helps us to understand yesterday’s and today’s world.
 15

Appendix 1: Books on Information History

That Provide Chronological Coverage

Archival History
Richard Bemer, Archival Theory and Practice in the United States: A His-
torical Analysis (1983)
Michael Clancy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307
(2012)
Donald McCoy, The National Archives: America’s Ministry of Documents,
1934–1968 (1978)
Ernst Posner, Archives in the Ancient World (1972)
Peter Wosh, Waldo Gifford Leland and the Origins of the American Archi-
val Profession (2011)

Book/Reading/Publishing History
Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot
(2000)
Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge II: From the Encyclopaedia to
Wikipedia (2012)
Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Im-
pact of Printing, 1450–1800 (3rd ed., 2010)
Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making
(2000)
Christine Pawley, Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in
Late-Nineteenth-Century Osage, Iowa (2001)

Computer History
Martin Campbell-Kelly et al., Computer: A History of the Information Ma-
chine (3rd ed., 2014)
Paul Ceruzzi, Computing: A Concise History (2012)
Paul Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (2nd ed., 2003)

Communication History
David Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications
in Nineteenth-Century America (2007)
Richard John, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications
(2010)
16 I&C/Many Histories of Information

Richard John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Frank-
lin to Morse (1995)
John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air (1999)
Marshall T. Poe, A History of Communications (2010)
Peter Simonson et al., eds., The Handbook of Communication History (2012)

Information Science History

Charles Bourne and Trudi Bellardo Hahn, A History of Online Informa-
tion Services, 1963–1976 (2003)
Mary Ellen Bowden, The History and Heritage of Scientific and Technologi-
cal Information Systems: Proceedings of the 2002 Conference (2004)
Mary Ellen Bowden, Trudi Bellardo Hahn, and Robert V. Williams,
eds., Proceedings of the 1998 Conference on the History and Heritage of Scien-
tific Information Systems (1999)
Toni Carbo and Trudi Bellardo Hahn, International Perspectives on the
History of Information Science and Technology (2012)
Irene Farkas-Conn, From Documentation to Information Science (1990)
Trudi Bellardo Hahn and Michael Buckland, eds., Historical Studies in
Information Science (1998)

Library History
Dee Garrison, Apostles of Culture: The Public Librarian and American So-
ciety, 1876–1920 (reprint with a new introduction, 2003)
Lowell Martin, Enrichment: A History of the Public Library in the United
States in the Twentieth Century (1998)
Carl Ostrowski, Books, Maps, and Politics: A Cultural History of the Li-
brary of Congress, 1783–1861 (2004)
Wayne Wiegand, Main Street Public Library (2011)

Appendix 2: Books on Information History

That Provide Thematic Coverage

Individual and Collective Memory

Francis Blouin and William Rosenberg, eds., Archives, Documentation,
and Institutions of Social Memory (2007)
Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradi-
tion in American Culture (1993)
Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers (2014)
 17

Technologies of Information
Nicolas Basbanes, On Paper (2013)
Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New (1988)

Information Use in (Nonscientific) Application Domains

Pablo Boczkowski, Digitizing the News (2004)
James Cortada, The Digital Hand (3 vols., 2003, 2005, 2007)
JoAnne Yates, Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technol-
ogy in the Twentieth Century (2005)

Information and Government

Burton Adkinson, Two Centuries of Federal Information (1978)
Jon Agar, The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Com-
puter (2003)

Information Businesses and Industries

Martin Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A
History of the Software Industry (2003)
James Cortada, Before the Computer (2000)
Christophe Lecuyer, Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of
High Tech, 1930–1970 (2007)
James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade
1450–1850 (2007)

Information Societies
Craig Robertson, The Passport in America: The History of a Document
(2010)

Information Infrastructure
Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Starr, Sorting Things Out: Classifica-
tion and Its Consequences (2000)

Information Work and Labor

Gregory Downey, Telegraph Messenger Boys: Labor, Technology, and Geog-
raphy, 1850–1950 (2002)
18 I&C/Many Histories of Information

David Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automa-

tion (1986)
Soshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine (1989)

Professionalization
Christopher McKenna, The World’s Newest Profession: Management Con-
sulting in the Twentieth Century (2006)
Douglas Raber, Librarianship and Legitimacy: The Ideology of the Public
Library Inquiry (1997)

Gender, Race, and Class

Janet Abbate, Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Com-
puting (2012)
Barbara Hochman, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Reading Revolution
(2011)
Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of Afri-
can American Literary Societies (2002)
Louise Robbins, The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown: Civil Rights, Censor-
ship, and the American Library (1999)

Science Information and Informatics

Geoffrey Bowker, Memory Practices in the Sciences (2008)
Joseph November, Biomedical Computing: Digitizing Life in the United
States (2012)

Regionalism and Other Geographical Issues of Information History

AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Sili-
con Valley and Route 128 (1994)

Social and Cultural History

Peter Burke and Asa Briggs, A Social History of the Media (3rd ed.,
2010)
Daniel Czitrom, Media and the American Mind (1983)
Susan Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (2004)
Rosemary Ruhig Du Mont, Reform and Reaction: The Big City Public Li-
brary in American Life (1977)
 19

Plummer Alston Jones, Jr., Libraries, Immigrants, and the American Expe-
rience (1999)
Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001)

War, Information, and Technology

Atsushi Akera, Calculating a Natural World: Scientists, Engineers, and
Computers during the Rise of U.S. Cold War Research (2007)
Patti Clayton Becker, Books and Libraries in American Society during
World War II: Weapons in the War of Ideas (2005)
Colin Burke, Information and Secrecy: Vannevar Bush, Ultra, and the Other
Memex (1994)
Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in
Cold War America (1997)
John B. Hench, Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle
for Global Markets in the Era of World War II (2010)
Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear
Missile Guidance (1993)
Christine Pawley, Reading Places: Literacy, Democracy, and the Public Li-
brary in Cold War America (2010)
Wayne Wiegand, “An Active Instrument for Propaganda”: The American
Public Library during World War I (1989)

Information and Politics

Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Al-
lende’s Chile (2011)
David Paul Nord, Newspapers and New Politics (1981)
Daniel Schiller, Objectivity and the News (1981)
Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Commu-
nications (2005)

Early History
Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe
(2nd ed., 2012)
Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (2010)
Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News (2014)
Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (2005)
20 I&C/Many Histories of Information

Notes
Thanks to the many scholars who have read versions of this manuscript, of-
fered suggestions, or answered inquiries: Lecia Barker, Alistair Black, Michael
Buckland, James Cortada, Nathan Ensmenger, Patricia Galloway, Clark Glymour,
Edward Goedeken, Trudi Hahn, Thomas Haigh, Richard John, Alberto Martinez,
Megan Raby, Ciaran Trace, Toni Weller, and Robert Williams.
The epigraphs are taken from Robert Darnton, “An Early Information Soci-
ety: News and Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” American Historical Review 105
(2000): 1–35; Alistair Black, “Information History,” Annual Review of Information
Science and Technology (2006): 441–73.
1. Luciano Floridi, Information: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2010).
2. Black, “Information History,” 443.
3. A number of scholars have written about the historiography of informa-
tion. See, for example, William Aspray, “The History of Information Science and
Other Traditional Information Domains: Models for Future Research,” Librar-
ies & the Cultural Record 46, no. 2 (2011): 230–48; Alistair Black, “Information
and Modernity: The History of Information and the Eclipse of Library History,”
Library History 14 (1998): 39–45; Alistair Black and Dan Schiller, “Systems of
Information: The Long View,” Library Trends 62, no. 3 (Winter 2014): 628–62;
Colin Burke, “History of Information Science,” Annual Review of Information Sci-
ence and Technology 41, no. 1 (2007): 3–53; James Cortada, “Shaping Information
History as an Intellectual Discipline,” Information & Culture: A Journal of History
47, no. 2 (2012): 119–44; Thomas Haigh, “The History of Information Technol-
ogy,” Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 45, no. 1 (2011): 431–87;
Toni Weller, “Information History: Its Importance, Relevance, and Future,” Aslib
Proceedings 59, nos. 4/5 (2007): 437–48; Weller, Information History—an Introduc-
tion: Exploring an Emergent Field (Oxford: Chandos, 2008); Weller, ed., Information
History in the Modern World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Robert V.
Williams, “Enhancing the Cultural Record: Recent Trends and Issues in the His-
tory of Information Science and Technology,” Libraries & the Cultural Record 44,
no. 3 (2009): 326–42. For earlier historiographic papers, see the bibliography in
Burke, “History of Information Science.”
4. In reading a draft of this article, Toni Weller made two points with which I
wholeheartedly agree. First, information history is a field of history. This means
that context is all-important, and thus what constitutes information at a given
time and place is dependent upon the context; any expectation of finding a
completely uniform meaning for information over time and place is likely to
lead to a misconstrual, often one of projecting modern notions inappropriately
to past usage and events. Instead, information historians should use the same
rigorous methods that more mainstream historians do in order to understand
the meaning of information in context. Second, there has been what Weller
calls “an informational turn” in history over the past two decades, “where con-
temporary information concerns and issues are causing a re-evaluation of what
we chose to study in the past” (private communication, April 29, 2014). This is a
common process in historical scholarship, extending far beyond the domain of
information history, by which historians choose what they study because of con-
cerns that are contemporary to their time of writing. I have not had sufficient
 21

opportunity to discuss this issue with Weller, but I might disagree over the ex-
tent to which this has happened. I note, for example, the relative absence of
historians in the theorizing about the existence of an information society in the
second half of the twentieth century. See Frank Webster, Theories of the Informa-
tion Society, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2012) on those main (nonhistorian)
theorists of the information society. For more on Weller’s views, see Weller, Infor-
mation History in the Modern World, esp. 1–12.
In a private communication (May 1, 2014), Alistair Black made a comment
similar to Weller’s first point, namely, that information history “first and fore-
most” should appeal to the academic discipline of history. Black went on to say
that even if one is not ready to admit information history as a full-fledged aca-
demic discipline, it can be seen “as a lens through which to view the past—in
the same way as identity (gender, nationalism, regionalism, class, sexuality, etc.)
or material life (Marxist interpretation) or sound, smell, light (postmodern
approaches).”
5. There is also the iSchool Caucus, which is an organization specifically of
these interdisciplinary iSchools. However, the iSchool Caucus does not currently
sponsor a journal or special interest groups.
6. I use the term foundations instead of philosophy here so as not to confuse
the activities carried out in the ASIS&T special interest group with the research
agenda being pursued by Luciano Floridi, The Philosophy of Information (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013).
7. Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1962).
8. Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1976).
9. For example, see John Earman and Clark Glymour, “Lost in the Tensors:
Einstein’s Struggles with Covariance Principles, 1912–1916,” Studies in the His-
tory and Philosophy of Science 9, no. 4 (1978): 251–78; Earman and Glymour, “The
Gravitational Red Shift as a Test of General Relativity: History and Analysis,”
Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 11, no. 3 (1981): 175–214; Clark
Glymour and John Earman, “Einstein and Hilbert: Two Months in the History of
General Relativity,” Archive for History of the Exact Sciences 19, no. 3 (1978): 291–
308; Glymour and Earman, “Relativity and Eclipses: The British Eclipse Expedi-
tion of 1919 and Its Predecessors,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 11, no.
1 (1980): 49–85.
10. Kyle Stanford, Exceeding Our Grasp (New York: Oxford University Press).
11. See, for example, Seymour Mauskopf and Tad Schmaltz, eds., Integrating
History and Philosophy of Science (New York: Springer, 2012).
12. Charles Bourne and Trudi Bellardo Hahn, A History of Online Informa-
tion Services, 1963–1976 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); and Trudi Bellardo
Hahn and Michael Buckland, eds., Historical Studies in Information Science (Med-
ford, NJ: Information Today, 1998).
13. I select this field principally because it is the traditional subfield of infor-
mation studies that I know best, not necessarily the one that presents the clear-
est picture of the point made in this paragraph.
14. See, for example, Karen E. Fisher, Sandra Erdelez, and Lynne E. F.
McKechnie, Theories of Information Behavior (Medford, NJ: Information Today,
2005); Reijo Savolainen, Everyday Information Practices (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow
22 I&C/Many Histories of Information

Press, 2008); and Donald O. Case, Looking for Information, 3rd ed. (Bingley, UK:
Emerald, 2012).
15. Thomas Haigh, “Challenges and Opportunities in Information History,”
paper presented at the panel New Directions in Information History, ASIS&T
Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC, November 9, 2009. Inasmuch as the slides from
the 2009 ASIS&T annual meeting are difficult to come by, one might also look
at Haigh, “The History of Computing: An Introduction for the Computer Scien-
tist,” in Using History to Teach Computer Science and Related Disciplines, ed. Atsushi
Akera and William Aspray (Washington, DC: Computing Research Association,
2004), 5–26; and Haigh, “The History of Information Technology,” which make
similar if not identical points.
16. David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since
1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
17. At a presentation of a draft of this article in the History and Philosophy
of Science Colloquium at the University of Texas at Austin, Alberto Martinez ar-
gued, quite reasonably, that I had not given any strong reason to believe that
these six subfields were the only fields that contribute to information history.
Martinez suggested advertising history as another possibility. Others might be his-
tory of the professions or economic history or gender history, to name just a few
possibilities. It is clear to the author that the six subfields named in the body of
the text have a connection to information history, but this does not mean others
should not be added. At the same colloquium presentation, Megan Raby drew a
comparison between information history and environmental history, which for
some time consisted of groups of scholars originating in various existing disci-
plines, each talking to itself about issues of environmental history without much
interchange with the other groups; but today those groups have begun to con-
verse with one another and create environmental history as a more coherent
field of study. Perhaps this gives hope for a coherent field of information history.
18. These six disciplines are not randomly chosen; rather, the fact that they
all contribute to information history is intimately related to the fact that the
information schools have their origins in the organized academic study of librar-
ies, archives, communication, computers and computing, information science,
and reading and publishing.
19. JoAnne Yates, Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American
Management (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
20. I have restricted the appendixes to books so as not to overwhelm these
reading lists with articles. My historical expertise is in nineteenth- and twentieth-
century American history, especially of mathematics and information technolo-
gies, and the themes in appendix 2 (as in appendix 1) are biased in the direc-
tion of the examples I know well. I believe that examples could be selected from
other times and places, but since this list is illustrative rather than comprehen-
sive I have not tried to be comprehensive. I would be quite interested to see lists
by historians of earlier times and other places whose work I admire, such as Ann
Blair, Robert Darnton, Anthony Grafton, and Daniel Headrick.
21. When I first presented an early version of this article at the SHOT Special
Interest Group in Computers, Information, and Society in October 2013, Richard
John suggested that communication history might serve as this master field for
information history.
 23

22. Even if many different lenses are used to examine information in society,
a unified study of information history may map out new intellectual pathways
that can be used by many different varieties of scholars. For the most part, the
intellectual direction is one way, with information studies scholars appropriat-
ing ideas from sociology, philosophy, and cultural studies without the reverse
happening very often. It would be interesting to see more of a two-way avenue
of ideas.