DOCUMENTATION IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES SOME PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
| Published date | 01 March 1948 |
| Pages | 84-86 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026127 |
| Date | 01 March 1948 |
| Author | G. WOLEDGE |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
DOCUMENTATION IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
SOME PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
by G. WOLEDGE
Librarian,
British Library
of
Political and Economic Science
{London School
of
Economics,
University
of London)
I
IT
is unnecessary to stress either the importance in the troubled world of
to-day of the easy circulation of information in the field of the social sciences,
or the inadequacy as they exist at present of the documentational services
(including bibliographies and abstracts) which are needed to facilitate it.
Since it is scarcely possible for these services to be provided adequately
except by wide international co-operation, their improvement cannot be
undertaken except by equally wide agreement, which must in turn be based
on full discussion and on a more exact and comprehensive knowledge of the
situation than is easily available at present. It is good news that Unesco, the
progress of whose work on the documentational questions of the natural
sciences is recorded in the previous paper, is also to turn its attention to those
of the social sciences; it can provide the impulse, the centre, and the machinery
for the work of investigation and discussion which must necessarily fall on
those immediately concerned as producers, intermediaries, or consumers—
that is, on bibliographers, librarians, and social scientists. These notes do no
more than suggest some lines on which investigation and discussion will be
particularly necessary, and some dangers which should be avoided.
II
History and geography are excluded from consideration here, not from
any theoretical judgement as to whether or not they should rank amongst
the social sciences, but for the purely practical reasons that they have very
largely different organs of publication and a different body of readers, that
they may need different documentational apparatus, and that they are already
catered for independently to a considerable extent.
The field which it seems useful to consider as a whole includes social
philosophy and sociology, social anthropology, political philosophy and
political science, economics, and law, with the smaller subjects closely
related to these, and including not only the theoretical studies to which the
term 'social sciences' might be limited, but also the descriptive literature
which provides their data, and the literature concerned with their practical
application in industry and commerce, in administration and legislation, and
in politics. III
Much can be learnt from the example of the natural sciences, where more
extensive documentation services already exist, and where more discussion
of developments needed has already taken place. There is no danger that
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