**This is part of the blog bomb that all the librarians at LibTechWomen planned and I am excited to participate. : )Â Find more posts celebrating Briet today in Twitter with #briet**
Ada Lovelace from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ada_Lovelace_portrait.jpg)
In celebration of Ada Lovelace Day, I am posting this short blog post on a female librarian, Suzanne Briet, the author of “Qu’est-ce que la documentation? (What is Documentation?). For those who do not know Ada Lovelace, she was ‘the world’s first computer programmer, and the first person to realise that a general purpose computing machine such as Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine could do more than just calculate large tables of numbers.’
- Read more about Ada Lovelace in the Guardian news article today.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/15/nerd-cabaret-wikipedia-ada-lovelace-day-2013
Getting back to Briet, in her manifesto published in 1951, she argued that the antelope in the wild is not a document but the antelope in the zoo is. If you ever hear “Is the antelope a document or not?,” now you know that the antelope example comes from Briet’s manifesto.
Unfortunately, this idea of the document antelope was often wrongly attributed to Michael Buckland, a professor at the School of Information, University of California, Berkeley, who actually introduced Briet to many students in library and information science.
About Suzanne Briet’s manifesto, Michael Buckland wrote:
In her manifesto, “What is Documentation?” Briet argued that the scope of Documentation extended beyond text to evidence and she defined “document” as any material form of evidence.
(Source: http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/briet.html)
According to Briet, the antelope in the zoo was a document just as much as the stone in the museum or the photo of the star in the sky.
For more information, see:
- The Suzanne Briet page in Wikipedia
- What is Documentation? (English Translation)
- Qu’est-ce que la documentation? (Original Manifesto)
- Ronald E. Day, Suzanne Briet: An Appreciation
- Danah Boyd, Suzanne Briet: madame documentation and librarian extraordinaire
Happy Ada Lovelace Day, everyone!
