What is Documentation? English Translation of the Classic French Text

Suzanne Briet, a prominent French documentalist around the time of World War II, attributed a cultural origin and function to documentation and to documentary signs. In Qu'est-ce que la documentation? she brilliantly defined documents in terms of indexical signs, adopting an argument that previous documentalists had suggested. This book is unique both in the breadth of institutional scope that she attributed to such networks of signification and in the manner through which she folded the notion of the documentary sign back upon the definition of professionalism in documentation and librarianship. Briet's characterization of the documentary sign in terms of institutional and cultural contexts still stands as an open challenge to positivist and simple quantitative notions of "information" within information theory, information science, and information culture, particularly in the United States, since World War II.