ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

"Information and Documentation" (IuD) in the long 1970s, or: The Politics of Encyclopedism before the Web

• In Event: The Local and the Global in Scientific Information

English Abstract

This paper focuses on the Federal Republic of Germany’s (FRG) so-called “IuD” program, a federal, generously funded initiative to create a national information infrastructure. Starting in 1974, its primary objectives included the centralization of the “largely unstructured diversity of information and documentation facilities”. While thus partly responding to concerns that had built up over the previous decades––an incipient “information crisis” that plagued the bureaucratic machineries of “Big Science” and the wider Military-Industrial Complex—IuD was already a clear expression of the more civilian mood of reform and crisis that emerged in the late 1960s. Various influences converged in this program: administrative reform and visions of a more agile state; a reorientation of research policy towards societal needs as well as questions of transparency and democratization. Not least, of course, it reflected the possibilities then opened up by advances in (non-numerical) data processing. The central theme, however, remained “scientific and technical information,” to be disseminated by 20 specialized information centers. The program ran into resistance early on: academic publishers balking at the prospect of an Orwellian “state publisher,” local states vying for hosting the centers, critics within the state playing up the neglect of “users,” putative market distortions, and excessive costs.

Ultimately, this recalcitrance paved the way for the crisis of “IuD” within the context of deregulation and privatization after 1982 ––a crisis compounded by the growing relevance of information networks and personal computing. As our paper argues, this cemented a view of the problem of information provision as a private-sector task, a perspective that remains effective to the present day. The failure of IuD as an infrastructure strategy thus marks a significant turning point in the history of scientific encyclopedism in the late 20th century.

Authors

• Mathias Grote, Universität Greifswald

• Max Stadler, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin