ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Local and the Global in Scientific Information

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Who should be responsible for the management and dissemination of scientific information? While many had long believed that this was a problem that ought to be the subject of international cooperation, in practice, local circumstances – political, economic, scientific – shaped a variety of approaches to the problem. By the 1960s, many nations had made the problem of controlling scientific information a focus of science policy. Private firms were also emerging that specialized in collecting and analyzing such information for universities, governments, and other enterprises. This panel considers the interaction between public and private approaches to scientific information management in four contexts: Britain, West Germany, Argentina, and the USA. When international norms were articulated, they often hewed to the local commitments (often British, American, or French) of those who articulated them. And when those norms traveled elsewhere, they were reshaped by other local commitments (as in the case of Argentina). A key factor was differing views of the role that the state ought to have in controlling scientific research agendas in general. Another was the status and power of private firms, such as the increasingly powerful commercial publishers or firms such as the Institute for Scientific Information, an American company that strove to establish itself as a global power for the management of scientific information.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Mathias Grote, Universität Greifswald

Individual Presentations

• Scientific Information for Peace or Progress? - Lai Ma, University College Dublin

• The Scope and Limitations of Scientific Information Planning in Argentina (1958–1976) - Camila Indart, CONICET

• "Information and Documentation" (IuD) in the long 1970s, or: The Politics of Encyclopedism before the Web - Mathias Grote, Universität Greifswald; Max Stadler, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

• Exporting Publishing Standards / Negotiating “Scientific Information” - Alex Csiszar, Harvard University

Session Organizers

• Alex Csiszar, Harvard University

• Mathias Grote, Universität Greifswald