SPECIAL TOPIC ISSUE - HISTORY OF DOCUMENTATION AND INFORMATION-SCIENCE .1. INTRODUCTION

The substantial increase during the 1990s in the quality and quantity of research on the history of Documentation and Information Science is briefly reviewed. This special issue introduces 14 articles and two b ibliographies. Three articles (by W. B. Rayward, by I. Rieusset-Lemari e, and by R. Day) examine the contributions of Paul Otlet, his collabo rators, and the Institute (known successively as IIB, IID, and FID). F our articles describe the development of particular techniques: Early Hebrew citation indexing (B. H. Weinberg); the Universal Decimal Class ification (I. C. McIlwaine); postcoordinate indexing (F. G. Kilgour); and the Chemical Registry System of the Chemical Abstracts Service (D. W. Weisgerber). Three articles examine the literature: An analysis of the Journal of Documentary Reproduction, 1938-1942 (T. Walker); an an notated bibliography of writings published in Spain on the history of Information Science (F. Sagredo Fernandez and A. Garcia Moreno); and a bibliography of the history of Information Science in North America, 1900-1995 (R. V. Williams, L. Whitmire, and C. Bradley). Forthcoming: Three articles study people and organizations: Special librarians in t he U.S.A. (R. V. Williams); librarians and documentalists in France (S . Fayet-Scribe); and the NATO Institutes (A. Debons and E. E. Horne). Theoretical topics are reviewed in three articles: The notion of a ''d ocument'' (M. K. Buckland); relevance (S. Mizzaro); and the Bradford d istribution (V. OluiC-VukoviC).