Information Science at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s: A Memoir of Student Days

Summary

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The author's experiences as a master's and doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley School of Library and Information Studies during a formative period in the history of information science, 1966-71, are described. The relationship between documentation and information science as experienced in that program is discussed, as well as the various influences, both social and intellectual, that shaped the author's understanding of information science at that time.

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Information Science at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s: A Memoir of Student Days

INTRODUCTION

I am writing this article not to claim myself as a pioneer of information science but rather to describe what it was like to be a student in the pioneering days of information science. There is much discussion nowadays of the history of information science, and in some instances it is argued that the early twentieth-century documentation theories of Paul Otlet (1990) and Suzanne Briet (n.d./1951) were the intellectual antecedents of information science. I am not a historian of the field, and I make no claim one way or the other about its historical roots. The understanding I developed of information science as a doctoral student in the 1960s at the University of California at Berkeley (U.C. Berkeley), however, had little to do with Otlet, Briet, or documentation in general. We saw information science as something brand new that was drawing on a range of earlier ideas, to be sure, but those sources were from realms very different from documentation. I believe that some of these sources are being lost sight of in the current discussion of the history of information science. In what follows, I present a memoir of my experience as a student at a formative moment in information science and describe the effort, as I saw it, to develop the field as a meaningful, distinctive discipline in one large doctoral program in a major university.

BECOMING A MASTER IN LIBRARY SCIENCE STUDENT

Sometimes in life we fall into where we were meant to be all along. Upon returning from Peace Corps service in Thailand, where I had taught English as a foreign language in two Thai high schools, I was confronted with the same question I had had as a fresh college graduate before I left: What should I do with the rest of my life? While sorting this out, I went to live with my parents in Lafayette, California, just over the hills from the University of California at Berkeley. I went down to Berkeley to take aptitude tests and get career counseling. It must be remembered that this was 1965, and women did not routinely get career guidance. Most female life-models for me in those years were homemakers. In fact, despite having attended Pomona College, one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country, I did not personall...

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