Of CD‐ROMs and History

Musing the other day on the possible reasons for the information profession supporting the small coven of information historians to which I belong, I decided that we owe our keep to a couple of factors peculiar to the field. First — more relevant to the university than to industry — is information science's yearning for validation as a discipline. If it has a history, even if it only goes back to the telegraph (this is for the faint of heart; True Believers can lecture endlessly on the Book of the Dead as early information technology), then information science must be taken seriously. If information science can't command the same respect in faculty meetings as law or medicine, well, we're at least not leisure science, or food science. We have historians. More simply put — we have a past, therefore we must exist. The second, and much more legitimate, reason that historians of information are given succour, corporate or academic, is that information science is a results‐orientated field. Over the past century and a half it's brought forth some products that changed society as well as some expensive flops, so it's of more than conversational interest to identify parallels between present and past society‐technology interfaces. (Such compelling questions raise their heads as to whether or not pink haircurlers killed the picture‐phone in 1971, and, if so, whether a feminist America is ready for it now. These are weighty issues — well worth having a historically‐oriented colleague or two around.)