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 bibliographies. Three articles (by W. B. Rayward, by I. Rieusset‐Lemarié, and by R. Day) examine the contributions of Paul Otlet, his collaborators, and the Institute (known successively as IIB, IID, and FID). Four articles describe the development of particular techniques: Early Hebrew citation indexing (B. H. Weinberg); the Universal Decimal Classification (I. C. Mcllwaine); 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 annotated bibliography of writings published in Spain on the history of Information Science (F. Sagredo Fernández and A. García 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 the 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 “document” (M. K. Buckland); relevance (S. Mizzaro); and the Bradford distribution (V. Oluić‐Vuković). © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.