Fernanda Ribeiro

Archival science and changes in the paradigm

The dominant paradigm in Archival Science, thehistorical-technicist paradigm, has its origins with the French Revolution and raised from the social, economic, political, ideological and cultural changes that occur during the 19th and 20th centuries. During this last one and due specially to the technological revolution Archival Science reinforced its technical component and became autonomous in face of History, but the consolidation of the model, based on a custodial, technicist and documentalist perspective, is associated to a knowledge essentially empirical. By effect of the new conditions generated by Information Society, the dominant paradigm entered into a crisis and developed inside itself the factors which, unavoidably, will produce the paradigm shift. The new paradigm — thescientific-informational paradigm — conceives Archival Science as an applied discipline into the scope of Information Science and defines unequivocally its object of study — the archive, understood as aninformation system — and its scientific method of research. The method tends to find consolidation through quadripolar research dynamics, which is operated and continuously repeated within the field of knowledge itself, which implies a permanent interaction on four poles — epistemological, theoretical, technical and morphological.

Documentation / Information and Their Paradigms: Characterization and Importance in Research, Education, and Professional Practice

Since 2004 the authors began to design a proposal of paradigms for the documentation/information field, which starts from a wide meaning for the concept and it is based on the identification of the force of a custodial, cultural, historicist/humanist and technicist paradigm, that shaped the professional activity, the education and the public policies of archival, librarian and museologist universe, since 19th century until the middle of 20th century. It also consists in pointing out the emergence of a new paradigm, postcustodial, informational and scientific, generated by the deep changes in course at world level, that are summarized in strong but too much generic expressions as Information Era or Globalization. In this paper it is made the characterization of the two paradigms proposed, referring the factors that were in their origin and the contexts of their appearance, identifying their dominant features and showing their operative importance for education, research and professional practice.

Information Science and Philosophy of Information: Approaches and Differences

In this text we explore, in a brief and systematic way, the epistemological and theoretical groundings of Information Science (IS), understood as a transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary field, which is being developed and taught at the University of Porto over the last decade. IS’s object of study – information – is also characterized, as well as its non-symmetrical, yet complementary and elementary relationship with communication. From that basis, the points of convergence and divergence with Philosophy of Information, as it is conceived and discussed by Luciano Floridi, are put in debate.

LIS Education in Portugal between academia and practice

There is a brief exposition, in a historical perspective, about the evolution of the professional education in Portugal, in the area of Library and Information Science, since the creation of the Curso de BibliotecarioArquivista, in 1887, until its closure in 1982, when it was replaced by the Curso de Especializacao em Ciencias Documentais (CECD). After that, there is an analysis of the CECD, a two years postgraduate course that constitutes the indispensable requirement to occupy the places of librarian, archivist or documentalist in the public administration’s institutions and which represents the dominant model in Portugal. Some new education models, at postgraduate and undergraduate level are also approached, especially the alternative course that appeared in 2001, at under graduated level, in the University of Porto, because it constitutes an innovative proposal in the scope of Information Science, oriented to educate information professionals able to act in any organizational context.

Information Science and Cognitive Psychology: A Theoretical Approach

Information, as a human and social phenomenon, is the object of study of an emergent scientific field named Information Science (IS), which we put forward as unitary and transdisciplinary and open to a rich interdisciplinarity with other fields of knowledge. In face of the new reality, baptized the ‘Information Society’, and the emergence of a new paradigm, that we name “post-custodial, scientific and informational”, as opposed to the previous one, “historicist, custodial and technicist”, it is urgent to consolidate the theoretical and methodological foundations of IS in order to develop research, both pure and applied, and to contribute to a definition of its boundaries as a scientific area, in the scope of Social Sciences. Starting from an operative definition of Information, this paper aims to discuss the cognitive and emotional dimension of the info-communicational phenomenon and, for that, it is crucial to start a profound and hard dialogue with Cognitive Sciences. The label of ‘cognitivist’ given, in IS literature, to some authors like Bertram Brookes, because of the emphasis he put on the passage from a state of knowledge to a new state through an addition of knowledge coming from an increase of information, sounds quite equivocal, because knowledge and cognition are not synonymous and cognitive and emotional activity is not reducible to formalities. It is necessary to compare concepts and to understand the neuropsychological roots of the production, the organization and the info-communicational behaviour, so the contribution of Neurosciences and Cognitive Sciences, namely Cognitive Psychology, is indispensable.

The Epistemological Maturity of Information Science and the Debate Around Paradigms

Rafael Capurro, in a paper entitled Epistemologia e Ciencia da Informacao (2003), presented at the V ENANCIB – Encontro Nacional de Pesquisa em Pos-Graduacao em Ciencia da Informacao (Belo Horizonte, Brazil) put forward an innovative proposal for information science, which defended the existence of four paradigms and condensed and illustrated the evolution of documentation/information science by Paul Otlet This contribution inspired the authors of this text—who had already formulated an initial approach that established three phases (syncretic, custodial and post-custodial), while pursuing a different path and situated in the Portuguese context, to observe two paradigms: the custodial, historicist, patrimonial and technical (between the 18th and mid-20th century) and the post-custodial, informational and scientific (from the mid-20th century) This paper aims to establish a constructive and critical confrontation of Capurro and Izquierdo Arroyo’s proposals that are rooted in different but complementary epistemological conceptions

As bibliotecas universitárias: seu papel de mediação para o acesso ao conhecimento na era digital

Numa comunicacao que pretende, sobretudo, apresentar-se como umconjunto de reflexoes sobre o papel das bibliotecas das universidades, comeca-se por tracar uma panorâmica geral e diacronica da evolucao destas bibliotecas enquanto servicos de informacao com um cunho marcadamente orgânico, cujos objetivos sempre se enquadraram na missao das instituicoes de que faziam parte. Na sociedade digital e em rede, esta carateristica permanece como fator identitario das bibliotecas universitarias, pese embora o facto de terem de enfrentar novos desafios para os quais se exigem competencias tambem de novo tipo. O seu perfil custodial etecnicista, que lhes conferia um estatuto de repositorios/tesouros do saber, esta em profunda alteracao, a qual as reconfigura como repositorios dinâmicos, que nao tem por objetivo essencial a custodia, mas sim a mediacao e a partilha em rede, a escala global, da informacao (conhecimento) gerada, acumulada e utilizada pelas universidadesno desempenho da sua atividade pedagogica, cientifica e de transferencia deconhecimento para a sociedade.

Electronic journals: Their use by teachers/researchers of engineering and social sciences

Libraries must attend the needs of their different users. Academics are usually a particular kind of users with specific needs. Universities are environments where scientific communication is essential and where electronic format of journals is becoming more and more frequently used. This way it becomes increasingly important to understand how academics from different scientific areas use the available electronic resources. The aim of this study is to better understand the existing differences among the users of electronic journals in Engineering and Social Sciences. The research undertaken was mainly focused on the study of the use of electronic journals by teachers/researchers from the Faculties of Engineering and of Arts from the University of Porto, Portugal. In this study an international survey was used in order to characterize the levels of use and access of electronic journals by these communities. The ways of seeking and using scientific information, namely in terms frequency of access, the number of articles consulted, the use of databases and the preference of publishing in electronic journals were analyzed. A set of comparisons were established and results indicate an extensive use of the electronic format, regardless the faculty. However, some differences emerge when it comes to details. Such is the case of the usage rate of reference management software which is considerably more used by Engineering academics than Social Science ones. Generally, electronic journals meeting the information needs of its users and are increasingly used as a preferred means of research. Though, some particular differences in the use of them have emerged, when comparing academics from these two faculties.