Documentology: The background and development

The article explains the objective reason for the emergence of documentology along with documentation and documentary studies, the relevance and practical significance for library science and bibliography. Attention is drawn to the outstanding role of Paul Otlet (Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet; 1868–1944) in the promotion and development of the theoretical foundations of the general theory of the document. The concept of three worlds, in particular, “the world of logical content of books, libraries, computer memory, and the like”, developed by Karl Popper (Karl Raimund Popper; 1902–1994) enabled to bring documentology to the level of a philosophical discipline. The stages of development of documentology are defined. The first stage embraces the late 19th – first half of the 20th centurys, the second covers the mid-20th century (1950–60s), when in the USSR it was known as “documentalistics”. Simultaneously, since the early 1960s, the document science has been developing with its specific methodology, individual acts and systems of documenting and creating documents, and on this foundation, their complexes and systems (the third stage). The documentation is contradictory: it claims to study both documents as proper objects, and those objects of workflow management, which have got the term “records” used in the Western countries. The fourth stage of development of the document general theory originates in the second half of the 1980s. In the early 1990s, Moscow State Institute of Culture proposed the term documentology to be used for the general theory of documents. The discipline core embraces the issues related to the conceptual apparatus, functional analysis of documents, study of their characteristics, parameters and properties, document classification, as well as study of the documents as a means of communication and an element of document collections.