Documents and the communication of scientific and scholarly information: Revising and updating the UNISIST model
Trine Fjordback Søndergaard, Jack Andersen, Birger Hjørland · Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology · 2003
With this poster we would like to propose a revision and update of the UNISIST-model of scientific and technical communication published in 1971 (UNISIST, 1971). UNISIST is an Intergovernmental Programme for Co-operation in the Field of Scientific and Technological Information. The UNISIST model was a product of 4 years of cooperation between the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU). The poster will describe the original model and update and revise the model by incorporating the Internet as a means of communicating scholarly knowledge and by framing the model in light of the domain analytic theory. There are two main reasons for this. First, the domain-analytic approach to library and information science (LIS), as advocated in recent years by Hjørland & Albrechtsen (1995) and Hjørland (1997; 2002), stresses the importance of analysing and comparing differences between various knowledge domains and their communication structures with regard to, for instance, information retrieval and knowledge organization. The UNISIST-model holds the potentials, we argue, for outlining and understanding such structures, not only in science and technology - as originally envisaged - but also in other domains such as the social sciences and humanities. More recent models from the literature do not in our opinion show similar qualities. Second, due to the Internet and its role in scholarly communication, the model is inadequate today. Therefore, a revision and update that takes the Internet into account seems in its place in order for the model to serve as a framework for further analysis and research. To LIS, the UNISIST-model offers an important sociotechnical perspective on the activities of scholarly communication. It raises attention to information communication between knowledge producer and knowledge user, as a system consisting of diverse organizational and documentary units each contributing to the division of labour in scholarly communication. In so doing the model allows us to examine communication within specific domains or discourse communities and to compare differences between them. A mapping of these agents, their information services, and document production with regard to the provision of “the best textual means to an end” (Wilson, 1968, p. 21) should be an essential task of LIS-research. Accordingly, the objective is to present a general model capable of constituting a framework for specialized studies of communication structures in concrete domains. We suggest the differences between disciplines, or domains, as a new feature that hopefully can serve as motivation for further studies of specific disciplines or domains. The poster demonstrates an agenda for concrete analyses.