Book Review: S.C. Bradford and documentation

Abstract

Reviews the work carried out and the legacy left by S. C. Bradford in the field of documentation, in the context of the debate throughout the first half of the twentieth century regarding the nature of documentation and its relationship with librarianship. The emergence of the field of special librarianship is attributed both to his ideas and the publication of his seminal book Documentation in 1948, the year of his death. The main themes of Bradford’s work, summarized as a series of essays in ‘Documentation’, were: the need for a UK national central library for science and technology; classification; and abstracting services. The influence of his ideas on the future of library and information science, particularly those which resulted from his work for the Library of the Science Museum, London, are discussed. Bradford’s advocacy of the UDC (Universal Decimal Classification) for the retrieval of patent information tend to be dismissed but may be shown to have led him to a study of abstracting services and the publication patterns governing disciplines. This led to his formulation of what is now known as Bradford’s law of scattering, Bradford’s main claim to fame. Discussion of Bradford’s hypothesis has proliferated greatly in the years since Documentation was published, in particular the way in which Bradford described his law in two ways: verbally; and graphically. The subsequent work that has been undertaken to rationalize Bradford’s two formulations has yielded considerable insights into the functioning of publications and the flow of information involved in disciplines. Further work has been undertaken extensively in the past 50 years to study the relationship between Bradford’s law and other statistical relationships of interest to information scientists; notably Zipf’s law. The fact that Bradford’s law continues to be used in its traditional role of analyzing periodical article scatter has meant that Documentation continues to be cited.