"Documentation" used to be a hot buzzword before it was replaced by "information science". See the first page of "Libraries and Documentation" by Godet (1939)

"Documentation" used to be a hot buzzword before it was replaced by "information science". See the first page of "Libraries and Documentation" by Godet (1939) at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/614452?journalCode=lq https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/614452?jou... . > Exactly what is the meaning of this word "documentation" which is used in so many different senses? ... Messrs. Lafontaine and Otlet took possession of the word, and at the beginning of the century gave it a wider meaning when they advocated "the systemic organization of information and of documentation." To read Otlet in the original French, see «Traité de documentation: le livre sur le livre, theéorie et pratique» (1034) https://archive.org/details/OtletTraitDocumentationUgent https://archive.org/details/OtletTraitDocumentationUgent or http://user.textus.io/examples/trait%C3%A9-de-documentation.pdf http://user.textus.io/examples/trait%C3%A9-de-documentation.... . As part of this excitement, in the 1930s a number of people interested in microfilm as a form of documentation preservation and dissemination, started American Documentation Institute, with the journal "The Journal of Documentary Reproduction" and after WWII "American Documentation". The explosion of different types of "documentation" lead to new journals, like the "Journal of Chemical Documentation" in 1961. However, "documentation" as a term became passé. The ADI renamed itself in 1968 to "American Society for Information Science", its journal to "The Journal of the American Society for Information Science", and J. Chem. Doc. became first the Journal of Chemical Information (in 1975) and Computer Sciences and then Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (in 2005). As another example of its former hotness, see Taube's Documentation, Inc. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortimer_Taube#Documentation%2C_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortimer_Taube#Documentation%2.... ) which did the documentation management for NASA.