From mccrank@itttech.com Thu Sep 11 13:18:44 1997 Date: Wed, 21 May 1997 00:17:59 -0700 From: "L. J. McCrank" To: conference@h-net.msu.edu Subject: Conference proposal Lawrence J. McCrank ITT Corporation, Educational Services at ITT Techncial Institute 4020 Sparks Drive SE Grand Rapids, MI 49505 History has always been a synchretic or unifying discipline, sometimes seen as multi- or inter-disciplinary, but in the Annals tradition some refer to it as a unidiscipline. This is compatible with the merging influence of new Information Technology that blurs discplinary lines and departmental boundaries, and the enlargement of activities previously seen simply as history computing into a more holistic, embrasive combination of Information Science, Computing and Communications Technology, and Historical content drawn from archives, museums, and library special collections. This paper would present a outline of current developments in such interaction across institutional types and disciplines since the adoption of personal computing in History (ca. 1984) and argue for a conceptualization of an Historical Information Science which would affect how history is taught and how historians are trained. It will draw from a 2-volume work to be released by the end of 1997 by the same title, which is a bibliographic survey referencing 2600 citations. A summary benchmark study covering similar scope but less thoroughly was commissioned by the American Society for Information Science, published as "History, Archives, and Informaiton Science," in the vol. 30 (1995), 100pp. The paper would thus address issues cutting across all 6 themes suggested by the organizing committee, but given my role as a dean and university librarian, a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists, etc., and now as an information officer in the corporate world, it might fit best in sessions organizaed around proposition no. 6: cooperation between humanities faculty, museums, historical societies, and libraries. P.S. I just returned from providing a keynote address on at the International Congress on History and Computing at Moscow State University (which will be published in its proceedings). If you receive other proposals that can be identified with the IACH (Assn. for Computing and History), perhaps a panel or coherent session could be formed. L.J. McCrank