History and operation of the Documentalistics Commission

Abstract

The article deals with the history of the creation and activity of the Documentalistics Commission which functioned between the 1960s and 1980s under the Scientific Council on the Complex Problem of Cybernetics. The Commission’s activities are related to the formation of documentalistics as an independent scientific discipline, its object is presented by large documentary systems, the use of new technologies in the processes of collecting, processing, searching, storing and using information. The author focuses on the transformation of the Commission’s research directions throughout the entire period of its existence. In the first years of the Commission’s work, the issues of the information classification and the use of new technological solutions in working with documents (punch cards and microphotoreproduction) were prevalent. The heyday of the Commission’s activities is associated with the work on the creation of the unified documentation systems and all-Union classifiers of information for the automated control systems. The interdisciplinary nature of the Commission’s activities influenced the subject of documentalistics and the organizational form of its existence. Despite the fact that by the end of the 1980s the Documentalistics Commission had virtually ceased to exist, documentalistics as a scientific direction had a huge impact on the development of records management and archival studies in Russia.