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  • Introduction
  • Alistair Black (bio) and Charles van den Heuvel (bio)

In presenting this collection of essays in honor of W. Boyd Rayward—“Boyd” to those who are on first-name terms with him—we are not simply drawing attention to the work of a consummate historian but also celebrating someone who is deeply respected for his approachability, humility, and genuine interest in the lives of the many friends he has gathered around him over the years. Not all academics, by any means, combine intense intellectual labor with a human touch, but Boyd does this in spades. He is a true gentleman scholar (in applying the word “gentleman” in this context, we relieve it of its use to designate a person of leisure from the privileged classes; rather we emphasize that part of its connotation that signifies someone who is well-mannered, sociable, and considerate—in short, someone who manifests a true gentillesse d’esprit).

Boyd is best known, and revered, as the scholar who rescued Paul Otlet (1868–1944) from obscurity, thus implanting him as the “father of documentation” into the disciplinary consciousness of library and information science. Otlet’s grand, bibliographic/internationalist project, to which he devoted himself for over half a century, is considered to be a prime precursor of the Internet. It is to Boyd’s enduring credit that a quarter of a century before the Internet became a popular technology, and at a time when the term “information society” had yet to enter our vocabulary, he recognized the great significance of Otlet and his visionary ideas. Following his 1975 book on Otlet, The Universe of Information, Boyd went on to become the leader of an academy of historians interested in exploring not only Otlet’s thoughts and schemes but also those of his “information” contemporaries who together formed what can be called the modernist information (or documentary) movement of the period from around 1890 to World War II. Through his research he maintained this leadership role even while undertaking demanding managerial tasks as dean of schools of library & information science in the United States and Australia. [End Page 261]

Lately, Boyd has supported the proposition that it is possible to conceptualize a field labelled “information history,” encompassing the history of the modernist information movement but going well beyond it temporally and thematically. Indeed, we are fortunate to be able to include in this Festschrift an (until now) unpublished essay by Boyd on this very subject. For Boyd, the history of information—of its systems of management, organization, and dissemination—is not confined to the Otletian era. Boyd’s own research topics have spanned the centuries, from the seventeenth-century Republic of Letters to the late twentieth-century convergence (not simply amalgamation, he would argue) of library science and information science.

It is in the nature of history and the humanities that its scholars often find themselves leading a “solo” life (although collaborations have undoubtedly been on the increase in recent decades). Following in this tradition, Boyd has cultivated his own strip of land, and with tremendous results. But he has also offered his services to those who labor in nearby plots. Being the primary node in the Otlet scholarly network has automatically plugged him into networks that overlap it, and he has pursued links within these networks energetically. Boyd has won the reputation of being a great facilitator, running or helping to run academic events, passionately and carefully corresponding with colleagues, and editing the work of others. Regarding the latter—as the hundreds of scholars who have experienced the flourish of his meticulous corrective pen would no doubt testify—Boyd is rightly regarded as a supremely gifted editor, most recently of this very journal but also of other journals, including Library Quarterly, as well as of a number of books, many of these arising from conferences he has organized or co-organized. In short, Boyd brings people together, and brings people on.

When we approached authors to see if they were interested in contributing to this Festschrift, we were overwhelmed by the wave of goodwill that rebounded. Such was the scale of the response that it has been necessary to divide the Festschrift into two parts...

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