History
The Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology has been published continuously since 1950, but has undergone multiple changes in title, focus, and frequency during that time. It was first published quarterly as American Documentation, from 1950 to 1969. The new journal was a publication of the American Documentation Institute (ADI), which had formed in 1937 around a group of researchers and practitioners who were interested in the emerging technology of microfilm as a medium for the preservation and dissemination of documents and knowledge. Many of the same people and institutions were involved in a prewar American Library Association journal called The Journal of Documentary Reproduction, which ran from 1938-1943, before being discontinued due to the imperatives of the war.
American Documentation was founded as an explicit continuation of and extension upon The Journal of Documentary Reproduction, but with a broader brief to cover documentation as a whole, then defined as "...the creation, transmission, collection, classification and use of 'documents'; documents may be broadly defined as recorded knowledge in any format."
In the postwar years, rapid technological and social changes ushered in an "information explosion" which created many new problems and opportunities of special interest to documentation specialists, and in time documentation found itself at the center of the emerging field of Information Science. The ADI's membership and scope increased rapidly, and in 1968 the members voted to change the organization's name to "American Society for Information Science", to reflect the changes in their membership and focus. As their official journal, American Documentation followed suit, and beginning with the first issue of 1970 it changed its name to The Journal of the American Society for Information Science, and began publishing bimonthly.
In 1991, the publication frequency increased to 10 issues yearly. By 1996, the journal was publishing monthly, and by 1998 it had reached its current output of 12 issues a year. In 2000, ASIS again voted to change its name, this time to The "American Society for Information Science and Technology", in order to recognize the further changes in membership and interests brought on by the rise of the internet and the mainstreaming of networked computing and information technology. The journal subsequently obtained its current name in January 2001.
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