Time and memory in the information science knowledge process

Abstract

Time and memory are a constitutive part of information and, even more, are its condition of possibility. To understand and cognitively substantiate such a statement in the information sciences, a reflection is carried out divided into two phases: in the first, it seeks to answer what are time and memory. In the case of time, based on the proposal of the sociologist Norbert Elias who defines time as: “a communicable social symbol” and, with respect to memory, a series of considerations are made base on its expression in textualities. In the second phase, the epistemological foundation of time and memory is carried out, to establish them as concepts that have the function of being support and operative of the other concepts in the information sciences with which they build their objects of knowledge. All this process is exemplified in the case of reading, within the framework of librarianship; for this they are implemented in the relational concepts of intermediary, mediator-translation, created by Bruno Latour. Showing how reading carries information as meaning, which can be conducted as a mediator-translator or intermediary, at the base of which time and memory are found.