What is documentation?

"Suzanne Briet, a prominent French documentalist around the time of World War II, attributed a cultural origin and function to documentation and to documentary signs. In Qu'est-ce que la documentation? she defined documents in terms of indexical signs, adopting an argument that previous documentalists had suggested. This book is unique both in the breadth of institutional scope that she attributed to such networks of signification and in the manner through which she folded the notion of the documentary sign back upon the definition of professionalism in documentation and librarianship.…