Suzanne Briet

Renée-Marie-Hélène-Suzanne Briet (; ; 1 February 1894 - 1989), known as "Madame Documentation," was a librarian, author, historian, poet, and visionary best known for her treatise ''Qu'est-ce que la documentation?'' (English translation: ''What is Documentation?''), a foundational text in the modern study of information science. She is also known for her writings on the history of Ardennes and the poet Arthur Rimbaud.

Her treatise ''Qu'est-ce que la documentation?'' offers a vision of documentation that moves beyond Paul Otlet's emphasis on fixed forms of documents, such as the book, toward "an unlimited horizon of physical forms and aesthetic formats for documents and an unlimited horizon of techniques and technologies (and of 'documentary agencies' employing these) in the service of multitudes of particular cultures." Like many early European Documentalists, Briet embraced modernity and science. However, her work made a difference to modernism and science through the influence of French post-structuralist theorists and her strong orientation toward humanistic scholarship. She subsequently ushered in a second generation of European Documentation and introduced humanistic methods and concerns, especially semiotics and cultural studies, to information science.

Although Briet had been highly regarded throughout much of her career—the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur was conferred on her in 1950—she was largely forgotten in her later life, until her death in 1989, when scholars like Mary Niles Maack found a renewed interest in her ideas. Today scholars often credit Briet as a visionary, having laid the foundation for contemporary frameworks and methodologies in information science roughly 50 years earlier. "Her modernist perspective," writes Michael Buckland, "combined with semiotics, deserves attention now because it is different from, and offers an alternative to, the scientific, positivist view that has so dominated information science and which is increasingly questioned." Provided by Wikipedia