Cezar Karpinski

This is an exploratory qualitative and bibliographic research without a chronological framework that addresses the historical and epistemological relations of Library Science and Information Science from the Brazilian scientific production in Information Science. This study addresses how and which aspects in the historical and epistemological relation occur between Information Science and Librarianship in Brazilian scientific production. The general objective is to identify to what extent the content of publications brings the two fields together. Specifically, the objectives were as follows: list works within the Brazilian scientific production in Information Science that deal with the history and epistemology of Librarianship and Information Science; verify which works correlate historical and epistemological aspects of librarianship with Information Science; elicit some reflections on the historical and epistemological relations from the analysis of this research. The data collection was carried out in the Journal Portal of Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior database of the Scientific Electronic Library Online, Library and Information Science Abstracts, Web of Science and Scopus. Based on the analysis of the corpus of 21 articles, the most predominant themes were the history of Librarianship, the development of Information Science, the documentation of Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, and interdisciplinarity. It is important to deepen the historical and epistemological relations of Librarianship and Information Science in national scientific production since research shows a lack of theoretical depth in the studies retrieved from the corpus.

The visualization of Information Science as a postmodern science must aim at overcoming borderline dominant models, surpassing simplistic methodological impasses, and covering complex phenomena. In this regard, the article is inserted in the epistemological discussions, selecting social epistemology and decolonial thought as its themes. Its purpose is to identify the possible convergences between decolonial thought and social epistemology and, based on that, to propose, in an essay-like way, a decolonial social epistemology. In the methodological aspect, this is an exploratory, qualitative, and bibliographic research. The technical procedure for the analysis of the bibliography took place using a non-probabilistic approach, by judgment. The main result of this article is the construction of a historical and epistemological panorama that makes possible the approximation of thematics that, although produced in different contexts and interests, converge in a common objective: that of constituting a social, democratic epistemic field and that does not disregard the different subjects of knowledge. Thus, the reflections that combine the proposal of social epistemology with the decolonial thought or movement may bring theoretical panoramas and perspectives closer to the professional practice and research aimed at the 21st century informational context.