Today is once again Ada Lovelace Day. Please celebrate the women you know who work, or have worked, in technology.

As the Loon has had previous occasion to mention, she has sometimes been called upon to teach the bread-and-butter organization-of-information course at the library school where she works. Like all core courses, part of the point of this course is socialization into the information professions. In the Loon’s mind, this includes both casual in-jokes and (more seriously) a nodding acquaintance with the names of titans in the field.

Suzanne Briet, the incisive and eloquent Frenchwoman who leaned quite hard (in contrast to nearly all her contemporaries save perhaps Paul Otlet) on the notion that documents are made rather than born—a document, to Briet, is anything treated as one, anything humanity gives special treatment for its power to inform—is unquestionably one of those titans. Her “antelope document” has befuddled and amused many a library-school student, the Loon included. The Loon now teaches about it with relish.

Why, then—the Loon and certain other instructors of her acquaintance aside—has Briet, Madame Documentation, been so systematically disappeared from the history of information theory as to make one helplessly postulate conspiracy? Go and check when she attained the dignity of a Wikipedia page. The Loon will wait. Also, whenever you read about Paul Otlet—and you quite often will, if you read in this field—you should see Briet’s unsung shadow behind him.

The Loon has been reading and evaluating this semi-crowdsourced textbook for use in her org-of-info course. Allow the Loon to phrase this as charitably as possible: the book has many rough edges, such that much of it is simply unsuited to the Loon’s typical student base. The constant drumbeat of disdain for librarians and common discourses in librarianship is another considerable strike against it; librarianship has quite enough ego problems, thank you all the same.

But imagine the Loon’s apoplectic rage when she came to a section that had occasion to mention nineteenth-century notions of what a document was, and found Briet’s antelope openly, incorrectly attributed to Paul Otlet Michael Buckland! The book actually cites Michael Buckland’s Briet tribute pages as though this were his error, which it is emphatically not.

The error occurs rather early in the book. Her eyes sharpened, the Loon watched for mentions of people from then on. Also disappeared, at least from the first mention of a well-known phenomenon for which they are responsible: Barbara Tillett (FRBR), Henriette Avram (MARC), and just for variety, Melville Dewey—and these are just off the top of the Loon’s head. She hasn’t done a full census, but she is quite tempted to do so, because she is fairly sure she will find a preponderance of men and “information science” types, and not a few more disappeared women and librarians.

That book will not sully the Loon’s classroom until the Briet error is fixed; this the Loon vows. The authors and editor should be bitterly ashamed, not only of the obvious error, but of falling into the patterns of thought that make such an error possible, even likely.

Ada Lovelace Day came about because so many women have been disappeared, as this book disappears Briet. As keepers of the human record, the information professions should at the very least work hard to reclaim and celebrate them!

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