Information scientist
The occupation of finding information on someone else's behalf: a specialist, usually with subject credentials, who supplied scientific and technical staff in industry with the material they needed information-scientist-wikipedia. Defined in 1958 by the Institute of Information Scientists as complementary to, and distinct from, the librarian. The title is now largely disused, displaced by information officer, information professional and information specialist.
What killed the title
Two forces, per the article: end-user searching — researchers began doing their own retrieval — and the convergence of the two roles it had been defined against each other. The institutional ending is exact: cilip, formed in 2002 when the Institute merged into the Library Association.
The pattern, for this wiki
A specialist intermediary exists because a system is hard to query. Improve the query interface far enough and the intermediary's job title disappears while the work is redistributed to everyone. That is the arc the information scientist ran between 1958 and 2002, and it is the arc every retrieval tool in this corpus is somewhere along.
It sharpens one of Bush's proposals in particular. as-we-may-think called for "a new profession of trail blazers" who would build associative trails through the common record for others to follow — an intermediary role, invented in the same decade as the information scientist. The profession that did get founded lasted 44 years before self-service absorbed it. What llm-wiki, gbrain and agentic-archiving propose is the same job again, with the LLM as the intermediary rather than a person: trails built by something other than the reader, placement decided by something other than the owner.
The open question that follows: does the intermediary come back when the corpus is large enough, or does it only ever come back as software? The corpus has no evidence either way — this is a stub-sized observation, not a finding.
Related
information-science · cilip · information-retrieval · documentation-movement · as-we-may-think · agentic-archiving · llm-wiki