There's little controversy over the fact that information science appeared in Brazil in 1970, breaking traditional bibliographical practices that weren't any longer able to properly answer the requirements of an expanding scientific community. Examining the documents gathered in the personal archive of Lydia de Queiroz Sambaquy, the Brazilian librarian who conceived the Instituto Brasileiro de Bibliografia e Documentação (IBBD) and directed it between 1954 and 1965, the results of this historical research suggest, on the contrary, that the activities developed within IBBD during those eleven years were actually marked by an "informational" approach of the bibliographic work, according to the conceptions of Farradane, one of the founders of the field. Simultaneously influenced by librarianship, documentation and the concept of "scientific information", then a very modern one, the services provided by the librarians of IBBD under the leadership of Lydia Sambaquy opened a new field of professional action, defining the conditions under which the future birth of information science was made possible.
Librarianship; Documentation; Scientific information; Information science
