Introduction to Information Science

David Bawden, Lyn Robinson, David Bawden, Lyn Robinson

• Publisher: Facet Publishing
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781783305261
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Bibliotheks- & Informationswissenschaft

The second edition of this definitive text gives a comprehensive overview of all aspects of the subject, bringing it up-to-date with analysis of the changes in the information environment, now largely digital, and their implication for the discipline and professions. Its approach is rooted in the philosophical, theoretical, and conceptual foundations of the subject and in particular in Floridi's ideas of the fourth revolution, hyperhistory, and onlife. The theory-practice relationship is strongly emphasised throughout, and the extensive literature coverage makes this a valuable sourcebook. This second edition is extensively revised, with largely new text, illustrations, and resources, and offers a global perspective.

The main topics covered include:

• foundations: philosophies, theories, concepts, ethics, and historical perspectives
• organising, retrieving, and analysing information and data
• information behaviour, domain analysis, and digital literacies
• digital technologies, information systems, and information management
• information research methods and informetrics
• changing modes of information communication, and information society
• the nature and future of the information disciplines and professions.

This book will be a standard text for students of library and information disciplines, including information science, librarianship, information and knowledge management, archives and records management, and digital humanities. It will also serve as an introduction for those beginning research in these areas, and as a resource for thoughtful and reflective practitioners.

1 The Information Science Discipline

Information science is, or should be, involved with the whole concept of knowledge in whatever form its manifestations may take.

Jesse Shera (1973, 286)

Let us not restrict ourselves to grubbing around in the garden patch of a limited, little information science, restricted to the relationship between information and machine. Instead, let us expand, reach out, embrace and explore the wider world of information, to develop a vision of information science as a central synthesising discipline in understanding not simply information, but the world we live in. Because the world we live in is surely a world of information.

Tom Wilson (2010)

Introduction

The subject of this book is information science. We begin by asking what information science is, as an academic discipline and profession. Obviously, and simplistically, it is the science of information. But this is not sufficient, since the multiple meanings and implications of information, which will be discussed in Chapter 5, have given rise to different conceptions of information science (Buckland, 2012; Limberg, 2017). One such conception is of information science as being concerned with computing, algorithms and data science, a second with information and communication technologies and a third with information as an entity with physical and biological science. A fourth conception sees information science as concerned with information recorded in documents, with meaning and knowledge, and hence as growing from the older disciplines of librarianship and documentation. We will focus on the last of these in this book, although we will mention aspects of the others at appropriate points.

We will therefore be following the kind of definition which goes back at least as far as Borko (1968) and is expressed by Saracevic (2010, 2570) as:

Information science is the science and practice dealing with the effective collection, storage, retrieval and use of information. It is concerned with recordable information and knowledge, and the technologies and related services that facilitate their management and use.

This gives us a general idea of the nature of the subject, but there is still scope for much difference in viewpoint as to exactly what the subject comprises and how it should be understood; see Bates (1999), Hjørland (2000), Robinson (2009), Ibeque-SanJuan et al. (2014) and Bawden and Robinson (2016).

We now examine the nature of the subject in more detail.

The nature of information science

Information science is an academic discipline which supports areas of professional practice. We will think first about the discipline, although we should note that there have always been some doubts as to what extent it is a real discipline, still less a ‘science’ (Robinson, 2009; Buckland, 2012; Furner, 2015).

One way to accommodate the wide range of views about, and diverse approaches to, the subject within a coherent framework is to regard information science as a field of study, using this phrase in the specific sense of Paul Hirst, the philosopher of education (Hirst, 1974). A field of study is an alternative to ‘disciplines’ based on a unique form of knowledge, such as mathematics or the physical sciences, and to ‘practical disciplines’ based on one of the forms of knowledge but oriented to solving practical problems, such as engineering or medicine. For Hirst, a field of study is focused on a topic or subject of interest, using any of the forms of knowledge – sociological, mathematical, philosophical, etc. – which may be helpful in studying it. Bawden (2007, 320) argues that it may be appropriate to regard information science as such a field of study, focused on the topic of information, understood as information recorded in documents produced and used by individuals and societies:

a multidisciplinary field of study, involving several forms of knowledge, given coherence by a focus on the central concept of meaningful recorded information.

This is reminiscent of the insistence of Machlup and Mansfield (1983) that the field should be described as the information sciences, emphasising the plural, to show the breadth of approach needed. Ibeque-SanJuan et al. (2014) reinforce this, referring to the ‘pluri-, multi-, trans-, meta- and interdisciplinary’ nature of the discipline; see also Bates (2015), Limberg (2017) and Hjørland (2018). Evidence for the interdisciplinary is also given by the extent to which authors from the information sciences publish in journals outside the subject, and vice versa; see, for example, Chang (2018a; 2018b).

We can give some more precision to this general idea by arguing that the focus on recorded information can be expressed specifically as a focus on the communication chain of recorded information: from its creation, through dissemination, indexing and retrieval, use and archiving or disposal (Duff, 1997; Robinson, 2009). This is implied in earlier formulations, but noting that it explicitly helps to clarify what are the concerns of information science. Details of the chain, and the ways in which it is being changed by new technologies, are discussed in Chapter 13. Information is recorded in documents, and information science has a close affinity with the documentation movement and document theory, as will be covered in Chapter 6.

We can also explain more precisely what information science does, in terms of both research and scholarly study and of practice, through the components of domain analysis, as propounded by Birger Hjørland (2002). This will be discussed fully in Chapter 7. For now, we will just note that there are a number of aspects which represent both the activities of the information practitioner and the ways in which research and study are carried out. Examples are user studies, historical studies, studies of terminology, research on indexing and retrieval and so on.

Considering information science as an academic discipline, comprising the study of the components of the communication chain of recorded information through the perspective of domain analysis, provides the understanding of information science which we shall use throughout this book.

Information science is a field of study, with recorded information and documentation as its concern, focusing on the components of the information communication chain, studied through the perspective of domain analysis.

Information science is a vocational discipline, underlying a number of professional activities, including: data, information, and knowledge management; librarianship; metadata and taxonomy management; records management and archiving; and documentation in museums, galleries and heritage institutions.

What kind of discipline?

There is little agreement as to how information science should be categorised as an academic discipline. It has been called, among other things, a meta-science, an inter-science, a postmodern science, an interface science, a superior science, a rhetorical science, a nomad science, an interdisciplinary subject which should be renamed knowledge science, a liberal art, a form of cultural engagement, a subject which may assume the role once played by philosophy in mediating science and humanism, and the applied philosophy of information. There have also been national variations in the way the subject is regarded in, for example, the United Kingdom (Robinson and Bawden, 2013), France (Ibeque-SanJuan, 2012; Hudon, 2018), the Nordic countries (Limberg, 2017) and the United States (Buckland, 1996).

University departments teaching and researching the subject may be found in faculties of arts and humanities, social sciences, computing and technology, education, science, and business and management. This scatter may be a natural consequence of the status of information science as a field of study, but it has been held to be a weakness of the discipline. The related question of the extent to which information science has its own body of concepts and theories, as opposed to simply borrowing them from other disciplines, will be considered in Chapters 3 and 4; see Dillon (2007) for some concerns on this aspect.

It is clear that many other professions are interested in components of the communication chain: journalists are concerned with creation, publishers with dissemination, computer scientists with information retrieval and so on. Even accepting that information science is a meta-discipline, surely it must have some ‘academic turf’ of its own? We suggest that the uniqueness of information science lies in its concern for all components of the communication chain and the ways in which they interact with, and impact upon, each other. Other disciplines are interested in specific aspects, but only the information sciences see their concern as being the totality. We might also name some aspects of information organisation and information behaviour, seemingly invariant to technology or to context, which are the particular concern of information science. But our main claim to a unique area is the totality of the communication chain; for more discussion, see Robinson and Bawden (2012), Robinson (2009) and Robinson and Karamuftuoglu (2010).

Constituents and core

There is no canonical list of topics which fall within the remit of information science, despite much debate, supported by bibliometric mapping, about such a list, and consequently about what should be in the curriculum for information science education: see, for example, Robinson and Karamuftuoglu (2010) and Milojevic et al. (2011). Commonly mentioned topics are: nature and conceptions of information, documents and collections; information theory and philosophy; information history; information organisation and metadata; information behaviour and practices; information and digital literacies; information seeking and retrieval; information architecture, human–computer interaction and user experience; data, information, and knowledge management; information policies and strategies; document and collection management; records management and archiving; information law and ethics; information research methodology; information society; information systems; publishing and scholarly communication; and information services of all kinds.

A useful model for organising this broad collection of topics is that of the communication chain of recorded information (Robinson, 2009). There is no canonical set of constituents of the chain, but it typically comprises stages of creation, dissemination, collection, storage, organisation, description, retrieval, use, and preservation. The elements of the chain form the core of most academic courses in the subject (Robinson and Bawden, 2010).

The subject is delineated by national educational authorities. In the United Kingdom there is a detailed Subject Benchmark statement for the rather broader topic of Librarianship, Information, Knowledge, Records and Archive Management (Quality Assurance Agency, 2019). Professional bodies also list components of the subject, typically for supporting the accreditation of courses and individuals, and generally taking a strongly vocational perspective. In the United Kingdom, the Professional Knowledge and Skills Base (PKSB) of CILIP (the Library and Information Association) fulfils this purpose, with a main PKSB for library and information management generally and specific variants for health information and for knowledge management (CILIP, 2021). The Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) also has a set of educational guidelines, specifying broad topics to be included in curricula.

Overlaps with other information disciplines

Information science as understood here is the central discipline focused on recorded information and documents, but it has overlaps with other information-related disciplines. Some of these, particularly with collection disciplines such as librarianship and archival science, are of long standing. Others are more recent, such as those with the newer disciplines of data science and digital humanities (Casa...