Information science and its core concepts: Levels of disagreement Birger Hjørland

1 Two other dimensions also deserve consideration but will not be treated here for lack of space; they are embodied in the questions “What are the subdisciplines of LIS?” and “What are the most important disciplines related to LIS?”

2 Meho & Spurgin (2005), however, confirmed earlier research findings indicating that LIS literature is highly scattered and not limited to the standard LIS databases alone.

3 The American Society of Information Science & Technology decided in 2012 a nameshift to Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T). By the time of the writing of this chapter, the change was not yet implemented.

4 A centripetal force is a force by which bodies are drawn or impelled, or in any way tend towards a central point.

5 A centrifugal force is a force that tends to draw something away from the center. The concepts of centripetal and centrifugal forces were developed in physics but have also been applied to social phenomena by the literary scholar and linguist Mikhail M. Bakhtin; see Bakhtin 1981, 271–272. Cronin (2002, 5) also applied these concepts to information science.

6 Becher & Trowler’s (2001) discussion of ”convergence” and ”divergence” in research fields is related to the concepts of centripetal and centrifugal tendencies.

7 Examples of institutional names using the phrase are "L'Ecole de Bibliothéconomie et des Sciences de l'Information" of the Université de Montréal” and the department of "Archivistica e Biblioteconomia" at the Università di Roma, La Sapienza.

8 Comment by editor Fidelia Ibekwe 2013-01-31: “I […] wonder if the word ”library” refers only to the physical building. It seems to me that it refers also to the content of the building and evokes the idea of a ”collection” of contents, of organization of the said collection and of techniques for accessing documents within the collection.” Reply from Hjørland: Still, however, library science cannot be said to include, for example, the study of bibliographical databases and bibliometrics.

9 ”The use of ”documentation” has survived, however, for example, in the title of the prominent British Journal of Documentation” founded in 1945.

10 Cronin (2012) wrote: “In the 1980s I was head of the Department of Information Science (Department of Librarianship in an earlier incarnation) at Strathclyde University; it has since been merged with the Department of Computer Science. During the nineties and beyond I was dean of the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University; in June 2013 that school will be merged with the School of Informatics and Computing.”

11 Wiener’s (1948, p. 16) seminal book on cybernetics stated: "Society can only be understood through a study of the messages and communications facilities which belong to it." Today this view is often associated with the much-criticized concept of “the conduit metaphor”.

12 http://www.itu.dk/en/

13 Korfhage (1997), a book that reflects an understanding of IS and LIS from a computer science-inflected perspective, was the winner of the ASIS 1998 Best Information Science Book of the Year Award. That book could also be considered a representative for the “systems-driven paradigm” in IS. Saracevic (1999, p. 1057) describes the “systems centered approach” (and its alternative, the user centered approach): “We now have two distinct communities and approaches to research in the retrieval cluster. They became commonly known as systems-centered and user- (or human-) centered. Both address retrieval, but from very different ends and perspectives”. A criticism of this dichotomy was given by Hjørland (2010).

14 Humanistic IT is a humanist approach to IT and should not be confused with IT for the humanities (humanities informatics).

15 See note 3 concerning the recent nameshift of this association.

16 This is, for example, the case with the journal "Information Sciences: Informatics and Computer Science Intelligent Systems Applications," which writes “Readers are assumed to have a common interest in information science, but with diverse backgrounds in fields such as engineering, mathematics, statistics, physics, computer science, cell biology, molecular biology, management science, cognitive science, neurobiology, behavioural sciences and biochemistry.” The use of the plural form may be motivated by a desire to emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of the field, much as Machlup and Mansfield (1983) did. However, authors electing to use the plural form have a logical obligation to describe the different single information sciences and their mutual relations.

17 Note, however, that the recently discontinued Annual Review of Information Science and Technology had this name from the publication of its first volume in 1966.

18 This is, for example, the case at the School of Informatics, University of Tsukuba, Japan, which is made up of the following three colleges: College of Information Science (here understood purely as computer science), College of Media Arts, Science and Technology and College of Knowledge and Library Sciences. (Information retrieved 2012-08-13 from: http://inf.tsukuba.ac.jp/eng/)

19 Note, however, that in 2006, it underwent a further name change, becoming the “School of Information”.

20 Note that Black, Muddiman, & Plant (2007) have begun to redress this with their jointly produced history of information management practices in early 20^th-century Britain.

21 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_systems; accessed September 30, 2012.

22 For the Informing Science Institute and its publications, see http://www.informingscience.us/icarus/

23 Robinson (2012) interrogates the idea of «memory institutions» and proposes that such a generic concept is not especially productive in facilitating the thorough, critical analysis necessary to highlight both the synergies and discords in the history and memory-making techniques of museums, libraries and archives.

24 The URL is: http://www.abm.uu.se/about_us/

25 Whether all of these labels are designating a single field or a family of related fields is the question, just as it is a question how “the field” of LIS should be delimited. In order to study this issue we have, however, had to consider this whole complex of different concepts and their historical development.

26 The first FIS conference in was held in Madrid in 1994; the second 1996 in Vienna, and an electronic conference was held in 2002; the third FIS conference was held 2005 in Paris and Fourth International Conference on the Foundations of Information Science was in Beijing in August 2010. The list of authors presenting at FIS 2010 may be found at the following URL: http://www.sciforum.net/conf/fis2010/authors; Interestingly, there appears to have been no overlap between this roster of authors and those who participated in CoLIS 7 in London in 2010.

27 This definition is adapted from Jack Andersen, cf. the quote from Andersen (2011) in Section 3.8, above.

28 This definition origins from Bateson (1972, 453) but is used in domain analysis in not quite the individualistic sense that he used it.

29 The terms “theory”, “metatheory”, “epistemology”, “epistemological families/approaches” and related concepts shall not be discussed in depth in this chapter (there is realy a need for one or more papers on that issue in itself). In much of my works I have argued that researchers in LIS (as in other fields) may work from implicit philosophical assumptions that can be uncovered by relating them to philosophical traditions (see, e.g., Hjørland, 2011a+b).

30 ”The combination of high task uncertainty and low degrees of mutual dependence characterizes what I have termed ‘fragmented adhocracies’ because research is rather personal, idiosyncratic, and only weakly coordinated across research sites […] [Researchers in such fields] tend to make relatively diffuse contributions to broad and fluid goals which are highly contingent upon local exigencies and environmental pressures” (Whitley 2000, 159).

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