Information science and its core concepts: Levels of disagreement Birger Hjørland
Archives, Library and Museum Studies (ALM)
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- 3.11 What should the name of the field be
3.10 Archives, Library and Museum Studies (ALM)Archives, libraries, and museums (among other institutions) have been termed memory institutions (cf. Hjørland 2000a; Robinson 201223). While library science, archival science, and museology exist as separate disciplines in some countries (e.g. in Sweden), there are also tendencies to integrate them. For example, a Department of ALM was established at Uppsala University in Sweden around year 2000.24 The motivation to integrate these disciplines may be related to the tendency towards media convergence, for all kinds of memory institutions are utilizing the Internet and other digital media. However, because neither “information” nor “documentation” is included in the name, important perspectives and areas such as bibliographical databases seem to fall outside its ambit. Subfields or specialties such as bibliometrics, scholarly communication, bibliography, Internet research, information literacy and and many other streams of research (fields that are actually taught at the department of ALM in Uppsala) are not covered by the term ALM. It could be argued that the inclusion of the terms "documentation" and "information" in the name of a discipline implicitly covers not just libraries, but also other kinds of memory institutions; thus, there is no need to list these institutions explicitly in the name. But scholars interested in memory institutions may have perfectly good strategic reasons to prefer the label "ALM". 3.11 What should the name of the field be?We have now seen a complex pattern of names applied to the field in which we are interested.25 I hope the reader has gotten the impression that the issues surrounding the designation of our field are many and complex, and that we should attempt to reach a higher level of clarity regarding its name, what is included under the name, and what should be considered other (but related) fields. How do we determine which seemingly different fields should be considered parts of LIS? Bibliometric studies may reveal whether a given label for a discipline is used consistently, but it is also necessary to examine whether different labels cover the same theoretical assumptions (cf. Hjørland 2012b). Scholarly and scientific concepts, including labels for disciplines should be theoretically motivated. They should not be motivated by “smart” attempts to attract students or funding agencies, reflect different organizational attachments, or just satisfy a wish to be the creator of something new, if it is not based on new theoretical points of view. Disciplines and their knowledge should be based on serious arguments. When one uses ambiguous terms such as “information” (meaning both “bits” and meaningful messages, for example) or “information management” (meaning both indexing and library management, for example), something is gained and something is lost. What is gained is the freedom to do as you like (i.e., not being “disciplined,” as expected in an academic discipline) as well as to give students the impression of broadness and freedom. What is lost is the serious collective effort to build a field from which we and our students may earn respect in the broader scientific community – and, in the end, earn a living. The extreme use of ambiguous terms causes confusion both inside the field and in relation to external partners, which is the opposite of what we as scholars are supposed to produce. In general, different organizational structures tend to separate related fields. It has been argued, for example, that dictionaries are a kind of knowledge organization system (KOS) and thus share important properties with other kinds of KOS (Hodge, 2000). If that is correct, it is most fruitful that the study of dictionaries (lexicography) is understood as part of information science (and knowledge organization). However, because dictionaries are mostly studied by lexicographers and linguists, while information retrieval thesauri are mostly studied in relation to the design of bibliographical databases, these different forms of KOS tend to be differently institutionalized and discussed within different discipline discourses with the result that the study thereof is not theoretically well-integrated. In 2002, two different international conferences about the foundations of information science took place. One was the Fourth Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science (CoLIS 4) in Seattle, USA, the other was the International Conference on the Foundations of Information Science (FIS).26 Were these conferences discussing two different fields, each of which claimed to be an ”information science”, or were they two different scholarly meetings in the same field? Perhaps they are both forums for multidisciplinary approaches using different disciplinary outlets? Whether they represent one, two, or more kinds of information sciences can only be uncovered by theoretical analysis of the core assumptions expressed in the respective conferences and their proceedings. Inasmuch as FIS is founded on cybernetics and CoLIS is founded on something more related to social and epistemological studies of knowledge production and dissemination, different information sciences may well be at play. I have, in the present paper as well as in several other papers, argued that concepts such as knowledge production, documents, bibliographies, and domains/epistemic communities are core concepts in information science and that a social and philosophical approach to the study of knowledge production, dissemination, and use lies at the heart of all problems in our field (e.g. Hjørland, 2002b, 2007b; Hjørland & Albrechtsen, 1995). My approach may or may not turn out to be fruitful. Other researchers may develop a more fruitful theoretical framework. One or more theories may succeed, or, in the worst-case scenario, no frame will survive and the field may die or be absorbed into other fields such as computer science. In the process of developing a theoretical framework for a discipline it is important to have an open debate. Given the situation today, the best compromise I see between the need for a theoretically satisfying name and the terminology actually used is library, information and documentation science (LID); the motivation to include ”documentation” is laid out at the end of Section 3.4, as well as in Section 5, in which the argument for the importance of the concept of ”document” is given. However, given the present use of terminology, the terms information science or LIS may for practical reasons be used as synonyms (depending on the context and the intended audience). Directory: portal -> files files -> Is it possible to construct a canon of tv programmes? Immanent reading versus textual-historicism files -> Lawrence Peter Ampofo files -> Impact case study (ref3b) files -> Ethics and Factual Television: a short history files -> P. O. 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