What is the aim of LIS? What are we trying to achieve?

4 What is the aim of LIS? What are we trying to achieve?

Hjørland (2012a) described the aim of LIS as basically being about helping people find the books, articles, pictures, music, and information resources they need or would like to read or experience. Information specialists help students, researchers, the general public, and everybody else to find the documents they need in order to solve tasks, including writing theses and research papers. The most advanced use is in scientific documentation where subject databases are developed and used to satisfy the needs of advanced user communities. The needed documents used to be kept in physical libraries, archives, and museums but are increasingly available in digital form, sometimes free, sometimes with toll access. We may term all this “the information ecology” and information scientists are the people studying this universe in order to help people utilize its resources optimally for their specific purposes.

Although much information is available in digital form, the study of information is not identical with the study of computers, information, or communication technology. LIS is rather about knowledge production in society and how this knowledge is materialized in documents (including digital documents) and how it is organized, labelled, and managed in order to serve different groups and individuals.²⁷ LIS is about what Google and Wikipedia can do for you, but it is also about what Google and Wikipedia cannot do for you, what else needs to be consulted. It is about how to improve access to information by progress both in computer-based retrieval and in the forms of information services provided by information professionals. Such information services include the teaching of ‘information literacy’ to students and helping professionals, for example medical doctors, who practice evidence-based research. Another way to describe the difference between computer science and LIS is to say that for the first of these fields, the interaction between humans and computers is a core topic. In the case of LIS, it is rather the interaction between people and the whole information ecology. This is an important difference between the two disciplines, although computer science is an important adjacent discipline to LIS.
The unique focus of LIS in relation to other disciplines is therefore: the study of the information ecology in order to facilitate its utilization for many specific purposes. It follows that LIS is a pragmatic enterprise: It studies knowledge and information for a purpose, in order to support progress in human life and the improvement of things in the world (though, of course, “progress” and “improvement” may mean different things to different people).
Not all approaches to LIS serve this proposed aim equally well. The present author has argued that the domain-analytic approach to LIS is the best alternative for this purpose (cf. Hjørland, 2002a).

5 What are the core concepts of information science?

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  Information
  
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  Knowledge
  
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  Documents
  
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  Collections
  
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  Relevance
  
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  Aboutness
  
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  Information use and users
  

The following concepts, however, were not included:

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  Domain
  
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  Sign, language, special language
  
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  Memory institutions (libraries, archives, museums, database hosts, etc.)
  
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  Communication, media, genre, literature
  
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  Concepts, conceptual systems, classifications, theories, paradigms
  

The list is not exhaustive and the omission of such concepts is strange considering, for example, that Bawden & Robinson (2012) devote a chapter to domain analysis, but do not include “domain” among the basic terms. The point of view I wish to put forward is that the basic concepts of LIS are dependent on the paradigm from which you consider the field. The basic concepts are not given. It is not even given that “information” is among the core concepts: Buckland (1991), Hjørland (2000a), Lund (2004), Ørom (2007), and others have argued that the concept of document is the most fruitful one to consider as the core concept in LIS. The concept of document is understood as “any concrete or symbolic indication, preserved or recorded, for reconstructing or for proving a phenomenon, whether physical or mental” (Briet 1951/2006, 7; here quoted from Buckland 1991, 47). Recent additions to this view are Frohmann (2004), Furner (2004), and White (2010). Furner (2004) argues that all the problems we need to consider in information studies can be dealt with without having recourse to a concept of information. He suggests that to understand information as relevance is currently the most productive approach for theoretical information studies. All of the aforementioned authors assume that the concept of document is a more precise description of the objects that information science is about, but they see documents as part of a larger universe of informative objects. White (2010, 4499) writes: ”When IS [information science] is defined as the study of literature-based answering, much else falls into place.”