Words Theoretical development of information science: a brief history Birger Hjørland

1^ I thus disagree with the view that recall and precision cannot reflect user preferences as stated by Baeza-Yates and Ribeiro-Neto, 2011, p. 144. Su (1992, p. 514) for example, found: “Value of search results as a whole has two strong correlates: user’s satisfaction with completeness of search results and user’s satisfaction with precision of the search”.

2^ “Each document is evaluated by three assessors in TReC. Inter-indexer consistency is at an average of 30% between all three assessors, and at just under 50% between any two assessors (Voorhees, 2002). This represents a fundamental problem of any evaluation following the Cranfield paradigm: relevance assessments are highly subjective.” (Stock and Stock, 2013, p. 491).

3^ Bawden (1990, p. 99-100) wrote: “The UOE [user oriented evaluation] approach to relevance assessment will be diametrically opposed to the laboratory experiment approach, well illustrated by Martyn and Lancaster (1981), who suggested that ’relevance judgments by a representative user group … entail an undesirable degree of subjectivity’. It is this ‘subjectivity’ reflecting the true user need, which UOE must capture and control.”

4^ Patrick Wilson (1983, p. 181) argued that an information specialist in reality has to function as an ‘authority on authorities’.

5^ Kantor (2010, pp. 2721-2722 ) wrote: “In the field of Library and Information Science, it has seemed that one might want to know something about the relation between the “amount of information” and something else, which Brookes [1980] has called the “increase in knowledge.” Brookes proposed that the phenomenon of importance to information science is that the transmission of information to a suitable recipient results in an increase in the amount of knowledge “held by” that recipient. The idea, while often referenced, does not seem to have led to any serious attempt to provide a measurement of either the “amount of information” or the “in- crease in quantity of knowledge”” (emphasis in original).

6^ Also the fact that the textbook Human Information Processing (Lindsay and Norman, 1977) was chosen by Ingwersen as one of the texts for the first master’s degree of education at the Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark (RSLIS) in 1990 is also an indication of his connection to cognitivism.

7^ It should be noted, however, that some tendencies in information technology seems to be based on theoretical assumptions which have resembles with the cognitive view, for example: The new tendency in search engines personalization search results (cf., Pariser, 2011) and the application of ‘big data’ in learning environments, allowing computers to diagnose learning styles and difficulties and suggest solutions based on comparing the individual user’s pattern with patterns derived from huge set of users.

8^ Unfortunately, Bates did not chose to present these approaches in Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences (Bates and Maack, eds., 2010). In this work, there is an entry about information theory (Kantor, 2010) but that does not relate Shannon’s theory to the physical approach. Also, it did not consider information theory to be an approach in LIS today.

9^ See Bazerman (2012) and Hjørland (2002) as examples of applying activity theory as a basic approach toinformation science.

10^ Kuhn’s (1962) theory of science suggested, however, that science is not cumulative (but have revolutions), although it represents an internalist view of science.

11^ However, a given paradigm may not influence all subdisciplines; each subfield may – so to speak – live its own life, cf. Spear, 2007.

12^ The quote is from a job announcement dated 8 April 2011.

13^ Spears paper is a good example, of how a critical involvement in a domain may produce better, more objective depictions of a field.

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