The success or failure of any interactive system and technologyis contingent on the extent to which user issues, the humanfactors, are addressed right from the beginning to the very end,right from theory, conceptualization, and design process on todevelopment, evaluation, and to provision of services.

The strength of Salton’s model is that it: a)starts from a base of a firm grounding in formal mathematicaland other methods, and in algorithms, and b) relates directly toresearch. The weakness is in that it: a) ignores the broaderaspects of information science, as well as any other disciplinesand approaches dealing with the human aspects that have greatrelevance to both the outcomes of IR research and the researchitself, and b) does not incorporate professional practice wherethese systems are realized and used.

Thestrength of the Shera model is that it posits education withina service framework, connects the education to professionalpractice and to a broader and user-oriented frame of anumber of other information services, and relates it to agreat diversity of information resources

human-computer interac-tion (which is also a strong area in cognitive science)

Interestingly, research on OPACs, now thatthey are incorporating more and more IR features, is bring-ing the two fields in closer relation. Probably, so will theresearch in digital libraries, but at this time (1998), it is tooearly to tell.

Uncertainty (as in informationtheory and decision-making theory) was one choice sug-gested by a number of theorists

The connectionto the information science community is tenuous, and al-most nonexistent. The flow of knowledge, if any, is one-sided, from IR research results into proprietary engines.

design

The acceleration of the growth of the Web is an infor-mation explosion of the like never before seen in history.Not surprisingly then, the Web is a mess. No wonder thateverybody is interested in some form of IR as a solution tofix it.

users, use, situations, context, andinteraction with systems

Text Retrieval Conference (TREC)

Thus, the field doesnotdeal with great many other information systems, such aspayroll, inventory, decision support systems, data process-ing, airline schedules, and a zillion others, nor does it dealwith direct communication among and between persons.Information science is about a specific manifestation or typeof information that defines its scope and its systems.

valued surrogates for persons

The key orientation here is the problemof need for and useof information, as involving knowledge records.To providefor that need, information science deals with specificallyoriented information techniques, procedures, and systems.

big science

The two clusters are not equally populated. The retrievalcluster has significantly more authors, not to mention totalnumber of works. As in many other fields, more effort isexpanded on the applied side than on the basic side. In part,this is due to availability of funds for given topics—notsurprisingly, research goes after moneyed topics.

I dare to venture a prediction: fameawaits the researcher(s) who devise a formal theoreticalwork, bolstered by experimental evidence, that connects thetwo largely separated clusters, i.e., connecting basic phe-nomena with their realization in the retrieval world.

information is usedin a context and in relation to some reasons

In cases of information services, information is mostoften conveyed through the medium of a text, document, orrecord, e.g., what a reader may understands from a text ordocument

Tague-Sutcliff

Stonier, 1997

While we do not know what information is, or whatsome of its derivative notions, such as relevance, may be,over the years we have learned a lot about their variousmanifestations, behaviors, and effects

message-sense

Thereis gold in information. Information science has many com-petitors—it may be even swamped by them.

[K]nowledge provesitself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is infor-mation effective in action, information focused on re-sults

Their effortsshould indeed go into reading and organizingexistingclaims, ratherthan gathering new data

In the U.S.,information science developed and began flourishing on itsown in a large part due to government support by a host ofagencies, as did many other fields.

Bush addressed the problem of information explo-sion. The problem is still with us. His solution was to usethe emerging computing and other information technologyto combat the problem.

Debates over the “proper” definition of informa-tion science, as of any field, are fruitless, and in expectationsnaive. Information science, as a science and as a profession,is defined by the problems it has addressed and the methodsit has used for their solutions over time.