the formal positioning oflibraries apart from information science is a rhetorical displacement activ-ity, taking our attention from the important issues and into an argumentover labels.

step was to determine if a conceptual core of knowledgeand skills existed for the field.

educators were out of touch

The implication is that females are contributing to the development of LISeducation by teaching both library science-oriented courses and inforina-tion science-oriented courses

To explore the magnitude of gender division within curricular offerings,we sampled and evaluated the male to female teacher ratio of a collection ofcourses categorized as either male or female in their orientation. Thecourses chosen reflect only conventional assumptions and findings re-ported by Hildenbrand on course-gender relations, cross-referenced withGorman's article and a review of curriculum components we conducted in2004.27

Notwithstanding any possible glass ceiling effects,we anticipate that greater equalization of gender at all ranks should occurover the next decade

educe scholars to consultants and threaten the status of LISschools in the eyes of the academy

It is the latterthat is often labeled 'information science' and assumed (mistakenly) to reston an analysis of technological conditions.

Thiscasting of the field into two divided camps is nothing new, but it is no longerclear that this division reflects the reality of many LIS programs."

Yet, these developments have oc-curred, and people's information-seeking behaviors have altered in a man-ner which suggests strong support for seamless and self-sufficient access toinformation beyond the walls of traditional physical libraries.

The argument is based on a belief that the field hasshifted from a focus on libraries as spaces, where ordered collections areoverseen by skilled professionals who serve as guides to users, to a focus oncomputational aspects of retrieval, where digital access interfaces peopledirectly, and remotely, with unfiltered information.

For present purposes wewill treat librarianship as being a commonly understood label for the workof credentialed practitioners involved in management and provision of ser-vices within a library or similar setting.

An antidisciplinary project isn't a sum of a bunch of disciplines but something entirely new - the word defies easy definition.

Antidisciplinary

higher missio

I think this philosophy of working together on big projects will help bring researchers together across disciplines - creating a single science instead of fragmented disciplines.

deploys in the world

Everything we do should have impact.

The kind of scholars we are looking for at the Media Lab are people who don't fit in any existing discipline either because they are between--or simply beyond--disciplines

There is a great deal of research showing that rewards and pressure can motivate people to "produce," but creative learning and thinking requires the "space" that play creates. Pressure and rewards can often diminish that space, and thus, squash creative thinking.

The list of journals was compiled from the Nisonger and Davis study and Journal CitationReports in an attempt to avoid bias; yet some respondents objected to the composition of thelist.

Publish-ing in journals highly rated by peers can engender respect from colleagues. Journal rankings arealso used in academic institutions as an indicator of journal quality when judging faculty pub-lications during tenure and promotion decisions.

In this study, three journals were in the topfive in the mean and mode rankings, as well as inthe topfive responses to the open-ended question about the most prestigious journals for ten-ure and promotion.

examined the consensus among respondents bysumming the highest number of responses in two adjacent ratings and dividing by the totalnumber of respondents.

mode calculation of the rating

survey

people able to laugh atthemselves

Librarianship, in contrast, follows a more service-ori-ented and empowerment-oriented value system.

one must be at least comfortable with both sides of this dualtradition

hree Big Questions can be identified within the aboveframework: (1) the physical question: What are the featuresand laws of the recorded-information universe? (2) Thesocial question: How do people relate to, seek, and useinformation? (3) The design question: How can access torecorded information be made most rapid and effective?

We ask what kinds of information people pre-fer to communicate through this or that new channel ofinformation technology. We always follow the information.

Information science has a distinct universe that it studiesalso—the world of recorded information produced by hu-man agency. We can imagine all the human activities instudying the above natural, social, and artistic universesthemselves producing information entities— books, articles,databases, data files, etc.—thus creating a fourth universe,that of recorded information.

We are interested in information as a social and psycho-logical phenomenon. The information we study generallyoriginates from human agency in some way, whether it isthe data beamed down from a satellite or the text of a bookon Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. Our primary, but not solefocus, is onrecordedinformation and people’s relationshipto it.

Llewellyn C. Puppybreath

In my 1980 study of citations in informationscience, Chomsky was the single most cited individual.

form and structure

Other fields with which informationscience might have been thought originally to have much incommon, such as computer science, cognitive science, com-putational linguistics, or artificial intelligence, did not, infact, prove to be good matches.

It is what thenewcomer or outsider does not understand

My litmus test for the newcomers who are now interestedin information work is whether I can observe evidence thatthey have gone through the transformation of becoming aninformation expert.

f you want to portray a doctor, you have to be agood actor, not a doctor; if you want to work with infor-mation organization and retrieval, you have to be a goodinformation person, not a subject specialist without infor-mation training.

features that matter to the organization and retrievalof it

as good a job

Creating databases and catalogs in-volves creating representations of forms of information. Theskill a reference librarian or information specialist developsalso involves representation—figuring out how to concep-tualize and represent a user’s query, then in turn, translatingthe query (representing it) into a form an information sys-tem uses, which in turn arises from the representations ofdocuments in the information system.

A talented actor, without a day’s experi-ence in medical school, can do a much better job.

The answer here is that although the physicians know themost about medicine,portrayinga physician is differentfrombeinga physician. Portraying a physician requires adifferent body of talents than being a physician does. Oc-casionally, some people have both types of talent, but usu-ally not. Actors, with little or no medical knowledge, butwith experience portraying a variety of characters

The Ph.D. arthistorian who gets a job working with art history informa-tion out of a love of the subject matter eventually finds him-or herself working with the core questions of informationscience, not of art history.

The average person,whether Ph.D. scholar or high school graduate, never no-tices the structure that organizes their information, becausethey are so caught up in absorbing and relating to thecontent. And, in fairness to them, they are not interested inthe structure.Weare interested in the structure

rhetorical character in the broadest sense, that is, by theirselection, design, and objectives

professional activities involving the manipulation andtransmission of knowledge

retrieval

Paisley has made a similar distinction by contrastingbehavioral science “level fields” and “variable fields.” Hedefined the former as disciplines that study human behaviorat different levels of organization—psychology at the indi-vidual level, sociology at the group level, and anthropologyat the culture level (Paisley, 1972, p. i). Paisley states thatvariable fields, on the other hand, look at one variable acrossall the conventional levels. For example, political sciencelooks at political behavior across the several levels.

Art historiansfocus on the study of art; information scientists, on the otherhand, take art information as but one slice of the full rangeof information content with which we deal. Likewise, arteducation is but one part of education, etc.

Borko, 1968, p. 3

behavior of information

Information sci-ence is the study of the gathering, organizing, storing,retrieving, and dissemination of information.

At this historicaljuncture, information scientists need to become more con-scious of the thought world we are operating out of, so thatwe can communicate it more rapidly and effectively to largenumbers of new people, and so that we can continue toinfluence the future of information in the 21st century.

Currently, the wheel is being reinvented every day onthe information superhighway

while the collectors of live specimens— the branch most remote from document collecting— are not included at this time.

socially mediated

I have not the space to make the case fully here, but I argue that a document, above all, contains "recorded information," that is, "communicatory or memorial information preserved in a durable medium"

that distinction has been fading a bit, because increasing portions of museum collections are being digitized, placed on websites, and made viewable and searchable online

we research the universe of living too— but always in relation to the universe of documentation

All the other humanities and sciences study the universe of living; the biologist and the bird-watcher alike both study the bird; we study the documentation associated with the bird.

That product of the doctor visit now exists in the universe of documentation.

we engage in living and working our daily lives, and these vast numbers of human activities give off or throw off a remarkably extensive body of documentation of one sort or another

This contrast is between the idiographic approach of the humanities— valuing the unique and individual character of phenomena, and the nomothetic approach of the sciences— seeking general laws and principles.

As a rule, all information disciplines are in the process of becoming more generally applicable, as the discipline gains sophistication and breadth of understanding.

The fundamental engine of development is need. Human beings want to retain informational resources, and, after a very short time, these resources collect at such a rate that some principles of selection, organization, etc., need to be brought to bear, in order for the resources to continue to be available for effective use.

add an "s"

an array of fields addressing distinct issues that nonetheless could all be seen from a common framework

We have been treated as the astrologers and phrenologists of modern science— assumed to be desperately trying to cobble together the look of scholarship in what are surely trivial and nearly content-free disciplines.

Ironically, however, that legitimacy has often been gained without much clarity on just what the information disciplines are about. Power struggles are going on in universities and information schools regarding what the fields really are, and whose backgrounds are most needed to create coherent information disciplines. And those of us who were information before information was "cool" are often the last to be consulted.

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.

understanding of algorithms

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.

At the bottom of IR research is a quest to alignsystems with other types of relevance.

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.

Second World War

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.

Lexical definitions are nec-essary for providing a broad description and boundaries ofthe subjects covered by a field, but they cannot provide fora deeper understanding.

The purposes are to contribute to an understanding of thepast and present of information science, and to assess theissues in its future.

viewer’s perception

kind of use that is made of them

support of a fact

little direct attention

signifying objects

significant ( or potentially significant )

techniques for reproducing

mechanical

observe

physical relocation

It is not uncommon to infer that some sort of evidence, of which we are not aware, ought to or might exist and, if found, would be of particular impor- tance as evidence, as when detectives search, more or less systematically, for clues

It is not asserted that sorting areas of information science with respect to their relationship to informa- tion-as-thing would produce clearly distinct popula- tions. Nor is any hierarchy of scholarly respectability intended.

These differences provide one basis for the comparative analysis of information storage and retrieval systems.

Representations have important characteristics:

ultimately information systems, including “expert systems” and information re- trieval systems, can deal directly with information only in this sense

“Information-as-thing”, then, is meaningful in two senses: (1) At quite specific situations and points in time an object or event may actually be informative, i.e., constitute evidence that is used in a way that affects someone’s beliefs; and (2) Since the use of evidence is predictable, albeit imperfectly, the term “information” is commonly and reasonably used to denote some popu- lation of objects to which some significant probability of being usefully informative in the future has been at- tributed.

As a practical matter some consensus is needed to agree on what to collect and store

rant the preser- vation of this particular evidence.

ut, as noted above, we could in principle say that of any object or document:

Therefore we retain our simpler view of “in- formation-as-thing” as being tantamount to physical evidence: Whatever thing one might learn from (Orna & Pettit, 1980, p. 3)

fossils, footprints, and screams of terror.

Indeed it would be a logical development of current trends in the use of computers to expect a blurring of the distinction between the retrieval of the results of old analyses and the presentation of the results of a fresh analysis

How different the study of history would be if they could!

Hence “document” originally denoted a means of teach- ing or informing, whether a lesson, an experience, or a text.

On this view objects are not ordinarily documents but become so if they are processed for informational purposes.

ny concrete or symbolic indication, preserved or recorded, for reconstructing or for proving a phe- nomenon, whether physical or mental.

uthentic

Information takes at least two persons: one who tells (by speaking, writ- ing, imprinting, signally) and one who listens, reads, watches.”

ob- jects that are not documents in the normal sense of being texts can nevertheless be information resources,

It is wise not to assume any firm distinction between data, docu- ment, and text.

English law,

authentic historic pieces of evidence

Oxford English Dictionary,

trace.

Further, the term “evidence” implies passiveness. Evidence, like information-as-thing, does not do any- thing actively. Human beings do things with it or to it.

reverse the process and ask people to identify the things by or on account of which they came to be in- formed.

However, the representation is no more knowledge than the film is the event. Any such representation is necessarily in tangible form (sign, sig- nal, data, text, film, etc.) and so representations of knowledge (and of events) are necessarily “information- as-thing.”

lan- guages evolve

But if the principal uses can be identified, sorted, and characterized, then some progress might be made.

There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things.

but who would now place bounds on where such a thing may lead?

The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities.

It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized.

Whenever logical processes of thought are employed—that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove—there is an opportunity for the machine.

One of them will take instructions and data from a whole roomful of girls armed with simple key board punches, and will deliver sheets of computed results every few minutes.

But creative thought and essentially repetitive thought are very different things.

A girl strokes its keys languidly

girl

will the author of the future cease writing by hand or typewriter and talk directly to the record?

Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled at by a few.

Today, with microfilm, reductions by a linear factor of 20 can be employed and still produce full clarity when the material is re-enlarged for examination.

Often it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and to look at the picture immediately.

A record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.

publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record

But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends.

strange destructive gadgets

he field is too young, a

Yet, it is important to recognize that, particularlyin information science, there is no sharp distinction be-tween research and technology. I

Artificial intelligence; automata; problem solving;self-organizing systems.

he tremendous growth in science and technologyand the accelerated pace at which new knowledgebecomes available and old knowledge becomes ob-2. The fast rate of obsolescence of technical knowl-edge, so that the old graduate must go back toschool and update his skills;3. The large number of working scientists and thelarge number of scientific and technical journalswhich exist today;4. The increased specialization which makes communi-cation and the exchange of infonnation betweendisciplines very difficult;5. The short time lag between research and applicationthat makes the need for information more pressingand more immediate

oday's society.

rariansliip and docu-mentation are applied aspects of information scie

Eobert S. Taylor p

On paper this may appear to be an elaboration of our pres- ent system, but in reality it represents simplification in that it is a concentration of control.

So serious has the situation grown that recent gradu- ates from library schools are in some cases asking for employ- ment without pay in order to gain experience and a possible foothold in some library system.

There must be centralization of con- trol.

n these ways could the library help immeasurably to bring art to the hinterland and make beauty increasingly a vital part of our lives

But in the increasingly important village the library must broaden its scope and become a true cultural center

There is a definite need for a central bureau, publicly subsidized and controlled by the library profession, and serving the country as a whole, which will make possible the continuous lending of art exhibits at a cost within the reach of even the smallest librarie

For the scholar of the future, then, the bibliographical treasures that he needs, even though they may be in the most remote libraries, will be no farther from him than the television apparatus at his elbow

Decentralization and specialization will not only be possible, but perhaps quite

As this is undoubtedly true for present conditions, one cannot but wonder what the implications for book-selection policy will be as the lines of demarcation between "rural" and "urban" disappear

Ameri- can Library Association appoint a committe

It must logically follow, then, that a sound comprehension of present-day social and economic developments must be the true point of departure for all who would seek to project into the future the trend of current library policie

etorically (

where the three coordinates cross: level ofquestion, state of readiness, and available answer

The accuracy of trans-mission of the messages is not the most important pointhere. More important is the accurate description andcommunication of the inquirer's "doubts" (the question

s observation,however, brings up the problem of browsing, which is toolarge and complex to discuss here

Acceptance of information as relevant de-fines readiness before that information was available andcauses a change in the inquirer's future state of readiness.

alogy. T

xtent ofmatching determines the success of the system at the jor-mal level.

ructure-index of the ques-tion—its degree of formal complexity.

om psychological to logical; fr

In fruitful dialogue he can expect constant feedback,something a formal information system cannot yet

The Process of Asking Question

may be only a vaguesort of dissatisfaction and may, in fact, be disregarded asthe investigation develops. I

tend tothink that when we have "answered" a question, via thesystem, the process is completed. From the inquirer's sideit has only begun.

We care about doing what we want to do creatively. We want to be interested in it. We want it to challenge us. We want it to be difficult. We want to reinvent the stupid thing every time.

session logs

committed deeds

We're sticking with the classic, good old Nagios.