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Information Science and Its Core Concepts: Levels of Disagreement

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Theories of Information, Communication and Knowledge

Part of the book series: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science ((AUST,volume 34))

Abstract

One often encounters disagreements in information science (IS) (or library and information science, LIS), even disagreements about what might seem rather trivial questions. Such disagreements range from the designation of the field to questions such as whether IS is an academic discipline or not, what its aim is, what its core concepts are, what kinds of problems we try to solve, and what kinds of theories, metatheories, and related disciplines are the most important ones for us. Some people tend to regard IS as a branch of computer science or the cognitive sciences, while others tend to consider it as part of cultural studies or of science studies, and the different views are often reflected in the various names given to the field. These kinds of disagreement and their mutual dependencies are the focus in this chapter, with an emphasis on the different labels given for the field. “Poor terminological hygiene” may account for some of the disagreements, but basically the problem is seen as a lack of sufficient strong centripetal tendencies keeping the field together.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Two other dimensions also deserve consideration but will not be treated here for lack of space; they are embodied in the questions “What are the subdisciplines of LIS?” and “What are the most important disciplines related to LIS?”.

  2. 2.

    Meho and Spurgin (2005), however, confirmed earlier research findings indicating that LIS literature is highly scattered and not limited to the standard LIS databases alone.

  3. 3.

    The American Society of Information Science & Technology decided in 2012 alter its name to Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T). By the time of the writing of this chapter, the change was not yet implemented.

  4. 4.

    The disciplinarity of a research field is usually determined by its leading research journals. This is, however, becoming much more complex because, as demonstrated by Chua and Yang (2008), authors publishing in the leading Journal of American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) have grown in diversity from those being affiliated predominantly with library/information-related departments to include those from information systems management, information technology, businesss, and the humanities.

  5. 5.

    A centripetal force is a force by which bodies are drawn or impelled, or in any way tend towards a central point.

  6. 6.

    A centrifugal force is a force that tends to draw something away from the center. The concepts of centripetal and centrifugal forces were developed in physics but have also been applied to social phenomena by the literary scholar and linguist Mikhail M. Bakhtin; see Bakhtin (1981: 271–272). Cronin (2002: 5) also applied these concepts to information science.

  7. 7.

    Becher and Trowler’s (2001) discussion of “convergence” and “divergence” in research fields is related to the concepts of centripetal and centrifugal tendencies.

  8. 8.

    Examples of institutional names using the phrase are “L’Ecole de Bibliothéconomie et des Sciences de l’Information” of the “Université de Montréal” and the department of “Archivistica e Biblioteconomia” at the Università di Roma, La Sapienza.

  9. 9.

    “The use of “documentation” has survived, however, for example, in the title of the prominent British Journal of Documentation founded in 1945.

  10. 10.

    Cronin (2012) wrote: “In the 1980s I was head of the Department of Information Science (Department of Librarianship in an earlier incarnation) at Strathclyde University; it has since been merged with the Department of Computer Science. During the 1990s and beyond I was dean of the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University; in June 2013 that school will be merged with the School of Informatics and Computing.”

  11. 11.

    Wiener’s (1948: 16) seminal book on cybernetics stated: “Society can only be understood through a study of the messages and communications facilities which belong to it.” Today this view is often associated with the much-criticized concept of “the conduit metaphor”.

  12. 12.

    http://www.itu.dk/en/

  13. 13.

    Korfhage (1997), a book that reflects an understanding of IS and LIS from a computer science-inflected perspective, was the winner of the ASIS 1998 Best Information Science Book of the Year Award. That book could also be considered a representative for the “systems-driven paradigm” in IS. Saracevic (1999: 1057) describes the “systems centered approach” (and its alternative, the user centered approach): “We now have two distinct communities and approaches to research in the retrieval cluster. They became commonly known as systems-centered and user- (or human-) centered. Both address retrieval, but from very different ends and perspectives”. A criticism of this dichotomy was given by Hjørland (2010).

  14. 14.

    Humanistic IT is a humanist approach to IT and should not be confused with IT for the humanities (humanities informatics).

  15. 15.

    See note 3 concerning the recent name shift of this association.

  16. 16.

    This is, for example, the case with the journal “Information Sciences: Informatics and Computer Science Intelligent Systems Applications,” which writes “Readers are assumed to have a common interest in information science, but with diverse backgrounds in fields such as engineering, mathematics, statistics, physics, computer science, cell biology, molecular biology, management science, cognitive science, neurobiology, behavioural sciences and biochemistry.” The use of the plural form may be motivated by a desire to emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of the field, much as Machlup and Mansfield (1983) did. However, authors electing to use the plural form have a logical obligation to describe the different single information sciences and their mutual relations.

  17. 17.

    Note, however, that the recently discontinued Annual Review of Information Science and Technology had this name from the publication of its first volume in 1966.

  18. 18.

    This is, for example, the case at the School of Informatics, University of Tsukuba, Japan, which is made up of the following three colleges: College of Information Science (here understood purely as computer science), College of Media Arts, Science and Technology and College of Knowledge and Library Sciences. (Information retrieved 2012-08-13 from: http://inf.tsukuba.ac.jp/eng/)

  19. 19.

    Note, however, that in 2006, it underwent a further name change, becoming the “School of Information”.

  20. 20.

    Note that Black et al. (2007) have begun to redress this with their jointly produced history of information management practices in early twentieth century Britain.

  21. 21.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_systems; accessed September 30, 2012.

  22. 22.

    For the Informing Science Institute and its publications, see http://www.informingscience.us/icarus/

  23. 23.

    Robinson (2012) interrogates the idea of “memory institutions” and proposes that such a generic concept is not especially productive in facilitating the thorough, critical analysis necessary to highlight both the synergies and discords in the history and memory-making techniques of museums, libraries, and archives.

  24. 24.

    The URL is: http://www.abm.uu.se/about_us/

  25. 25.

    Whether all of these labels are designating a single field or a family of related fields is the question, just as it is a question how “the field” of LIS should be delimited. In order to study this issue we have, however, had to consider this whole complex of different concepts and their historical development.

  26. 26.

    The first FIS conference was held in Madrid in 1994; the second in 1996 in Vienna, and an electronic conference was held in 2002; the third FIS conference was held in 2005 in Paris and the Fourth International Conference on the Foundations of Information Science was in Beijing in August 2010. The list of authors presenting at FIS 2010 may be found at the following URL: http://www.sciforum.net/conf/fis2010/authors; Interestingly, there appears to have been no overlap between this roster of authors and those who participated in CoLIS 7 in London in 2010.

  27. 27.

    This definition is adapted from Jack Andersen, cf. the quote from Andersen (2011) in Sect. 9.3.8, above.

  28. 28.

    This definition origins from Bateson (1972: 453) but is used in domain analysis in not quite the individualistic sense that he used it.

  29. 29.

    The terms “theory”, “metatheory”, “epistemology”, “epistemological families/approaches” and related concepts shall not be discussed in depth in this chapter (there is really a need for one or more papers on that issue in itself). In many of my works, I have argued that researchers in LIS (as in other fields) may work from implicit philosophical assumptions that can be uncovered by relating them to philosophical traditions (see, e.g., Hjørland 2011a, b).

  30. 30.

    “The combination of high task uncertainty and low degrees of mutual dependence characterizes what I have termed ‘fragmented adhocracies’ because research is rather personal, idiosyncratic, and only weakly coordinated across research sites […] [Researchers in such fields] tend to make relatively diffuse contributions to broad and fluid goals which are highly contingent upon local exigencies and environmental pressures” (Whitley 2000: 159).

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  1. Royal School of Library and Information Science, University of Copenhagen, 6 Birketinget, DK-2300, Copenhagen S, Denmark

    Birger Hjørland

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  1. Birger Hjørland
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Correspondence to Birger Hjørland .

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  1. ELICO – University of Lyon 3, Lyon, France

    Fidelia Ibekwe-SanJuan

  2. Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA

    Thomas M Dousa

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Hjørland, B. (2014). Information Science and Its Core Concepts: Levels of Disagreement. In: Ibekwe-SanJuan, F., Dousa, T. (eds) Theories of Information, Communication and Knowledge. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 34. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6973-1_9

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