One wonders if there is really a need for another book introducing information science to the world. Surely we have so many already that the best any new volume can hope to offer is topicality or currency? Perhaps we need new ones because the field ceases to remain still, or the emergence of every new technology seems to require expression once more of the importance of organization, context and human use. Either answer is plausible enough but I think there is a simpler one. We don't have a best introduction yet. No single book I can pull from my shelves or locate on Amazon, our collective digital library in the second decade of the 21st century, provides the appropriate weaving of materials together to do justice to this meta-discipline we call information. Not since Machlup and Mansfield's edited (1983) tome The Study of Information, now sadly out of print and extortionately priced on the used market, have I felt comfortable handing a student one text and saying ‘this’ is the one. Consequently, my piecemeal approach to referencing the core has often translated into confusion in students’ minds over what exactly they should be reading.

While the searches for compelling and unifying definitions of information and information science or studies are engaging, I am not convinced by the underlying implication, oft mooted by critics, that we cannot really be a field until we agree such definitions. What hope would there ever be for disciplinary emergence if we had to agree definitions in advance? Further, I suspect many fields could really split hairs about their own definitions and for me there is more to understanding what makes a discipline real than the wording of its self-description. At the very least we should identify the commonalities among the scholastic efforts of those who call themselves information scientists, for it is in looking at what people do rather than what they say that we often find the truth. I am very pleased that David and Lyn have presented ample evidence of doing just this in their efforts at showcasing the logic and language of information science.