Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- Forewords: Information science and 21st century information practices: creatively engaging with information
- The emerging discipline of information
- The scope of information science
- A fascinating field and a pragmatic enterprise
- A slippery and ubiquitous concept
- The future of information science
- List of acronyms
- 1 What is information science? Disciplines and professions
- 2 History of information: the story of documents
- 3 Philosophies and paradigms of information science
- 4 Basic concepts of information science
- 5 Domain analysis
- 6 Information organization
- 7 Information technologies: creation, dissemination and retrieval
- 8 Informetrics
- 9 Information behaviour
- 10 Communicating information: changing contexts
- 11 Information society
- 12 Information management and policy
- 13 Digital literacy
- 14 Information science research: what and how?
- 15 The future of the information sciences
- Additional resources
- Index
15 - The future of the information sciences
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- Forewords: Information science and 21st century information practices: creatively engaging with information
- The emerging discipline of information
- The scope of information science
- A fascinating field and a pragmatic enterprise
- A slippery and ubiquitous concept
- The future of information science
- List of acronyms
- 1 What is information science? Disciplines and professions
- 2 History of information: the story of documents
- 3 Philosophies and paradigms of information science
- 4 Basic concepts of information science
- 5 Domain analysis
- 6 Information organization
- 7 Information technologies: creation, dissemination and retrieval
- 8 Informetrics
- 9 Information behaviour
- 10 Communicating information: changing contexts
- 11 Information society
- 12 Information management and policy
- 13 Digital literacy
- 14 Information science research: what and how?
- 15 The future of the information sciences
- Additional resources
- Index
Summary
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
Robert Storm Petersen, Danish poet and philosopher – also attributed to the physicist Niels BohrIf we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run and often in the short one, the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.
Sir Arthur C. ClarkeLibrarianship has become preoccupied, perhaps to a point of obsession, with its own future. There seems to be a growing sense that change is now moving at such a rate that steering may have ceased to be an option.
Ross Atkinson (2001, 3)Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.
Dwight D. EisenhowerIntroduction
In this final chapter, we give an overview of some ideas about the discipline and profession of information science. As the opening quotation from Ross Atkinson indicates, some of the information professions are very concerned about this, perhaps seeing signs of their own demise, overwhelmed by changing technical and social environments.
This is by no means a new concern. During the 1970s, Dennis Lewis, an information manager in the British chemical industry who later headed the professional association ASLIB, became well known for propounding the idea that ‘There won't be an information profession by the year 2000’ (Lewis, 1980). This became known as the ‘Doomsday Scenario’, and Lewis rather revelled in his nickname of Doomsday Den. This focused on the increasing computerization of printed indexes, particularly for the scientific and technical literature, and the increasing trend for academic and professional users who needed the information to find it for themselves, a phenomenon then termed ‘end-user searching’. This, argued Lewis, would lead to the end of the ‘intermediary’ role, by which an infor - mation scientist carried out searches on behalf of those who needed the information, using their searching skills to deal with the ‘difficult’ online inform - ation resources of the time. With this role gone, there would be no place left for the information specialist, and the profession would disappear, leaving only a few librarians and archivists, carrying out custodial functions for heritage material. And Lewis, like all other experts of the time, had not envisaged anything like the web or Google (Bawden, 2007).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Introduction to Information Science , pp. 327 - 338Publisher: FacetPrint publication year: 2012