Introduction

Work is central to most of what we care about as individuals and as com - munities. Work provides a sense of identity expressed through work roles; most of us would answer the question ‘What are you?’ with a line such as a ‘I am a journalist/doctor/lawyer/regional manager/coastal zone advisor’. It provides a sense of purpose – ‘I make sure the public is informed; I save lives; I help create a fair justice system; I make sure the environment is protected; I monitor our coastlines’ – that may take years of training to achieve and must be constantly nurtured with new information. Work also provides economic gain that funds education, health services, the arts and most areas of civic life.

Work is central to how we organize many areas of our life. University and college training organizes us within disciplines and provides disciplinespecific skills. Professional societies, guilds, trades, crafts and unions help us differentiate what is important and different about our work from that of other people. Even specialist buildings such as hospitals or schools encourage us to see some types of work as belonging in different spaces to other types of work. To do our work we need information. The work we do creates a specific filter for recognising important information for that work even during our leisure time and it creates information-related habits and awareness. A part of a journalist's identity, for example, is scanning for news, which may happen almost automatically and unintentionally during leisure. A doctor reads medical information with a different preunderstanding from that of a layperson. A lawyer picks up on trial-related news, while the regional manager learns to read natural signs that are invisible for someone without that filter. A part of the identity of a coastal zone advisor is an understanding of the natural environment. These infor - mation processes are often unconscious and not recognised. For work itself, however, these processes need to be made implicit and managed. Information science works to reveal, understand and implement more efficient information processes.

Information science studies work in many different ways; sometimes the focus is on higher-level socio-cultural aspects of workplace environments, sometimes the focus is on specific activities of curating or managing information and the systems that we use to perform these activities.