Introduction

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).