Introduction

The subject of this book is information science. We begin by asking what information science is, as an academic discipline and profession. Obviously, and simplistically, it is the science of information. But this is not sufficient, since the multiple meanings and implications of information, which will be discussed in Chapter 5, have given rise to different conceptions of information science (Buckland, 2012; Limberg, 2017). One such conception is of information science as being concerned with computing, algorithms and data science, a second with information and communication technologies and a third with information as an entity with physical and biological science. A fourth conception sees information science as concerned with information recorded in documents, with meaning and knowledge, and hence as growing from the older disciplines of librarianship and documentation. We will focus on the last of these in this book, although we will mention aspects of the others at appropriate points.

We will therefore be following the kind of definition which goes back at least as far as Borko (1968) and is expressed by Saracevic (2010, 2570) as:

This gives us a general idea of the nature of the subject, but there is still scope for much difference in viewpoint as to exactly what the subject comprises and how it should be understood; see Bates (1999), Hjørland (2000), Robinson (2009), Ibeque-SanJuan et al. (2014) and Bawden and Robinson (2016).

We now examine the nature of the subject in more detail.