The aim of this second edition remains that of the first edition: to provide a clear and succinct synthesis of the information science discipline, in as holistic a way as possible; to give the reader a grasp of the basics and a platform to go into all aspects in more depth. It is intended as an overview, showing the scope and the landscape of the subject. We have tried to examine, in reasonably consistent if brief way, all the aspects of the subject and their interrelations, while not allowing details to obscure the whole picture.

As with the first edition, the book is rooted in the scholarly and professional literature, with a substantial number of references. We hope that it may act as a useful sourcebook for the subject and a reminder that no textbook can be an alternative for engagement with the subject's literature. The conceptual and historical dimensions have been retained, since we feel that it is vital that students and practitioners alike have an appreciation of these, to complement more practice-focused materials.

The book has been substantially rewritten to reflect the great changes in the information environment. Compared to the first edition, there is a greater emphasis on theory, philosophy and ethics, on data and algorithms and on documents and documentation. The increasingly important links between information science and the newer disciplines of data science and digital humanities also receive more attention, as does the avoidance of misinfor - mation and disinformation. Chapter 3 of the first edition (Philosophies and paradigms of information) has been divided into two chapters, dealing with philosophies of information and with paradigms and theories in the information sciences, respectively. Similarly, the first edition's fourth chapter, which dealt with the basic concepts of the information sciences, has been converted into two, focusing on concepts of data, information and knowledge and on the concepts of documents and documentation. The chapter on information technology has also been divided, into one chapter on data handling and one on information systems. A new chapter on information law and ethics has been spun out from the first edition's chapter on information management and policy.

Introduction

In this chapter we will give some historical context for the rest of the book by looking at the development of recorded information, and the documents which carry it, through time. We will do this only very briefly and informally; there are many detailed treatments of the history of information provision and dissemination, and we will not try to replicate these in any way. We will give some historical perspective on specific topics in several of the chapters which follow.

It is sometimes suggested that, since information science is a relatively young discipline, there is no need to think about the history of anything which came before, say, 1950. We strongly disagree. Some appreciation of the history of information and documents, as well as being of interest in its own right, can help give a perspective on current problems and solutions. Although contexts and technologies may change, many information issues remain constant over time, and a historical perspective can be of practical, as well as academic, value.

Historical studies come in many forms and flavours (Black, 2006). For the information sciences, historical accounts have fallen into a number of categories, including:

• • history of libraries, archives and information services

• • history of information policies and infrastructures

• • history of publishing, books and reading

• • history of information technologies (not just digital ones)

• • history of the information disciplines and professions

• • origins of the information society

• • studies of the cultural and social contexts of information communication and use.

The last of these has developed into a new sub-discipline of information history, concerned with all aspects of information in societies of the past; how it was understood, used, organised, managed, collected, disseminated, etc.

Introduction

Since the later years of the 20th century it has become commonplace for commentators to declare that we are living in an ‘information society’. In this chapter we will first consider the nature of, and criteria for, an information society. We will then look at some of the frameworks and infrastructures which support it, and some of the problems and issues which it brings with it.

Understanding information society

Information society is not a recent phenomenon. As Floridi (2014a; 2016) reminds us, it would be reasonable to say that information society emerged in the Bronze Age with the introduction of written communication and records. The contributors to Rayward (2008) identify origins of our present information society in the early 20th century. However, we tend to think of the development of information society as synonymous with the widespread use of digital information systems (Gleick, 2011, chapters 14 and 15; Floridi, 2014a; Lindgren, 2017). While information use has been a feature of all historic societies, in our current situation of hyperhistory (Floridi, 2014a), our use of information and communication technologies defines our society as one rooted in the infosphere. Put simply, as Gleick points out in our opening quotation, information is what our world runs on. There are different kinds of information societies, but a mature information society is one ‘whose members assume the digital as a foregone phenomenon’ (Floridi, 2019, 183).

Considered in more detail, however, there are a number of different criteria by which we may recognise and define information society. We will consider these in outline; for detailed analysis, see Feather (2017), Webster (2014), Floridi (2016) and Beaulieu and Leonelli (2021).

Introduction

In this chapter we will consider some of the changes which have occurred, and are still occurring, in the way in which recorded information is communicated, largely as a result of digital technologies but also because of associated economic and sociocultural factors. This amounts to a consideration of the changing infrastructure of the infosphere. It has a wide scope, including publishing, data curation, news media, collection and memory institutions including libraries and archives, and social media. These will mainly be covered in outline, with references to other sources for more detail. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first deals with information chains and lifecycles, simple models which help to understand changes in the communication of information; the second deals with the communication of knowledge, through publishing in the broadest sense; and the third with information places and spaces, which act as nodes for the communication and sharing of information.

Information chains and lifecycles

The idea of a communication chain, or information chain, or information lifecycle of recorded information is fundamental for the information sciences, and it is also commonly invoked in explanations of information and digital literacies. Such a chain describes the processes of documentation from creation, through dissemination, organisation, storage and use to disposal. They have been applied to information and data, and to journal articles, books, archival records and other forms of document. Communicating information typically falls within ‘dissemination’ or similar steps, but is obviously dependent upon other stages.

Introduction

In this chapter we examine the law and ethics of information. This is a broad topic and we can give only an overview with some relevant examples. In par - ticular, the sections on information law are not in any way intended to provide legal advice. Examples are largely chosen from UK law as of 2021 and may not be relevant at other times, or in other jurisdictions. Ethical issues for specific aspects of information science are dealt with in the appropriate chapters.

The chapter is organised into four sections. After a discussion of the context, and how law, ethics, governance, regulation, standards, etc. interact, the following two sections deal with the generalities of information law and of information ethics. The fourth section examines the legal and ethical aspects of two topics, privacy and artificial intelligence, to illustrate general principles with specific examples.

Introduction

Information management and policy is a multifaceted concept and can be understood in different ways. Sometimes it is understood as a wide and allembracing concept including records management, knowledge manage - ment, library management and so on, and sometimes with a much narrower focus. It ranges in scope from personal through institutional to national and international. It may or may not be taken to include general management processes of budgeting, managing people, etc. There is a close relation with IT management, since the great majority of information management (IM) uses digital systems; and a similarly close relation with the legal and regulatory framework for proper information use, the area of information governance. For overviews, see Detlor (2017), Schopflin and Walsh (2019), Evans and Price (2017) and Bystrom, Heinstrom and Ruthven (2019), and for general management issues, see Evans and Greenwell (2020). For insights into the historical development of IM, see Blair (2010), Black and Brunt (1999), Black, Muddiman and Plant (2007), Bawden & Robinson (2010) and Schopflin and Walsh (2019).

In this chapter we consider first some fundamental issues and models within IM and then some important contexts, including the management of collections, libraries, repositories, records, archives, documents, and knowledge. We then review information policies and strategies and ways of auditing and evaluation information services, ending with a brief consideration of some general management topics.

Introduction

Topics at the core of the information sciences, such as the nature of knowledge and what we can know, how meaning and truth are ascertained, and how things can be distinguished, named, categorised, and classified, have been the concern of philosophy for many centuries. Yet information science has no agreed philosophy of its own; rather, a wide variety of philosophies and philosophers have been pressed into service to analyse its concerns. In this chapter we will look at some ways in which philosophy and information science overlap and interact, and how philosophical ideas may directly affect the theory and practice of the information disciplines. This is an extensive, and in some aspects technical, topic, and only a selective and informal overview will be given, with references to the literature for those wishing to take it further.

Philosophy and its relevance to information science

There are usually held to be three main branches of philosophy: ontology and metaphysics – what is it to ‘be’, and what kinds of things can exist; epistemology – what is it to ‘know’, what can we know, and how can we be sure of our knowledge; and ethics – how can actions be ‘right’, and how should we act. All of these have relevance to the information sciences; see Furner (2017a) for more detailed discussion. Metaphysics (the study of what can exist) and ontology (the study of fundamental categories and kinds of things) address the existence and nature of entities such as information, documents, relevance, aboutness and many more. Epistemology questions what is meant by knowledge, with very practical consequences for knowledge management. Ethics questions what is the right use of information, and touches on issues such as censorship and privacy. This is treated in detail in Chapter 15, and will not be repeated here.

Introduction

In Chapter 9 we gave an overview of digital technologies and some of their applications. In this chapter we examine their use in information systems, focusing on the kinds of systems of particular interest to information science. After an initial look at the concept of information itself, we cover four general kinds of system: for retrieval of data and information; for managing documents in libraries, repositories and other collections; for facilitating the processes of digital scholarship; and for supporting creativity and innovation.

Information systems

An information system is a formal socio-technical system to collect, process and share information of any kind. It is a means to link people, information and technology to carry out particular tasks in a defined manner. We might think of pre-digital systems, such as a collection of records with access via a card index as an information system, and such a system would fit our general description. However, information systems are generally under - stood to be digital systems, comprising hardware and software, interfaces for data entry and information access, roles for the people involved and clearly specified processes governing their operation. They may be general purpose, or specific in nature. General-purpose systems are described by terms such as business information systems, management information systems, decision-support systems, enterprise systems, group-support or cooperative-working systems, and transaction-processing systems. Domainspecific examples are health information systems, and geographic information systems. For overviews of the current information systems, see Whiteley (2013) and Valacich and Schneider (2018), for reflections on the nature and significance of such systems, see Checkland and Holwell (1998) and Swanson (2020) and for a perspective on the broader concept of system, see Siskin (2016).

The ways in which information systems are created and modified are generally termed systems analysis and design (Dennis, Wixom and Roth, 2019).

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.

Introduction

This chapter is about measurement; specifically, measurement of the quantitative aspects of the creation, communication and use of information.

As Lord Kelvin reminds us (above), measurement is vital; but only if the right things are measured and the measurements are meaningful and up to date. In this chapter we will first examine the nature of informetrics and its components, before looking at how the subject has developed since its origins. We will consider the very basic question of how much information there is before looking, without extensive mathematics and with a focus on qualitative significance, at the main informetric laws – those of Lotka, Bradford and Zipf. Finally, we will look at how informetrics techniques may be applied in information research and practice.

Informetrics is the study of the quantitative aspects of information resources and of the communication of information. The term ‘informetrie’ was introduced by Otto Nacke (1979), a German documentalist and medical information specialist, and popularised as ‘informetrics’ by the British information scientist Bertie Brookes. Informetrics is usually taken to include several more specific subjects: bibliometrics, the study of quantitative aspects of published documentation; webometrics (also termed webliometrics or cybermetrics), the study of quantitative aspects of web resources; scientometrics, the quantitative study of the growth and change of academic disciplines, and altmetrics, assessing significance by measures not reliant on formal publication.

Ball (2021), Abrizah et al. (2014), Gingras (2016), Cronin and Sugimoto (2014), Sugimoto (2016), Bar-Ilan (2008; 2017), Hood and Wilson (2001), Wilson (1999) and Tague-Sutcliffe (1992) all give detailed accounts of the origins, meanings and interrelations of these terms and of others which have been used for this subject, and review the subject in general; see also Bawden and Robinson (2016) for an account of some numbers which are significant for the information sciences.

The major bibliometric laws – actually approximate statistical relations, rather than true laws describing patterns and regularities in quantitative aspects of documentation – are those of Lotka, Bradford and Zipf. They describe general patterns, typically rank frequency distributions, observed in social situations including in the world of bibliography and documentation.

Sometimes, a task (from baking a cake to studying the evolution of stars, planets, galaxies, and other objects in the universe) requires only one specific agent to be performed. In this case the agent in question, say A (Alice or astrophysics, in our example), is supposed to be both necessary and sufficient to deliver the required result. A can be the agent and the only agent for that task, and hence her unique identity as the deliverer is uncontroversial. Because she is both necessary and sufficient, she may find her role ethically demanding in two senses. Not only must she deliver but she can also deliver by herself. When things develop, this twofold responsibility may become less clear. A may no longer be sufficient, perhaps she needs to coordinate with other agents, yet she is still necessary, sometimes even more so than in the past.

The debate on the future of Westphalian nation-states seems to suffer from such confusion sometimes. Given the global and very pressing challenges we face, nation-states are far from obsolete. On the contrary, they are even more necessary than in the past. However, they are no longer sufficient, since nation-states now need to coordinate their efforts with many more agents required to make things happen, from companies to NGOs and supranational organisations (think of climate change efforts).

The digital revolution seems to have brought a similar change in information science too. We need information science to curate our expanding space of information (infosphere) and all the growing semantic capital that we inherit, accumulate, enrich, refine and bestow to future generations. It is a crucial role because semantic capital is the most precious outcome of all our activities, since it is what enables us to understand, make sense, and shape ourselves and our realities. And yet, information science today is no longer sufficient to take care of it, but must interact, coordinate and collaborate with many other disciplines (think of computer science) and agents (think of Google and its scholarly services) to fulfil its task.

Introduction

Technology, from the Greek techné, meaning art, skill or craft, is usually taken to mean the understanding of how to use tools, in the broadest sense of the word. The term information technology was first used in the 1950s to describe the application of mechanised documentation and then-new digital computers, and became widely used in the 1980s to describe the widerspread use of digital technology (Zorkoczy, 1982).

Information technology is usually associated with computers and networks. But, in a wider sense stemming from the original meaning of the word, the technologies of information include all the tools and machines which have been used to assist the creation and dissemination of information throughout history, as discussed in Chapter 2; from ink and paper, through printing to microforms, document reproduction and photocopying, and mechanised documentation technologies such as card indexes, punched cards, edge-notched cards, and optical coincidence cards. Krajewski (2011) examines the idea of card index files as a ‘universal paper machine’, in a sense the forerunner of the computer, between the 16th and 20th centuries.

Our focus here is on digital technologies, echoing the view expressed by Gilster (1997) that all information today is digital, has been digital or may be digital. This chapter covers the basics of digital technologies and the handling of data; the following chapter deals with information systems.

Digital technologies

We will describe these aspects only in outline; see Ince (2011) and Dasgupta (2016) for more detailed but accessible accounts, and Primiero (2020) for a more advanced summary; for accounts of the historical development of the computer, see Ceruzzi (2012) and Haigh and Ceruzzi (2021).

Introduction

In this final chapter we give an overview of some ideas about the future of the discipline and profession of information science. This has been a source of debate almost since the beginnings of the discipline, and of its sibling, library science. Much of the debate has been negative, with a narrative around disciplines and professions permanently in crisis. And, indeed, if one worries about the structure of academic departments and the names of professional associations one might find cause for concern. If one takes a longer view and thinks, with Lord Dunsany, about the power of recorded information and the continuing need for disciplines and professions to deal with it, the concerns come into better focus.

Predicting and prophesying

Karl Popper distinguished between prediction, when sufficient knowledge is available to make reasonable conclusions about future events, and prophecy, when statements are made about the future without the necessary knowledge being available for them to be rational or realistic. We have seen examples of both of these relating to information science, but, because of the great and rapid changes in the information environment, most fall under the heading of prophesy, and much of it bad prophesy. David Deutsch (2011) builds on Popper's view to argue that the continuous development of knowledge of all kinds reduces all speculation about the future to prophesy, and almost inevitably in error.

Arthur C. Clarke, writer of popular science books and science fiction novels and originator of the concept of the communications satellite, identified two general problems in predicting the future.

Introduction

In this chapter we consider paradigms and turns, approaches to the study of the information disciplines and the practice of the information professions, which are generally regarded as more specific and contextual than the philosophies discussed in the previous chapter. We then consider the role of theory in information science. A theory is regarded as more specific and contextualised than a paradigm, although types of theory are closely associated with particular paradigms. However, the terms are not used consistently, and the philosophy–paradigm–theory hierarchy is not strictly observed in writings on information science.

Paradigms and turns

The Oxford English dictionary (December 2020) defines a paradigm, in the sense in which the term is used here, as ‘a conceptual or methodological model underlying the theories and practices of a science or discipline at a particular time; hence a generally accepted world view’. The term, brought into common use by the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (1922–96) in his work on scientific revolutions, describes a collection of beliefs about the subject matter of a subject, and a set of agreements about how the subject should be studied. Acceptance of a paradigm is therefore mainly applicable to academic study and research, but it also influences practice, since it encapsulates a view of what a subject is like on the whole. It is important to realise that the emergence of a new paradigm does not mean the cessation of work based in older paradigms; the process is more one of addition, and perhaps gradual replacement. Information science has certainly seen several paradigms operating at the same time. This is somewhat different to Kuhn's original concept, by which there would usually be a single paradigm for a science, and a new paradigm would replace the old quite rapidly.

Introduction

The ability to use information effectively, in all formats, in a largely digital information environment is a vital life skill for everyone. This ability is variously termed information literacy, digital literacy and media literacy, with numerous other literacies having been mentioned. We will use digital literacies as an overall term, linked to the concept of onlife, for reasons explained later, using the other terms where appropriate. What constitutes each of these literacies, how they relate to each other, and how they can best be taught and promoted, has caused much debate.

The promotion of digital literacies has been seen as an important task for information professionals in all sectors. Indeed, CILIP includes, as one of its seven principles for ethical information professionals, a commitment to uphold the development of information skills and information literacy. Identified as an important issue since the 1990s, it has gained in importance as a claimed solution to the pathologies of the current information environment (Bawden and Robinson, 2009; 2011; 2020): information overload, misinformation, disinformation, information anxiety, etc. While information literacy training has largely been centred in libraries in secondary and tertiary education, as a replacement for traditional bibliographical instruction, there is an increased interest in its promotion in the workplace, and in society generally. The question of whether this can be a generic ability or whether it can be promoted only in the context of a specific subject is still debated, while the issue of multicultural information literacy has gained attention.

In this chapter, after explaining why we prefer the ‘digital literacies’ term, we will look at the variety of literacies of information. We will outline some of the more important concepts and models, consider the contexts in which they may be applied and the relation of generic and subject-specific digital literacies and how it may be affected by linguistic and cultural factors.