Introductory Concepts in Information Science (2nd ed.)

Citation

Žumer, M. (2011), "Introductory Concepts in Information Science (2nd ed.)", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 45 No. 2, pp. 242-243. https://doi.org/10.1108/00330331111129778

It is interesting to see, in recent years, a revival of discussions focusing on information science: its scope, boundaries, positioning. Often defensive and somewhat apologetic, this is far from the self‐evident and confident approach of traditional and well‐established sciences. We can therefore welcome another introductory book on this topic, from which the newcomers can start the “constructive and creative discourse upon the topics of information and information science” and thus contribute to the (re)affirmation of the discipline.

The book is composed of 12 independent chapters, written by different authors. The first chapter, “Information and information science” by the Editor, presents the general (“grandest”) view of both topics, gives an overview of the historical foundations, and ends with a history of professional and scholarly organizations in USA.

In Chapter 2 we can read two important and well‐known historical papers: by Harold Borko and by Anthony Debons and Klaus Otten. The former is often referred to as the first definition of information science, the latter redefines information science as a “metascience”, a superstructure providing a common framework.

In Chapter 3, “Communication”, the Editor addresses the difference between two connected and similar concepts, information and communication, and calls for further exploration and evaluation of the relationship.

Chapter 4, “Information retrieval”, was also written by the Editor. It is a discussion of information retrieval as a concept and activity. Different aspects of organization, access and design are discussed and the chapter ends with a brief (possibly too brief) mention of relevance.

Jung Won Yoon authored the new Chapter 5, “Indexing”. Subject access to documents is the central topic of information retrieval; both manual and automatic indexing are introduced. Modern indexing approaches such as image, music and multimedia indexing are briefly described and the chapter ends with an introduction to social tagging and folksonomies. I need to point out a detail that should be corrected: on page 68 “aboutness” is well defined and described, but “ofness” is mistakenly connected with descriptive cataloguing.

Chapters 6 and 7 were contributed to this edition by T. Welsh and deal with repositories. First, the history of information repositories is illustrated from prehistoric oral traditions to libraries through centuries. Chapter 7 follows with the description of different kinds of modern repositories and ends with the contribution by Peter Suber about institutional repositories.

Chapter 8, “Digital libraries” by Eun Kyung Chung briefly covers the area, starting from the definition(s), open‐source software tools and following with digitisation, preservation issues and interoperability. Metadata schemes are mentioned.

The rest of the book is written by the Editor. Chapter 9, “Bibliometrics”, introduces and describes the field, presents the classic laws and continues with citation analysis. Surprisingly, a short section on use and users of information is added here. Chapter 10 deals with a very important topic: information economics. The concept of uncertainty is introduced in the context of lack of information. Chapter 11 focuses on the value of information and Chapter 12 deals with the impact of information technology and digital accessibility of organizations.

This book provides interesting reading and will be particularly appreciated by educators teaching introductory courses in information science. They will find here many interesting thoughts and an abundance of less known additional resources. Being an introduction, the text cannot be comprehensive and the author had to make decisions on what to include or not, these decisions could be discussed at length and may not even be accepted by many. Such views are necessarily subjective. Personally, I miss a longer discussion of relevance, because the concept is deeply embedded in information science, the beginners should be introduced to it. I was also surprised to find “users and use” only as a subsection in the chapter on bibliometrics. It does not (primarily) belong there and, being an important topic, deserves an independent chapter. Finally, modelling is mentioned only in the context of economics. While introduced to social science much later than to other fields, it is now used in many areas of information science – from user behaviour to conceptual models of the bibliographic universe.

Many readers will only read separate chapters and they may not notice that when reading the book as a whole, Chapters 6 and 7 do not follow the style and content of the others. The content is interesting, but should probably be merged into other chapters (e.g. the definition of information and the history of repositories/libraries), or expanded (e.g. the new trends). On the other hand I really appreciate that chapters on economics and value of information were included.

In summary: this is a very interesting book both for educators and students and will definitely be appreciated as additional reading for introductory courses in information science.