Library and information science research

Citation

Bawden, D. (2005), "Library and information science research", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 61 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/jd.2005.27861bae.001

Library and information science research

Library and information science research

A Long Search for InformationBrian VickeryOccasional paper no. 213Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignUrbana, ILMay 2004ISBN 02761769

Research Questions for the Twenty-first CenturyMary Jo Lynch (Issue Editor)Spring 2003Library Trends, Vol. 51 No. 4, pp. 499-709

Keywords: Library science, Information science, Information researchReview DOI 10.1108/00220410510585241

Brian Vickery’s 33-page monograph in the University of Illinois occasional papers series gives a reflective account of his professional life, and his views on the information professions, and the research and teaching which supports them. It is an interesting and insightful account, touching on many of the events and personalities of the information world since the 1940s, with a strong emphasis on the UK setting, and Vickery does not shrink from some honest criticisms where he feels them to be justified.

Like many others of his generation, Vickery moved into library work almost accidentally from scientific laboratory work, and, like a remarkable number of leading scientific librarians and information scientists, began life as a chemist. Why there should be such a strong link between a starting point in chemistry and a subsequent interest in recorded information is not clear. Michael Lynch suggested to me, when he interviewed me as a newly qualified organic chemist seeking to join the Sheffield School, that it was because familiarity with the grammar of structural representations of organic compounds led to a natural interest in information handling; this sounded so erudite that I readily agreed with him. With the lamentable decline of chemistry as a university subject, in the UK at least, any such link is now hardly significant.

Vickery’s career took him from journal editing, through special librarianship at ICI, to positions as the Deputy Head of the newly formed National Lending Library (which later became the Document Supply centre of the British Library), university librarian, head of Aslib’s Research and Consultancy Department, and Director of the Library School at University College London. Combined with a extensive record of research and publishing, this wide experience means that his reflections are worth attending to.

There are many individual points of interest in what is essentially a very extended autobiographical article: the “non-functional” design for ICI’s library, prepared by the firm’s architects, which might find a match in some prestigious libraries of today; the long history of special libraries in industry, which Vickery exemplifies by a publication on indexing systems by one of ICI’s librarians as far back as 1911; the seminal role of the 1948 Royal Society conference on scientific information; and many more. A nice example of what Clarke has called the prophetic “failure of imagination” (Bawden, 1997) is given in his account of the speaker at the 1948 conference, who noted that “there [is] in America a machine called the Univac. Its ultimate possibilities seem to be very great, but it seems unlikely that in the foreseeable future it will be economical to set up such machines at more than one or two central points in each country”.

Particularly relevant are Vickery’s reflections on information research. He argues cogently that, while much will be in the category of useful applied research, or even “innovative product development”, there has also been, and should be, more basic research. But this latter has had little impact on professional practice. He advances some reasons why this should be so, expressing concern at the narrowing of focus, particularly in long-running research forums, such as TREC. He also casts doubt on what he sees as a “rather desperate search for a fundamental theory of information”, leading to a reliance on ideas from epistemology, hermeneutics, semiotics and the like; a theme developed further in an article in this journal (Vickery, 1997). These derivations, he argues, “rarely make adequate contact with the realities of information practice”. For Vickery, the theory of any science, including information science, must spring from deep immersion in its practice. As someone who spent a substantial time in the practice of information science before entering the academic world, I am bound to agree with him, though I imagine many would not.

He also notes the tendency of information research problems to remain and return: how, for example, at the 1958 International Conference on Scientific Information, “many hares were started that we are still chasing today”, including such topics as “lost information” (arguably still more of a problem in an internet age) and “planned and unplanned scientific communication” (which may encapsulate many of the concerns of today’s knowledge managers).

This trend can also be seen in the special issue of Library Trends, in which nine chapter authors reflected on research in their field, identifying a few questions of current importance and setting them into a context of previous work, research needs, and appropriate methodologies. The contributions are generally thoughtfully written and well referenced, though with a strong focus on the US situation. Several of the chapters – on school libraries, for example, on healthcare information, on public library services to children and teens, and on the differences libraries can make within their communities – deal with issues that, though involving new and technologies and situations, have been concerns for many decades. Even where the authors address technologies such as digital libraries and electronic publishing, the underlying concerns and issues are by no means entirely novel.

Christine Borgman gives a characteristically provocative account of research questions raised by the “invisible library” in the global information infrastructure, based around four issues identified in her earlier writings: invisible infrastructure; content and collections; preservation and access; and institutional boundaries. To be sure, the last three of these are hardly new concerns, but Borgman manages to give them a new, and interesting, spin.

In the most ambitious article of this volume, Michael Buckland proposes five “Grand Challenges” for library research: library service; library theory; library design; library values; and library communities. These are firmly grounded in the practice of librarianship, the research agenda based on, and driven by, specific problems identified by librarians. This goes even further than Vickery’s deep immersion of research in practice, in moving away from a “pure” science of information and documentation. Like Vickery, Buckland happily admits that these questions are not new – but, in the new digital environment, they may be more pressing.

Both Buckland and Vickery urge the merits of more study and appreciation of the historical development of the information sciences as a vital tool in understanding where we can go from here. That this message should emerge from two such seemingly different texts – one explicitly looking to the past, the other equally explicitly to the future – suggests that this may be a particularly valuable lesson.

David BawdenCity University, London, UK