The Occasional Informationist

Until quite recently, the world of recorded information was physical: print-on-paper, plus the paper card ‘machinery’ well described by Marcus Krajewski’s book Paper Machines. Mechanised documentation – punched cards, edge-notched cards, and the like – added some automation, but were still very much physical objects. Then the information world became a bit digital, with computer databases and online searching, and then very digital, with the internet and all that flowed from it. And at the same time, the rest of the world of documents, in the broadest sense, and collectable things – books, music, photographs, movies, art and museum objects – also became partly of wholly digital.

And so we became accustomed to the idea of a hybrid information world, and perhaps a hybrid world in general, a world of ‘physical plus digital’. And there seemed to be an assumption that the world, or at least the information and communication parts of it, was moving inexorably towards an all-digital condition.

Well, perhaps not. There has always been a realization among those who study these things, and – perhaps ironically – among those who are best versed in digital matters, that we are likely to end up with a balance. I recall seeing, quiet a few years ago, an exhibition mounted by Industrial Light and Magic, the special effects company who made their name with their work on the first Star Wars films. One of the exhibition’s tag lines was ‘Digital plus Physical equals the Future’. I recall thinking at the time that they ought to know,

And now Embracing Analog, a report from JWT Intelligence, a division of J Walter Thompson the best-known advertising agency in the world, looks at the issue afresh. The report, by the way, was brought to my attention by one of more informative tweeters, Lena Rowland.

In true adman style, the report’s subtitle tells us that “physical is hot”. Its author, Frank Rose, finds that although there is still enthusiasm for digital, in many aspects of life people are seeking out, and valuing, physical equivalents. While speed, convenience and low cost are powerful motivators for seeking digital materials, physical items have an emotional resonance, an authenticity, and a pleasing imperfection, which is driving increased purchases of physical books, music, pictures and films, and even writing paper and traditional-style wristwatches. We are aware of the resurgence of vinyl records, but Rose reminds us that even cassette tapes are making something of a come back.

Quite what this means for the communication of information, and the concerns of information specialists, is not easy to tell. Certainly not a return to library stacks of printed journals, nor to card catalogues. But we should not assume that the information world, any more than any other part of the world, is going to be inexorably all-digital; the digital-plus-physical balance is likely to be more subtle than that. And much more interesting.

“It is my contention”, writes Paul Sturges in a recent article on imagination in LIS research’, “that much of LIS research at all levels, throughout the world, is dull formulaic and often disgracefully bad”. This is bad for research, of course, but “given that LIS is a practical discipline, it is something of a professional disaster. The great virtue of LIS research is that first it deals with issues that are both fundamental (how human beings interface with information of all kinds) and immediate and urgent (the effectiveness of technologies and systems). Its second strength is that the LIS research literature addresses communities of practitioners – people who look to it for guidance in their professional lives. LIS researchers can make a difference much more than can their fellow researchers in predominantly academic disciplines”. Finally, he adds that “the almost universal lack of inspiration is depressing”. Coming from someone with many years experience as a library/information educator and researcher, an activist in the cause of freedom of access to information, and a member of the Order of the British Empire no less, these thoughts have to be taken seriously.

It is some consolation to me, as editor of Journal of Documentation, that Paul (himself an editorial board member) excludes this journal from the worst of his criticism, allowing that “Journal of Documentation, for instance, consistently publishes an exciting mix of material with many different approaches to LIS”. Nonetheless, his criticisms will give pause for thought to anyone involved in library/information research or education, or who cares about the relation between research and practice in our subject.

His basic contention is that much information research lacks imagination, which he associates with openness, unpredictability, making connections, exploring unlikely looking possibilities, and a willingness to stretch, or even break, norms and rules. What it not suffice is “hard work [and] the following of a set of rules obtained from a textbook on research technique”; there is sometimes “such a slavish respect for rules and conventions that excellent work is sadly predictable”.

These trenchant criticisms are expanded and exemplified by analysis of five aspects of the LIS research literature. There is a disappointing lack of imagination and ambition in the topics chosen: students choosing dissertation topics, in particular, are all too often “frighteningly conventional”. Whenever possible, a researcher should ask “is there a question I really want to answer?” and use this as a basis for topic choice. Theory is sometimes wrongly used or over-used, and can lead to unnecessary obscurity; research results should be accessible to a wide audience, though this is certainly not a reason for avoiding theories and models. Research should be grounded in a wide reading of the literature, and not only the library/information literature. Imagination is needed in the choice of appropriate methods; the over-use of questionnaire surveys in information research amounts to a form of “slavery”. And findings need to go beyond an identification of what is interesting, to show what is significant, and why. This involves time and imagination, both of which may be short as deadlines for the end of the research approach.

This splendid article should be made compulsory reading for all novice researchers, especially for students embarking on masters dissertations and doctoral theses, and also for jaded old hands. As for Journal of Documentation, we will try to live up to Paul’s commendation, and continue with as much of a novel and imagination mix of material as we can.

This is an amended version of an editorial to be published in Journal of Documentation.

Impact factors have been, for quite a few years now, the single metric most closely associated with the ‘quality’ of an academic journal, or similar dissemination mechanism. This simple, perhaps simplistic, measure has been receiving an increasing level of criticism recently, of which an interesting example is a study by George Lazano, Vincent Larivière, and Yves Gingras, published in Joural of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, showing that the proportion of highly cited papers coming from high-impact journals is steadily decreasing. A main reason for this seems to be the increasing tendency for readers to find articles through search engines, rather than through the tables of contents and indexes of individual journals, severing the close link between perceived quality of articles and of journals. This study has received a good deal of publicity; see, for example, the article by Dan Cossins in The Scientist newsletter.

There are a number of things to be said about this, from the perspective of a scholarly journal such as Journal of Documentation (which I have the pleasure of editing). First and foremost, we have always be wary about choosing a single metric as the measure of how well a journal is doing; there are other, and arguably equally or more relevant measures. One such, produced from the same dataset as the impact factor, is a journal’s ‘half-life’; a measure of the length of time for which its material remains useful and used. JDoc has always had a very long half-life, equal to that of the major review journals of the field, something in which we have taken great satisfaction.

There are also new metrics, appearing as scholarly communication becomes an increasingly digital business, often referred to under the label of altmetrics. The most obvious of these, though by no means the only one, is the number of downloads of articles. While by no means the same as an impact factor, this is an alternative, and arguably an equally, if not more, valid, way of assessing a journal’s ‘reach’ and influence.

The most dramatic possibility, of course, hinted at by many of these new developments, is that the academic journal itself will undergo far-reaching change, as the viability of an information dissemination system developed to be produced in a convenient print-on-paper package is tested in an information environment which is not merely digital, but increasingly interactive and decentralized. Volumes, issues and pages, essential concepts for print journals, cease to have much meaning in the digital environment, and possibilities for interaction vastly exceed older ideas of errata and letters to the editor. It may that the effect of these changes will turn out to be so major for the scholarly journal, that the issue of the impact factor will come to be seen as entirely insignificant.

I gave a talk to a meeting of CILIP’s Library and Information History group, which was celebrating its 50th anniversary. It was a short and informal presentation, which – as it was US election day – had a presidential theme, and looked at some reasons why library and information history is worthwhile as a subject for study. This is a summary of the main points.

Thomas Jefferson, the third president, wrote that “”I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past”. This reflects what is quite a common viewpoint among students and practitioners of the information sciences: why should we study the history of our subjects, when we could be focusing on advances in technology and in society, and where they will take us in the future.

Prediction of the future, even the near future, is difficult for the information sciences, due to the dramatic and transformational changes brought about by advances in technology. We are all familiar with Moore’s Law, which – though it can be expressed in different ways – points to the exponentially increasing power of computers.

And we know of the dramatic prophecies of gurus such as Ray Kurzweil, of a ‘singularity’, a few decades off, when the capabilities of computers will outstrip our ability to understand what they are doing, still less to control them.

This situation, when technology advances so fast that our ideas of how best to use it are always lagging behind, is problematic but not unprecedented; there have been other periods in history when imagination, rather than detailed realistic planning, was needed to cope with the speed of technological advance.

In the 1840s, the Austro-Hungarian Empire planned for a railway line between Vienna and the nearest seaport, Trieste , now in Italy. However, whatever route was chosen for the line, and whatever tunnels and viaducts might be made, stretches of the line would still have too steep a gradient for any current or foreseeable locomotive. The Emperor, Franz Joseph 1, nonetheless ordered that the line built, expressing the faith that by the time it was finished, there would be engines able to work it. And so it proved, and the line opened in July 1857.

Perhaps there is a lesson, or at least an analogy here. When planning information systems and services, we should focus on what we want them to do, assuming that the technology will be there to support our ideas.

But how do we know what to do? Our best guide should be what we know about information and documents and collections; and how people like to use them. Technologies change rapidly and dramatically, but human thought, and social interaction, and information behaviour in general terms, does not. And we have several centuries of a printed information environment, and several millennia of use of recorded information, from which to draw lessons. This is not an advocacy for the drawing of shallow analogies, or fatuous claims that nothing ever really changes; rather it is an argument for seeing repeating lessons in how humans deal with information and knowledge, independent of technology. Information history is a very good teacher about the information future.

So this is one, rather pragmatic reason, for studying information history. It gives a good response to those who think like Thomas Jefferson. It is by no means the only reason, nor necessarily the most important. And it absolutely does not mean a passive attitude towards considering the future of our discipline and profession. In the words of the forty-second president, Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him”

As documents, and the whole information and communication environment, become increasingly digital, it is natural to assume that physical location becomes of less importance. Two newly published books remind us that this idea should be examined with a critical eye.

Rosemary Ashton’s Victorian Bloomsbury, a splendidly scholarly and well-produced intellectual and cultural history of that London district, gives a very convincing account of how the “March of Mind” occurred in a very specific locale over a relatively short time period. This is the story of how Bloomsbury became London’s “intellectual workshop” long before the Bloomsbury Group entered its squares and terraces.
Naturally, the foundation of University College London is in many ways the focal point of the story, but Ashton covers much more besides, focusing on a number of institutions centred on documents and collections.

The British Museum, with its library, is another major topic, with a lively account of the career of Pannizzi, whom Ashton categorises as “a force of nature, bringing is enormous energy to the task of making the … library one of the best in the world” (p. 148). Many publishers set up home in Bloomsbury, most notably the splendidly-named Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Hospitals, with their associated libraries, anatomy and pathology museums, and publishing ventures also flourished, as did institutions promoting the education of women and the working classes. There is much else in the book to commend it to anyone interested in Victorian intellectual life, or in the history of London generally. But documents and collections, and the interactions of those who used them are at the heart of this account of what Ashton reminds us is still “the heart of intellectual London, with more libraries, museums and educational establishments than any other part of the city” (p 319).

The social institutions which promoted this interaction are also covered, most notably the Museum Tavern, a regular meeting place for those who frequented the Reading Room.
The British Library, which grew from the library of the British Museum is now on the wrong side of the Euston Road to count as being in Bloomsbury by physical location, though it is certainly still there in spirit. Michael Leapman’s Book of the British Library, while on an academic text in the same sense as Ashton’s, gives a well-researched and informative account of the Library’s origins and of its current status and issues. It is so well-produced and profusely and beautifully illustrated, that some may dismiss it as a “coffee table book”. This would be a mistake. A serious student would learn much from this book, though certainly the pleasure in reading it might disguise the fact.

The Bloomsbury origins of the Library are well-described and illustrated; particularly gripping is the long-running feud between Pannizzi, Keeper of Manscripts, and Frederick Madden, Keeper of Manuscripts, and technically Pannizzi’s junior. The enjoyment of the blow-by-blow account of their disputes, culminating in Madden’s complaint that Pannizzi was to blame for Madden’s cat being locked in the Museum basement for two days, is one of the guilty pleasures of reading this book.

These two books join a small number which has analysed and celebrated the history of intellectual advances in London. We might also mention James Hamilton’s London Lights, a popular account of developments in the early nineteenth century, focusing on the generation and communication of knowledge generally, including factors such as libraries, learned societies, museums, printing, lithography, and photography.

Studying the history of information, and its collection and dissemination, in local contexts is worthwhile in itself. But books of this kind remind us that a physical place, a locality, has sometimes been a very powerful stimulus to the development of collections, of memory institutions, and of the advances in education and dissemination of knowledge which are associated with them. This is worth remembering as we move into a digital information world.

Blaise Cronin presents an interesting and insightful article in the latest issue of Information Research on the waxing and waning of a field; reflections on information studies education. It is the latest contribution to a very long debate, going back over three decades, as to whether library / information science has a good future, as an academic discipline and profession; for other interesting examples, see an article by Tom Wilson, and the papers in the book edited by Alan Gilchrist. Cronin’s presentation gives, among other things, a neat potted history of the discipline, and an informed assessment of some aspects of its present state.

However, unlike some of the other contributions on this topic, it is based on some solid evidence. Cronin has been among those who have studied the way in which LIS imports and exports knowledge, to and from other academic disciplines. Here he summarises evidence which show that over recent years LIS research is being cited more outside the field than within it, as other academic disciplines make use of its research findings. LIS is becoming less introverted and self-referential.

Unmitigated good news one might think. But Cronin points out some systemic weaknesses in LIS as a research-based discipline. Its ‘methodological heterogeneity’, i.e. its cheerful use of methods and concepts from a variety of other disciplines, while an obvious strength in some respects, is also a weakness. It leads to an accumulation of isolated findings, rather than to generalizations, and a solid base of disciplinary theory. Cronin terms this ‘epistemic promiscuity’, and warns that it comes at a price; LIS’s sense of identity as an academic discipline, already rather weak, will decrease still further. The information studies field, says Cronin, is increasingly fluid and permeable.

One consequence of this is that LIS has never had a natural home within academia. Indeed, a study of European LIS departments carried out a few years ago showed them located in almost all parts of the academic universe: faculties of science, of social science, and of humanities, business schools, and schools of computing and informatics. Cronin also alludes to a recent rash of restructuring and reorganization affecting academic departments of LIS which he has personal knowledge, and to equivalent changes affecting information pratitioners.

Unlike other more pessimistic commentators, Cronin takes a view which is by no means negative overall; while some parts of the field will wane, he points out, others will wax. This seems to me to a sensible assessment, and one which should give us cause for optimism. These sort of concerns are far from new, and, I think, an inescapable consequence of the nature of the information sciences as academic disciplines. If, as I believe, library / information science is best regarded as a ‘field of study’, focused on the very broad topic of information as its subject matter, then its permeability to other fields is inevitable; indeed is right and proper. And if, as my colleague Lyn Robinson has argued, the proper subject of study of information science is the whole communication chain of recorded information, then we will naturally overlap with all the other disciplines who have some interest in this, from computer science to psychology, and from sociology to publishing. This is arguably a wider list of overlapping interests than most, if not any, other subjects; not for nothing has information science sometimes been called a meta-science.

On this basis, I see a lot to be optimistic about, given what Blaise Cronin concludes about the increasing recognition of LIS insights and results by other disciplines. Like him, I see the field waxing and waning over the years, to a different extent in different parts of the discipline, and perhaps also in different parts of the world. But I am confident enough to believe that there will be, on the whole, more waxing than waning. What matters is not trying to hold on to some rigid and permanent core of the subject, and try to keep others away from it; what matter is rather to ensure that its insights cross its increasingly fluid boundaries.

Some good news (for a change, maybe) in the academic library/information world. We are recruiting a new staff member in the Centre for Information Science, City University London. Full-time, permanent position, intended for a fairly new entrant to academic life; looking for someone to do a mix of teaching, course development, research, publication, and professional liaison.

Some information is given below, with a link to the formal advertisment on the University’s web site. For anyone who was quick off the mark and looked at it already, please be aware that (in a commendable effort to meet a deadline) our HR people initially put up a fairly generic set of information, which has now been enhanced.

Please contact Lyn or myself, if you might be interesting in working with us.

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City University London has been a centre of excellence for research and teaching in library and information science for over 50 years. As part of the University’s strategy to develop academic excellence for business and the professions, we now wish to appoint a Lecturer in Library Science. The new lecturer will work alongside David Bawden and Lyn Robinson in City’s Centre for Information Science, teaching on our Masters programmes in Information Science, Library Science and Information Management in the Cultural Sector, and being actively engaged in research and publication.

This is a post for an early-career academic, with a good level of academic maturity and independence. Applicants should hold a PhD in a relevant subject area, and have at least four significant publications in peer-reviewed journals. Relevant professional experience, and experience of teaching in higher education, would be advantageous. Areas of expertise of particular interest are: GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector issues; collection management; culture and heritage information and informatics; digital humanities; social informatics; and publishing.

For an informal discussion, please contact David Bawden (db@soi.city.ac.uk) or Lyn Robinson (lyn@soi.city.ac.uk).

Formal information, including application procedure, can be found aton the City University job pages.

The closing date is 28 September.