The Occasional Informationist

While writing a review for Aslib Proceedings of a new text on knowledge management, Kevin C. Desouza and Scott Paquette’s Knowledge Management: an introduction, I commented that there was a bit of a contradiction in the way that the book addresses Tom Wilson’s criticism – in his 2002 paper, The nonsense of knowledge management – of the discipline as a “fad’ that would fade away. At one point, Desouza and Paquette say that “after the fad of knowledge management receded in the early 2000s, the field went through a period of deep introspection, evaluation and renewal”; two pages later, they say that that “since we are still talking about knowledge management … the fad has not faded”. I pointed out that it was fairly clear from the context that what they mean is that the hype has gone away, but the substance is still there.

Wilson’s criticism, in essence, was that what passed for knowledge management was not, in fact, about managing knowledge; it was about managing information, or about organising work practices so that people can co-operate effectively. And indeed, these points have been reflected to a large extent in the way the subject is described now. It is often subsumed under ‘business intelligence’ or ‘communities of practice’, perhaps more realistic descriptions of its essence. And, insofar as it is still a area of concern to both researchers and practitioners in the information sciences, it is increasing being seen as a point on the spectrum of the management of information of all kinds, rather than as something separate.

In being assimilated in this way, knowledge management follows the pattern of other disciplines and activities on the overall information science/management spectrum. It takes something of an effort to recall that searching for digital information, now a common activity for most people in the developed world was, not so long ago, a specialised job. Making slides for a presentation, which again was a special skill and function, is now routinely done by school pupils. Creating metadata, once the province of the cat-and-class community, is now open to anyone who tags their photographs and books. Interestingly, while many jobs and skills in other sectors have simply disappeared, most information functions seem to continue. True, one would be hard-pressed to find a hot-metal typesetter outside a heritage setting, but most other information activities tend to continue, but without their special status. As with knowledge management, they simply cease to be fads.
These reflections should not, by the way, be taken as a criticism of Desouza and Paquette’s book. On the contrary, it is one of the better examples of its kind. Its structure is particularly logical and well thought out, with an introductory chapter introducing knowledge management leads to two expositions on ‘the concept of knowledge’ and ‘the concept of management’. It has more of a ‘library/information flavour’ than most other knowledge management texts. Several leading library/information writers in this area are mentioned, and a good philosophical historical perspective is provided. I felt obliged to comment the authors were trying a bit too hard in their identification of Sir Francis Bacon (1521-1626) as a ‘leading LIS figure’. One should not however be too critical of any author who goes out of their way to remind their readers that the elements of knowledge management did not begin with the digital computer.

The book can be recommended, alongside the volume edited by Kanti Srikantaiah and Michael Koenig, Knowledge management in practice: connections and context, to any student of library/information science or of information management. Indeed for any interested person with a library/information perspective, it would be a good introduction to a subject which retains its importance, though it may no longer be a fad.

So, the 2011 International Online Information Meeting will be the last to be held in the Kensington area of London. Next December, the show moves east to the ExCel conference centre in Docklands.

I have to say I feel rather melancholic at the news. True, the exhibition had looked a bit lost for the past few years, with too few stands to fill the cavernous halls of Olympia. But those of us who were at the first Online Meeting in 1977 (yes, reader, I was indeed very, very young) will find it difficult not to equate early December/Online Information/West London. As the meeting moved up and down the road, from the Kensington Tara Hotel, to the old Town Hall, to the Novotel, and then to Olympia, it was a fixed point in the information year.

Those of us who have gone on and off over the years (I wonder if anyone has actually attended all 34) have been fond of ruminating on how the show has changed. And indeed it is actually quite difficult to think back to a world that was not just pre-web, but pre-a-lot-of-things-that-have-come-and-gone; CD-ROM databases, to name but one, were the latest thing for quite a few years. But certainly what was once a very focused event for a small community of providers and users of a certain format of information has become very much more diffuse and all-encompassing; much like the information world as a whole, I suppose.

The survival of IOLIM (as I still think of it) is therefore interesting. When it began, it was essential for everyone who was a serious user of computerised information to be there; that was where new products were launched and demonstrated, and you had to be there, to see things and to pick up the new shiny brochures. The web and social media changed all that; but there still seems to be the attraction of going along to meet people, as I discovered when it took me 30 minutes to leave the show this time, due to bumping into – literally – several people who I had not imagined would be there.

So, I imagine I’ll go to ExCel next year. I just wonder if early December/online information/East London is really going to work. And there is a ‘new concept’; and ‘international convention for the information community’. It sounds like something I will dislike, but one should not be cynical; I’m sure I can still bump into people.

An interesting critique under the title ‘The city, the world and what cannot be measured’, written by Adam Frank in a blog post for the US National Public Radio Service in the last days of the old year (Frank 2011), discusses a speech given in 2010 by the Václav Havel, the former Czech president who died on December 11th last year. The full text is also worth reading (Havel 2010). Frank draws out as the main theme of Havel’s talk that we should be pleased when we encounter, and accept, things which cannot be measured; that there can be a value in not knowing things, and even in not being able to formulate the question.

This seems a rather negative and inappropriate message to be mentioned in an information science context, which is – I have always thought – about promoting ways to know things, and to find out what is already known. But Havel’s message is a subtle one, as befits a poet and playwright, as well as a politician. He begins by speaking of his home city, Prague, and the ways in which its outskirts, and previously clear boundaries, have been lost in an amorphous sprawl with no structure, and no connection to history or to the way in which people wish to live. What has been created is “some sort of gigantic agglomeration that renders life nondescript, disrupts the network of natural human communities, and under the banner of international uniformity it attacks all individuality, identity or heterogeneity”.

This complaint will be familiar enough to anyone who lives in many major city of the developed world. But does it not also have an informational resonance? Have we not heard much the same said about the Internet, imposing a homogenising effect on the variety of printed publications and physical artefacts, and equally imposing a ubiquitous culture based on the English-language language? The Internet, admittedly, is changing, so that these charges may not be as valid as they were some years ago. But I think there is still much validity in this kind of criticism, applied to the information environment as much as to the physical.

Havel’s message is much broader than this, as he attacks a society “whose basic attributes include the supercilious idea that we know everything and what we don’t know yet we’ll soon find out”. This also has an information resonance. If it isn’t to found on the first page of results from a simple Google search, it doesn’t exist; or if it does it isn’t worth searching for.

It seems to me that it is important that the information sciences address this. That they would consider ways in which new information environments can grow more organically from the old, rather than – as it sometimes seems – believing that nothing of the pre-Web world is worth remembering. And that they might keep in mind that, in information terms as much as in city planning, there are, as Havel puts it “some things that we shall never measure, and may never know”.

Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introductions series will be familiar to anyone who is old-fashioned enough to still visit serious bookshops. Small enough to fit into an average pocket at 18 by 10 cms, and around 160 pages, and attractively printed and produced, they have proved very popular. It helps, of course, that they are relatively cheap, all the more so when many bookshops, perhaps confusing small size with limited scope, offer them at ’3 for 2′.

There are about 300 titles in the series, at the time of writing (end 2011). All are introductions to some non-fiction topic, from statistics to Jung, from post-structuralism to cosmology, from anaesthesia to film music, from colonial Latin-American literature to environmental economics, and from the periodic table to privacy. OUP advertise them as “ideal for train journeys, holidays, and as quick catch-up for busy people who want something intellectually stimulating”.
However, I first encountered them when recommending Luciano Floridi’s “Information: a very short introduction”, then moved to recommending the titles on computing and on statistics, and was then impressed by the quality and convenience of the whole series. I suspect that in addition to OUP’s intended intellectual market, they will do very well as de facto student texts. Indeed OUP suggest as much in adding, as a coda to their description of the series, that the books may be useful to undergraduates and their lecturers.

Yet on reflection, their success – with over three millions books of the series sold – is perhaps a little surprising, as they seem very out of tune with modern trends. Serious in their topics, they seem rather out of place alongside the garish novels and celebrity magazines which are the alternatives for a conveniently packaged read. Invariably written by well-known and authoritative authors, they could be intended as a rebuttal to the idea of the death of expertise. And without colour, still less any iota of multimedia, they seem like a survivor from a previous age in a web-based world. How can they compete with the Kindle and the iPad?

Is this I wonder, just an example of the last flowering of the book format, soon to be overtaken by newer technologies? It would, I suppose, be very nice to have the whole series on an e-reader. But maybe that would miss one point behind the success of this series; that it is nice to have in one’s hand a nicely produced physical book, which encapsulates a basic understanding of some topic. And that its physicality, and certainly its small size, encourages us to believe that we too can understand it, with a modest effort. Certainly a nicer feeling than that we get from the prospect of e-reader holding more books than we can read in a lifetime, or of an interminable list of search engine hits. Some may lament that these may be read instead a full-length “proper book”, particularly by students; well, even students have to start somewhere, and these texts are a different order of magnitude of quality than Wikipedia, which seems to be the default alternative.

An idiosyncratic hold-over from the great days of print, or a sign that not everything is going to be digital? Who knows? Perhaps in twenty years time we may have a Very Short Introduction to the Survival of the Little Book.

Rather belated, this posting marks the death in August this year of Ludwik Finkelstein, formerly Dean of Engineering at City University London.

Finkelstein was born in Lvov in Poland (now Lviv in the Ukraine) in 1929, and seemed destined for a career in his family’s iron and steel business. Like so many from that part of the world, his life was disrupted by the 1939-45 conflict. After an initial banishment by the Soviets to Siberia, and then a period in the Middle East where his father was an officer in the Polish Army Corps, the young Finkelstein found himself a refugee in Britain in 1946. He worked in the nascent electronics industry, became a mining engineer, and then a lecturer in what was then the Northampton College of Advanced Technology in London. He was one of those who led the transformation of this college into City University, becoming its first Dean of the School of Engineering, and later Pro-Vice Chancellor.

I did not know Finkelstein well, although our time at the university overlapped by three years. I feel an obvious respect for one who helped establish the institution where I have worked for over twenty years. And, as someone who did not greatly enjoy my schooldays, I cannot but feel warmly towards Finkelstein, whose sole pre-degree formal education apparently amounted to six weeks of secondary schooling at the Trans-Siberian Railway School. But more fundamentally. I think his intellectual approach and legacy has a lot to say to the information sciences. He became best known as a measurement and control engineer, and head of a department of systems science, focusing on the idea that measuring instruments were, in effect, machines for processing information. This provides an interesting extension of information science principles into an area not always associated with them. But more fundamentally, he believed in what he wrote of as “the vision of the Colleges of Advanced Technology to bridge the gap between science and practice”; to show how academic research and theoretical study is always of the highest value to a professional discipline. This is a lesson which, it seems, the information sciences are always having to relearn.

A fuller biography of Finkelstein, with a link to a short autobiographical sketch, can be found on the City University site.

Last week I had the chance to attend a conference on the topic of ‘Information Ecology and Libraries’, held at the library of the Comenius University in Bratislava. Organised by Jela Steinerová, of the University’s department of library and information science, the meeting attracted participants from several countries.

The city of Bratislava has now entirely shaken off the gloom of its recent Soviet-bloc past, and is now certainly as attractive is its ‘big sister’, Prague, but on a smaller (and, for a first-time visitor) scale. Such a shame that getting there directly from London involves Ryanair at 06.30……

Information ecology involves the treatment of information infrastructures and environments as ecological systems; though often in a metaphorical way, rather than using the methods of ecology in a strict manner. Although the concept of information ecology was first widely publicised in the 1997 book of that name by Davenport and Prusak, the relevance of the ideas of information ecology to information science already had been established by Bonnie Nardi, Rafael Capurro and others. This conference gave a very good overview of the applicability of the idea in many contexts. Among the presentations which I found particularly interesting were those by: Barbara Moran (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA) on the search by libraries for a new ecological niche; Isto Huvila (University of Uppsala, Sweden) on social aspects of information work, and their relations to information infrastructures; and Jela Steinerová (Comenius University, Slovakia) on an analysis of the Slovakian academic information environment in ecological terms.

The abstracts of the papers can be found here, and the full proceedings are published by Comenius University (ISBN 978-80-223-3087-9).

The publication of Luciano Floridi’s magisterial work on the philosophy of information should, I think, be counted as a major contribution to the study of the foundations of the information sciences. This post is a modified version of a review written for journal publication.

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“I wouldn’t have minded if he’d called it A philosophy of information”, said my Distinguished Colleague, “but I do object to The bloody philosophy”.

Luciano Floridi has created considerable interest, and a little controversy, in the library/information community, since he began publishing on the topic a decade or so ago. Now, in this latest book – The Philosophy of Information, Oxford University Press, 2011 – he presents what he tells us is the results of that ten years of work, in what the publisher’s blurb announces a “a book that will set the agenda for the philosophy of information”.

Let us be clear. This is a detailed and serious book of academic philosophy. Although the audience is nowhere explicitly stated, it seems clear that Floridi, a professor of philosophy at Hertfordshire and Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, is writing for his fellow philosophers, and pulling no punches. He warns us in the preface he is “painfully aware that this is not an easy book to read, to put it mildly”, and will require patience and time. He politely refers anyone who wishes to “warm up” before embarking on this arduous task to his “much easier and shorter introduction” – Information: a very short introduction, Oxford University Press, 2010. He pleads that he has made the book as reader-friendly as possible, not least by providing summaries and conclusions for each chapter, and by reminding us at the start of each chapter of what has gone before; a feature which he, endearingly, tells us he took from Battlestar Galactica.

So far, so bad, at least for the casual library/information reader. Even with some background in philosophical analysis and in formal logic, this is tough going.

But, in the book’s favour, even for our casual enquirer, we can say some positive things. It is very well written, and clearly presented, as befits an OUP publication. And the author takes the trouble to give frequent summaries and recapitulations, and to draw attention to significant points, so that even the non-philosophical reader can follow the general themes.

For those who need a quick overview, a kind of synopsis of the synopsis, Floridi provides one: “The essential message of the book is quite simple. Semantic information is well-formed, meaningful and truthful data. Knowledge is relevant semantic information properly accounted for: humans are the only known semantic engines and conscious inforgs (informational organisms) in the universe who can develop a growing knowledge of reality; and reality is the totality of information (note the crucial absence of ‘semantic’)”. Aha, you will say: the old data-information-knowledge-wisdom hierarchy. Well, yes, in a way; except developed with a precision of analysis quite removed from the vague conceptual presentation of the DIWK hierarchy.

The first three chapters of the book are devoted to a ‘metatheoretical’ justification for the philosophy of information as a branch of philosophy, and this in itself spells out one feature of the book. We are not being given a philosophical justification for, or analysis of, what we might regard as the sciences of information; rather information is being placed as a crucial concept for philosophy itself. This may give us a warm glow of pleasure, but does not make for easy reading. When Floridi writes that information deserves a thorough philosophical investigation, with the implication that it has not had one before, this may annoy some readers, of the same turn of mind as my Distinguished Colleague. They may wonder whether such an investigation has not been offered before, by authors such as Fred Dretske, who is cited here, and Jesse Shera, who is not. But I think Floridi’s implicit claim is valid; many authors have written by philosophy and information before, but no-one has set out to deal with it in such a thorough way.

The bulk of the book is given over to a detailed analysis of the concept of information, and its relation to data, and to knowledge. Floridi acknowledges that information is an elusive concept, that answering the question of what it is constitutes the hardest and most central problem of its philosophy, and that the whole book may be read as a long answer to this question. He suggests that information may be understood from three perspectives: as reality (patterns in the physical world); about reality (semantic and meaningful); and for reality (genetic information, algorithms and recipes). He presents seven approaches to defining information – information theoretic, algorithmic etc.), discusses them in detail, and settles for the semantic approach, mentioned above,, which “defines information in terms of data space: information is well-formed, meaningful and truthful data”.

This is developed in chapter 4, one of the central chapters of the book. We begin which data, which is acknowledged to be not well-understood philosophically either, though it is easier to deal with than the more slippery idea of information. Data is understood here as simply a lack of uniformity; a noticeable difference or distinction in something. To count as information, a collection of data must be well-formed (put together correctly according to relevant syntax), meaningful (complying with relevant semantics), and truthful. This last point is analysed at some length, with detailed analysis of the nature of true information, as distinct from mis-information, pseudo-information and false information.

This is then developed, via lengthy formal analysis, the details of which which will be beyond those without a strong philosophical background, into the idea of knowledge. The view here is that “knowledge and information are part of the same conceptual family”, which may irritate some knowledge managers and social epistemologists, but seems to me to be a positive feature, considering this approach as a foundation for the information sciences. The crucial point is that information is ‘converted’ to knowledge by being inter-related, which is formally analysed here through network theory in chapter 12, another central chapter of the book’s arguments. Informally, “what [knowledge] enjoys and [information] lacks … is the web of mutual relations that allow one part of it to account for another. Shatter that, and you are left with a pile of truths or a random list of bits of information that cannot help to make sense of the reality that they seek to address”. Furthermore, information which is meaningful must also be relevant in order to qualify as knowledge, and this aspect also is formally modelled, as is the distinction between ‘knowing’, ‘believing’ and ‘being informed’.

There follows a discussion of the idea of the inforg, a conscious informational organism such as a human being, and you will be pleased to know that Floridi is able to prove that we are neither zombies, nor artificial agents.

Which leads us to the final, and in many ways most ambitious, chapters which address the rather big, and very philosophical, issue of the nature of reality itself. Floridi argues for an ‘informational ontology’, with information as the fundamental stuff of the physical universe. However, he takes issues with those proponents of ‘information phsics’, such as Seth Lloyd, who see the universe as a kind of digital computer, arguing instead for ‘information structural realism’. Again, the arguments are detailed and technical, but, as I understand them, they propose a real and objective physical world, whose constituent structures can be known, and understood in terms of information.

This is clearly a very important book, and I think it justifies the author’s claim that it describes the first philosophical analysis of information in all its aspects. It is copiously referenced, showing familiarity with a very wide range of literature. Floridi is sometimes accused, by people like my Distinguished Colleague, of ignoring the contributions of library and information science, which might be expected to have something to say about information. This is incorrect and unfair: Floridi has written for library/information journals, spoken as library/information conferences, and emphasised a natural relation between his ideas and the concerns of library/information science. And in this book he does acknowledge the library/information literature, citing inter alia Buckland, Braman and Warner on the nature of information, and Borland, Choo, Mizzaro, Saracevic and van Rijsbergen on relevance. If he does not deal much in this book with library/information issues, that is perhaps because these are not the main concern of the book; this is by a philosopher for philosophers. I agree with Jonathan Furner, who writes in his 2010 ARIST article, that it is highly desirable that Floridi’s ideas be explored and applied within the library/information area.

Despite the author’s efforts to make the book reader-friendly, and his success in bringing out the main points from the mass of technical detail – which I certainly appreciated in writing this review – this is not a book for the average library/information specialist. As the author points out in the preface, it is not intended as an introduction to the subject for the general reader. For anyone in our field with a strong interest in the basics of our subject, if they have some philosophical background, it will repay serious and repeated study.

For everyone else, there is the user-friendly Very Short Introduction. This should be read by everyone with an interest in the foundations of the information sciences; even those who think like my Distinguished Colleague.Alternatively, Floridi has a readable account of semantic conceptions of information in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

It is just over fifty years since Derek de Solla Price produced his best known work: Little Science, Big Science. It was on the required reading list for my information science masters course, and – I suspect like many other students of the subject at that time – I wondered what it was doing there. It took some while before I realised that Price’s work, which founded the subject known generally known as scientometrics, was intimately connected with the information sciences, building on the laws of ‘statistical bibliography’ developed earlier by Bradford, Zipf, Pareto and the rest.

It now is taken for granted that bibliometrics and scientometrics are an integral part of information science, albeit that they overlap into other disciplines. Just how far they have come since Price’s day, with particular encouragement from the development of information visualisation techniques in the last decade, is shown in a remarkable new book: Katy Börner’s Atlas of Science: Visualizing what we know.

That an atlas of science of this sort, which rightly claims to set out the evolution of scientific knowledge, disciplines and applications, should be complied by a professor of information science, as Börner is, shows the extent to which Price’s ideas have been adopted by our discipline. A beautifully produced, and very large, book, it accompanies a physical exhibition of science maps, running until 2014 and continually augmented with new material. The core of the book is a series of 31 examples of mappings of science and scientific progress: from Napoleon’s march on Moscow to the period table, and from Wikipedia’s coverage of scientific issues to visualisations of DNA development and patent applications. Fascinating in themselves, they put this book, to my mind, on a par with Edward Tufte’s Visual Explanations and John Barrow’s Cosmic Imagery, as exemplifications of good use of images in conveying complex information and ideas.

The book is much more than this, however: indeed, this is only one of five parts. Of particular interest to anyone reflecting on the relations between the mapping of science and information disciplines is the second part, covering the history of science maps, and the third, covering the development of the ‘science of science’. Here we find sections on familiar topics: the collection, organisation and dissemination of knowledge; classification, interlinking and visualisation, co-citation and invisible colleges; and the idea of a ‘global brain’, able to comprehend it all. And some familiar names: Gutenberg, Nelson, Berners-Lee, Dewey, Otlet, Shepard, Garfield, Bush, Licklider, Zipf, Bradford, Lotka and Pareto. These sections, with their appealing timelines and linkages of influence, would serve a novel and attention-catching introduction to the main ideas and personalities across a substantial part of the information sciences.

Börner’s magnum opus shows not only how far we have come in scientometrics, but also how closely related the subject is with the rest of information science. In a review in Scientometrics (2011, 88(2), 657-677), Loet Leydesdorff says this is a wonderful book, and I agree. I think de Solla Price would too.

When I talk with my students about the history of recorded information, we usually agree that the rock and cave art of prehistoric times is a good starting point. The people who created such art clearly had a technology for conveying a form of communication across long periods of time, if not across space. As such, the carvings and paintings may reasonably be regarded as documents, of a kind.

Of course, without a written language we cannot be certain of the meanings of these documents; if indeed they truly have a ‘meaning’, or at least one which we could comprehend. Not that this has stopped a variety of speculations, some more wild than others, about their interpretation; in recent times the most vociferous claims have been that they have a religious, and more specifically a shamanistic, meaning. This is particularly ambitious, since it implies a claim know exactly what was in the artists’ minds, many thousands of years ago.

Paul Bahn is a leading and long-established scholar of this subject, and author of the magisterial Cambridge Illustrated History of Prehistoric Art. In his recent book Prehistoric Rock Art: Polemics and Progress he casts a refreshingly calm and rational eye over the debate. He begins by setting aside the “unending and tedious debates” about whether these works are really art in our sense, and the “speculative and wishful thinking” which characterises many interpretations. He goes on to point out that, in the absence of the original artists or any cultural links to them, we can never be sure about the significance of the depictions. Animals are often drawn with such exactness that we can identify them with certainly. Beyond this, however, we must be cautious; what seems, for example, to be a simple hunting scene may have a meaning and significance which we cannot grasp immediately, if at all.

Illustrating the book with many examples and images, Bahn reviews a wide variety of art, and crucially reviews the various theories which have been produced for its interpretation, and the supposition that all the art is of the same kind, or served the same purpose. Rebuking the idea that all such art is necessarily “powerful, mystical and deeply significant”, he concludes that “we can certainly be sure – because it was produced by human beings exactly like ourselves in everything but knowledge – that some of it was produced for the sheer pleasure of creation and self-expression, some was decorative, narrative, informational and last but not least humorous”.

For those interested in the earliest forms of information-bearing documents, this is an insightful and worthwhile book.

O’Reilly has been known as a publisher of books on information technology for over thirty years: as their website puts it “a chronicler and catalyst of leading-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and galvanizing their adoption by amplifying the faint signals from the alpha geeks who are creating the future”. Which might suggest that its offerings are only relevant at the hard technology end of the information sciences, away from central concerns of information organisation, access and use.

Not so. Two of their newer books, by J.D. Biersdorfer and by Jeff Siarto, deal respectively with a device – the iPad – and a software system – WordPress blogging – which typify the developments in information technology which have revolutionised the information environment over the past decade. One has arrived rather suddenly, while the other has been long anticipated.

The handheld information device has been predicted for many years in science fiction and futurology speculation, so that we have been waiting rather impatiently for its instantiation. Biersdorfer suggests that the iPad was specifically foreshadowed by Star Trek’s Personal Access Display Device (PADD). Conversely, I am not sure that the idea of the blog has been mentioned very much, if at all, in any speculative writing; the over 150 million blogs so far created seem to have arrived largely unannounced.

Billed as a “brain friendly guide”, Siarto’s guide to WordPress apparently uses “the latest research in cognitive science and learning theory to craft a multi-sensory learning experience”. In practice, this means that it is written in what is for me an irritating overly-conversational style, with a plethora of diagrams, photographs, speech bubbles, and case studies. The index, by contrast is limited, and I found it quite difficult to find specific topics; this is book to be worked through, rather than referred to. Oddly, perhaps, for a book emphasising a friendly approach, it comes with a rather nannyish set of suggestions on how to use it: from being told “Read the There are no dumb questions. That means all of them. They’re no optional sidebars – they’re part of the core content! Don’t skip them”, to being advised to drink lots of water when reading it. People who like this sort of thing will find it the sort of thing they like. While it didn’t appeal to me, the book contains much useful information, and anyone new to WordPress blogging would benefit from working through it. And, yes, despite my concerns at the way WordPress put in an iPad app with minimal announcement, it’s still a very nice system to use.

Much more to my taste, style-wise is Biersdorfer’s guide to the iPad. A quote on the cover suggests that the Missing Manual series, of which this book is a volume, is “simply the most intelligent and usable series of guidebooks”. I would go along with that. Very clearly laid out, and nicely written, without gimmicks or razzamatazz, and with detailed contents pages and indexes, it gets it points across very well. And, for the iPad, these points add to the assertion, though the author does not make it explicitly, that this device can change information access and use in quite fundamental ways. The book illustrates, of course, how the web may be browsed, music, video and photographs organised, email and social media accessed, and the other well-known applications of tablets like iPad; and explains these in a way which would be useful to all but the most informed users. However, arguably the most transformative aspects are elsewhere; in the office software suite, which brings the personal computer to a genuinely mobile format; in the variety of apps, particularly including the mobile, map and location functions, which make the idea of ‘information anywhere’, a clearer reality than formerly; and perhaps most of all in the book reader applications, in which – as the author suggests – we may be seeing the book of the 21st century. This is certainly the clearest explanation which I, as an iPad novice, have seen of these issues.

Both these books, in their different ways, are excellent guides to their subjects. Reflecting on them also shows us something of how information technology and the social context of information seeking and access is changing; and also how limited is the futurology of information.

It’s also interesting, and perhaps ironic, to see how printed books have a value as tools for making good use of e-readers and blogs; and how good books can appear in very different formats.