The Occasional Informationist

This is an amended version of an editorial written for Journal of Documentation. Information history is a new discipline, located at the boundary where history meets the sciences of information. This subject ranges from the narrow history of the information sciences and professions, to the broader historical development of libraries, information services and information management, [...]

The 7th CoLIS (Conceptions of Library and Information Science) conference was held at University College London between 21st and 24th June. As Programme Chair, I am bound to be biased, but, after leaving a decent period for reflection, it seems to me that it was a great sucess. Participants have been kind enough to use [...]

Although I have never had very much to do with newspaper libraries, and other media information services, I still felt a little sad at the news of the demise of the Association of UK Media Librarians. For over 20 years this was the professional body for information specialists in this sector. Now, alas, the double [...]

Academic disciplines usually have few have few scholarly resources that can reasonably be described as ‘jewels’; this label can certainly be applied to Annual Reviews of Information Science and Technology, which has for 45 years been the main forum for scholarly review articles in information science. Not for much longer. The sponsoring body, the American [...]

We all, I’m sure, have occasions when an idea stays in our heads for ages, perhaps appearing from different angles, but we never quite get around to clarifying for ourselves exactly what it’s about. How nice when a proper philospher does it for us, without being asked. “The ideal of thinking for oneself is in [...]

The makers and maintainers of classifications, thesauri and other tools for indexing and arranging human knowledge have to tread a delicate balance. On the one hand, they want to keep things stable as much as possible; users are annoyed if major changes are made too often, particularly if it means that hapless librarians have to [...]

I try not to talk too much about myself in this blog, but make an exception here. This post gives a brief account of how I came into the library/information professions, as a contribution to the excellent Library Routes project. When I was young, I was fascinated by science, and science fiction, and imagined I [...]

This is a version of an editorial to appear in the Journal of Documentation. Vannevar Bush gets a mixed press these days. Once he was hailed as a ‘father of information science’ – some called him our ‘Godfather’ – on the basis of his 1945 Atlantic Monthly vision of Memex. This was, and in some [...]

Speculating on the future, and spotting trends, is always fun, and I indulge myself quite a lot in this blog in ruminating about these things from an information viewpoint. I find myself quite outdone, however, by the Edge web forum, which examines new trends and concepts, particularly in science and technology . Each year, the [...]

At the start of the 2010, we heard the sad news of the death of Brian Vickery in October last year. He was one of the leading lights of British information science over many years. This post is an expanded version of a short appreciation which I wrote as an editorial for Journal of Documentation. [...]