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, to the still broader scope of the changing concepts and contexts of information throughout history (Black 2006, Weller 2007). These studies, naturally enough, begin with the origins recorded information, perhaps with a nod to the question as to whether earlier manifestations such as cave paintings can be counted as a form of communicable information.

There is, however, a bigger picture to be considered, as is shown by Fred Spier’s new book Big history and the future of humanity. This is essentially the first textbook of the relatively novel ‘big history’ approach, pioneered by such scholars as David Christian, John Mears and Spiers himself. This, while not ignoring the usual subject-matter of history – the development of human societies and civilisations – sets it into a much wider context: the historical development of the earth and its life, itself set within the wider context of the development of the solar system, the galaxy and the universe itself. This big picture approach to history necessarily involves input from cosmologists, astrophysicists, geologists, biologists, and archaeologists, as much as conventional historians.

The big context is indeed very much bigger. I was struck by an analogy given by Brian Cox in his BBC TV series, Wonders of the Solar System. If the history of the earth, since its formation, is represented by an outstretched arm, then the whole of human history can be erased by a single swipe of a nail file.

Fred Spier

Another of Spier’s themes is that, when we come to human history, the increasing ability to disseminate information widely and rapidly is one of the major forces influencing the course of ‘recent big history’, leading to ‘informatization’ as one aspect of globalisation. Here we see an overlap between the big history approach, and more conventional information history.

It seems to me that taking a broad view of information history, and placing it within the context of a ‘big information history’, has advantages in encouraging a truly multidisciplinary approach to the study of information.

References

Bates, M.J. (2006), Fundamental forms of information, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(8), 1033-1045

Bawden, D. (2007), Organised complexity, meaning and understanding: an approach to a unified view of information for information science, Aslib Proceedings, 59(4/5), 307-327

Black, A. (2006), Information history, Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 40, 441-473

Spier, F. (2010), Big history and the future of humanity, Chichester: Wiley/Blackwell

Weller, T. (2007), Information history: its importance, relevance and future, Aslib Proceedings, 59(4/5), 437-448

UCL, the venue for CoLIS 2010

As I said in my closing remarks, the conference was unusual in my experience in that (1) every speaker turned up, and spoke their intended topic, (2) every poster presenter turned up, with a poster, on the right day, and (3) every session chair ran their session to time. Doesn’t often happen like that.

Accounts of the conference have been given by a number of bloggers, including Charlie Mayor, Sheila Webber and the Information Literacy Research blog.

Over the next couple of months, we will be populating the conference website with copies of papers and posters, and links to published papers; the site will then remain available for the forseeable future.

The next, 8th, CoLIS conference is already being planned, to happen in Copenhagen in August 2013. A website is already operational, and announcements will be made on Twitter using the hashtag #colis2013.

The only, and rather cynical, comfort I draw from AUKML’s end relates to the library/information courses we run at City University London. For many years we had an elective in ‘media information’, which was quite popular in its day. We ceased running this a while ago, and still get some criticism from applicants and students for doing so. We can now, at least, point to the crisis in this sector’s viability as a justification for out decision.

Annabel Colley

Colley then widens her argument, to point out that this situation can be seen in many other sectors, where physical libraries may be outmoded, but information skills are certainly not. She urges CILIP (the main UK library / information professional body) to put emphasis on knowledge and skills rather than job titles, and to see ‘non-traditional’ information roles as central, rather than peripheral.

All of which is music to my ears, as this is exactly the perspective we take for our library / information courses at City University London. Trying to provide detailed practical training for specific professional roles, in a time of such change and uncertainty, is futile, and arguably positively harmful to our students. The best thing we can do is to provide the framework of understanding, knowledge and basic skills to enable our graduates to adapt to whatever environment they find themselves in.

How nice when other people say it for us.

Further reading

A Colley, Taking a skills-based approach to the future, Library and Information Update, June 2010, page 23

J Matarazzo and T Pearlsetein, Survival lessons for libraries: Staying afloat in turbulent waters – news / media libraries hit hard, Searcher, 2010, 18(4), available from http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/may10/Matarazzo_Pearlstein.shtml

Not for much longer. The sponsoring body, the American Society for Information Science and Technology, has decided to cease publication after the next, 2011, edition. The reasons given for what ASIST describe as an “agonizing” decision are that “the emotional and intellectual attachment to a printed ARIST was outweighed by a consensus of where scholarly communication is going and by the desire for instant online access by readers and authors”.

Blaise Cronin

What I suppose this means is that articles in ARIST are – by intention – relatively lengthy, detailed, closely argued and extensively referenced. Not at all what can be read easily and quickly in any format, and not pleasant to have to read on screen. It seems sad though, that a discipline which generally argues for critical analysis of information, and for a reflective use of the research knowledge-base, should be unable to sustain its own main tool for doing so. One tries not to say “dumbing down” but it’s a bit difficult to avoid. Would it have not been possible to restructure the material in the reviews for online reading; ARIST for the iPad would have been a very appealing prospect

The latest, and now we must say penultimate, volume of ARIST, volume 44 with a 2010 publication date, shows what will be lost. Authoritative and scholarly articles on philosophy and information studies, on the history of artificial intelligence research accompany shorter accounts on developments of communication within science, the new-ish discipline of usage bibliometrics, and the status of the much-hyped h-index. An insightful analysis of the literature of facet analysis shows how this ‘legacy’ topic is again coming into vogue, Researchers and policy makers alike would find the reviews of digital government and of the information practices of immigrants of value. And so on, through the twelve chapters of the volume.

Do the discipline and profession of information science, to say nothing of its teachers and students, really not need this kind of high-quality information source? Apparently not. I have much sympathy with those who took the decision I was, for a couple of years, editor of a short-lived European equivalent Perspectives in Information Management – the publisher pulled the plug on that one. So I am well aware of the difficulties, and demand on time and resources, to create such a high-quality offering. But as someone who has used ARIST for many years, and has more recently relied on it as a resource for my students, I feel it is a very regrettable step. I can, at least, think myself lucky to have been able to author an ARIST review (on 30 years of pharmaceutical information, with my colleague Lyn Robinson) which will appear in the final ARIST next year.

“The ideal of thinking for oneself is in fact a little difficult to describe. It would perhaps best be achieved by the student or enquirer being let loose in an ideally anonymous and undiscriminating library. This would be an unusual library which collects every book, each of which is then edited to eliminate as far as possible the mere effects of prestige. The author’s name and qualifications and place of employment would be carefully removed from every volume, together with the usual list of eminent names from the acknowledgements page. There would be no information about the press which published the item in question. Any phrases of puffery from the covers of the volume would be carefully blanked out. In the ideal case, the text would all be translated into a standardised English, and every humanising digression would be deleted. Articles would all appear as if they had been published in a single journal, The Pure Reason Review, and each would be accompanied by a Government Diversity Warning, in bold at the top of the page: ‘Caution: What follows might be an article by a well-known Harvard philosopher, but is equally likely to be a student essay. You must judge the content for yourself’. Now I am not saying that there might not be certain advantages for those who are already philosophically educated having on occasion to read anonymised materials. I once read the first few pages of a print-out which I took to be from a student essay. It turned out to be by a well-known Harvard philosopher. This is an instructive experience we all need from time to time. But needless to say, as a way of finding one’s way in this subject of ours, confinement to the anonymised library from the outset would, I believe, be quite hopeless.”

[Chris Coope, The doctor of philosophy will see you now, in Conceptions of Philosophy: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 65, edited by Anthony O'Hear, Cambridge University Press, 2009, This passage is on pages 183-184.]

Chris Coope encapsulates exactly some the thoughts, and misgivings, about anonymised information which I have been incubating of a long while, and in several respects.

As a journal editor, I observe the convention of ‘double blind’ peer review. The referees do not know who the article of the author is, and the author does not know who the referees are. Obviously, I accept the need for this, if only for mutual confidence. And yet, I note that such limited research as has been done shows that anonymity or otherwise makes no difference to the outcomes. And I note that many referees like to guess the identity of the authors, and very often succeed.

As someone who has run training courses on use of the internet for library/information purposes since the earliest days of the web, one of the points I have always tried to get across is the homogenising effect which results from information of varying kinds coming through a web browser. The visual and tactile clues of varying kinds of physical document – a newspaper, a printed book, a handwritten note, a reprint of an academic journal article, etc. – are largely lost in the web environment, forcing the information to be much more active in assessing what it is they are looking at. It is interesting to see the various ways in which indicators of authenticity and authority have emerged in the web environment.

As someone interested in new forms of information resource, I have watched with interest the emergence of the Wikipedia model of crowdsourced anonymised information products. Not, on the whole, believing that crowds have much wisdom, I have been a little surprised how much I like Wikipedia, though I am often frustrated by its lack of consistency and would – needless to say – never rely on it for anything important. It is interesting to note that it has had to tighten up its editorial procedures, with the apparent aim of being more like a ‘proper’ encyclopaedia, though its choice of anonymous Wikipedians to do so does not appeal to me at all. I would much rather have signed articles, and clearly stated disagreements, rather than anonymous tidying up.

So, thank you Chris Coope for articulating in a properly philosophical manner my concerns about anonymised information, at least of the academic and professional variety. May libraries always discriminate, and never anonymise.

Pluto and its moons

A new book, Alan Boyle’s The case for Pluto (Wiley, 2010) gives an interesting and accessible account of one such recent and dramatic change. Pluto, the nineth planet of our solar system, was recently summarily downgraded in status to being something less than a planet. In the course of describing this issue, Boyle gives an insight into the intellectual ferments, academic turf wars, and political (in all senses) debates, which underlie such changes in seemingly dry terminology and taxonomy issues, such as ‘what makes a planet a planet’?

Clyde Tombaugh

From the first, it was obvious that Pluto was an odd sort of planet. It is much smaller than any other, and its orbit is far from the norm. However, the final objection came when it was found in the 1990s, using computer-aided technologies to greatly speed up the sort of techniques that found Pluto in the first place, that it is merely one of many similar small planet-like objects in what has come to be called the Kuiper belt. Nor is it even the largest. Eris, discovered in 2005 (and originally unofficially named Xena, after the warrior princess) is bigger, and is possible that still larger ‘mini-worlds’ remain to be found in the outer solar system.

'True colour' image of Pluto

What is interesting about this is the variety of views what appeared as to how the concept of ‘planet’ should be considered. These have consequences for the ways in which classifications, thesauri and the like respond to changes in intellectual structures.

There was a major debate between astronomers and planetary scientists. The former group are primarily interested in mathematical analysis of the dynamics of bodies, and their gravitational effects and consequences; for them, Pluto is too small and dynamically insignificant to be a planet. The latter regard a planet as anything that is large enough to have interesting things like geological processes, surface features, and weather; Pluto, which is believed to show seasonal variations, is, for them, definitely a planet.

There is also a difference between those who regard the definition of the planet concept as being primarily a means of categorising the known worlds of the solar system, and those who think it should be sufficiently robust to categorise the worlds now being discovered around other stars.

The Pluto debate also had some political and emotional aspects. Pluto was the only (former) major planet discovered by an American, and there was some feeling in the USA that an American discovery was being somehow belittled by the rest of the world. And the IAU must have been startled to see that its arcane deliberations were leading to ‘save Pluto’ demonstrations, and many angry letters from those who ‘loved the little planet’.

The library/information community somehow has to make sense of this kind of debate, and change in the meaning of concepts, and does so in various ways. The Dewey classification has adapted to the formal change in Pluto’s status. In the 20th edition, Pluto was a planet in its own right at 523.482 , alongside Neptune as ‘trans-Uranic planets’. By the 22nd edition, it had been relocated to 523.4922, no longer in the hierarchy under planets, but under ‘Kuiper belt objects’.

The Astronomy Thesaurus, constructed well before the brouhaha of 2006 neatly avoids the tricky issues, by the simple expedient of not including any specifically named bodies. The terms PLANTS and DWARF PLANETS are included, but not defined, and the relationship between the concepts is not spelt out.

There is, I suppose, no right answer. The case of Pluto shows the problems afflicting the information specialist in trying to make keep up with changing intellectual landscapes, while keeping reasonable stability for collection organisation; and the need for a good understanding of the subject matter to do so sensibly.

Portrait of the author....

Liverpool University

Getting to the end of my studies, I returned to the idea of information science, and was also inspired by the possibility of a career in academic libraries; I was assured that this was the ideal job for someone keen on science but not its practical side, as university librarians spent all day reading academic journals. Fortunately, I found out otherwise in sufficient time to avoid an unfortunate career choice.

I was able, without too much trouble , to get a place on a Masters course, complete with a grant, and an offer of pre-course experience; things were easier in those days.

My trainee period was as an information assistant in a pharmaceutical company, Smith Kline and French, long since swallowed up, by a series of mergers, into GlaxoSmithKline. I experienced a variety of tasks, at a time just before information services of that kind went over to digital services. Doing a comprehensive search back through the company’s research files involved a trawl through the industrial archaeology of information retrieval. The oldest material was still in paper card-files; coming up-to-date meant using, in turn, edge-notched cards, optical coincidence (‘peek-a-boo’) cards, punched cards, and finally computer files. Literature searching was still largely reliant on paper indexes; online searching was just beginning to be important. This short trainee period confirmed my enthusiasm for scientific information work, although I was already more interested in the idea of developing new systems rather than in service provision per se.

I did a Masters in Information Studies at Sheffield University, in what was then the Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science, now the Department of Information Studies. Although the course was restricted to students with first degrees in scientific subjects, it had a very broad syllabus, from the basics of cataloguing, classification and reference work, to the latest research into information retrieval and scientific documentation. In retrospect, I don’t feel I got as much out of the course as I might; I was too focused on my interests in scientific information, and chemical information in particular.

Although I looked looked at job opportunities at the end of the course, it seemed fairly natural for me to stay on at Sheffield to do a PhD; funding for doctoral research was much more easily gained then than it is now. Sheffield, as now, was one of the world centres for research and development in systems for handling chemical structure information, and my PhD study was in one of the main lines of that work; the use of information systems to study relations between the structure and the properties of chemical substances. This is now a very well-established topic, of both scientific and commercial importance; I like to think that my studies put a few bricks in its foundations, though their methods, analysing structures coded intellectually in line notations by programs written in FORTAN and COBOL, and now of strictly historic interest.

Pfizer at Sandwich

Part of my work at Pfizer involved the sort of chemical structure developments that I had worked on at Sheffield. We produced searching systems for chemical substances, reactions, and 3-dimensional structures, and also pioneered searching by similarity, for browsing, and by dissimilarity, for creating files of ‘interestingly different’ molecules to test, as well as systems for structure-property correlation. Much of this work was done in conjunction with academic collaborators, particularly at Sheffield, and reinforced by view of the value of academic input to practice. We also collaborated with colleagues in other companies, and in some respects were practicing the idea of open source software before the term became popular. I also found myself getting involved in more conventional ‘library/information’ activities; literature searching, revising the (home made) library classification scheme, thesaurus construction, and creating library system interfaces, as well as trying out new types of hardware and software.

When I decided it was time to move on, going back to the academic world was a natural move (I had flirted with the idea of management consultancy, but fortunately the recruiters to whom I talked were more realistic about my capabilities there). I had already been involved in a lot of ‘external’ activities while at Pfizer (sometimes, if truth be told, not entirely to the pleasure of my managers), including writing articles and books, editing periodicals, getting involved with professional bodies, and conducting professional development training courses. I certainly feel that my time as a practitioner has made me a more effective academic, in what is substantially a vocational subject.

I was fortunate enough to find a position in the Department of Information Science at City University London, and have, as yet, seen no reason to want to leave. My subject interests have broadened a lot, though I still retain an interest in my original field of scientific information. I have also had the chance – through working with the library/information programmes of George Soros’s Open Society Initiative, teaching on summer schools for librarians at the Central European University in Budapest, and participating in Socrates/Erasmus exchanges – to develop a continuing involvement with colleagues in other countries, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe.

During my time at City, we have moved from being a department focused solely on the teaching of Information Science courses, to one in which courses in Library Science now give us our largest student group. I occasionally feel it ironic that, while my work in the ‘real world’ was never in a institution named a ‘library’, the largest group of my students have librarianship as their main interest, and do not, I hope find me too much of an irrelevance. I think this shows the inter-connectedness of the library/information world. Crossing the boundaries of the sectors, and working outside comfort zones, are vital for stimulating new ideas and developing the profession, and ourselves.

Vannevar Bush

Revisionist authors have looked closely at this legend in more recent years. They tell us that his article was actually written in 1939, but not published until several years later. They remind us that it wasn’t about libraries and public collections at all – Bush said they were another story – but about personal collections, organised by their owner and creator according to their personal whims. The most Bush would allow was the idea of a Memex encyclopaedia or professional collection, again organised by an individual. His distaste for traditional classification and indexing is then seen into a different context; indeed, there is no need to bother with these, if you are avoiding the main purpose for which they are created. And they remind us that Bush thought in terms of microforms, even when others were considering digital computing.

We are told that Bush wasn’t even that farsighted. Michael Buckland suggests that authors such as Paul Otlet, a documentalist, and Walter Schürmeyer, a librarian, had ideas about information retrieval that were more forward looking, and presented much earlier. That the, undoubtedly great, influence of his Memex article was due more to his perceived political, professional and social position than to any intrinsic merits. And that many of his supposedly novel ideas were, in fact, due to others.

Emanuel Goldberg

Buckland traces in detail, and with meticulous referencing, the life of Goldberg, whose influence of the development of mechanised documentation in the had largely been overlooked. Goldberg’s personal and professional life – from his birth in Tsarist Russia, his training as a chemist and later a photographic scientist in Germany, his leading role in the Zeiss Ikon company, and his later career in Israeli after his expulsion form Germany by the Nazis – reflects much of the history of twentieth century Europe.

Goldberg first developed a practical photographic ‘microdot’ process, for storing large amounts of information in miniature, and cameras to create such images. An enthusiastic commentator in 1926 suggested that this would allow someone to carry a library of a thousand books in their pocket. Another application is, of course, espionage. J Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI wrote an article on such usage in 1946, but replacing Goldberg’s name as creator by that of “the famous Professor Zapp .. of Dresden”; Buckland tells us that to this day Professor Zapp is still cited as the originator of microforms. Later commentators suggested the use of Goldberg’s storage devices in desktop libraries, very similar to Bush’s ideas of the Memex. Goldberg then went on to develop a way of easily retrieving material from a collection of microforms, the Statistical Machine. This, Buckland shows, was certainly known to Bush and his colleagues. They might have been excused for overlooking it initially, when they developed their Rapid Selector; part from its name, the associated patent specification spoke of its use for ‘adding, sorting and other statistical operations’, rather than anything to do with the retrieval of information. Nonetheless, know of it they did. Indeed, explicit credit was given to Goldberg by Bush’s associate, Ralph Shaw, director of the US National Library of Agriculture, in a 1949 Journal of Documentation article describing their own device. Nonetheless, Bush and Memex were names that stuck in the popular consciousness. Buckland reminds us that Robert Fairthorne was alone, until recently, in giving credit to Goldberg for first envisaging a ‘Memex-like’ machine.

So what does this tell us? Perhaps that we need a period of reflection to see what it is that seers and futurologists are really saying: Richard Veith tells us that Bush was, in a way, prophesying the iPod and personal information management, rather than digital libraries and the web. Perhaps that we need inspirational writers – and Bush was certainly that – even if they don’t get all their sources correct. Certainly that the detailed history of our subject, especially when set out in admirable books like Buckland’s, is both fascinating and essential

Background reading

Buckland, M.K. (2006) Emanuel Goldberg and his knowledge machine: information, invention and political forces, Westport CT: Libraries Unlimited

Bush, V. (1945), As we may think, Atlantic Monthly, 176, 101-108, available at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/12/as-we-may-think/3881

Houston, R.D. and Harmon, G. (2007), Vannevar Bush and Memex, Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 41, 55-92

Veith, R.H. (2006), Memex at 60: Internet or iPod?, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(9), 1233-1242

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 Edge asks a Question of the Year. For January 2010, this was ‘How is the Internet changing the way you think?‘. (The libertarian in me is pleased to see that, although the question as phrased didn’t allow for the answer ‘not at all’, some free-thinkers among the respondents said exactly this.)

172 participants, whose the Edge – accurately if immodestly – describes as ‘an array of world-class scientists, artists and creative thinkers, give an answer to this question, some at considerable length. Many of them give food for thought, and some are downright inspiring. I will draw on several of them for future posts.

I was, however, immediately caught by one response in particular George Dyson, a historian of science, writing of kayaks versus canoes, reminds us that, among the indigenous people of the shores of the North Pacific, there were two approaches to the building of boats. The Aleuts, living on islands bereft of trees, combed the beaches for pieces of driftwood. When they had, laboriously and over time, gathered enough pieces of the right kind, they used the to build a kayak. The Tlingit, living in areas where the rainforests grew down to the shoreline, adopted a different strategy; taking an entire tree, they simply cut away and discarded the wood they did not need, ending up with a dug-out canoe.

assemble a kayak ?

carve a canoe ?

Ben Macintyre, writing in the London Times, based a column – we need a dug-out canoe to navigate the net – on Dyson’s idea, and added to it, to give the striking mental picture of a fox in a dug-out canoe paddling downstream, pursued by a hedgehog in a kayak. He adds in the thought of the, very much pre-Internet, Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin, that thinkers come in two forms. There is the fox, who knows something about many things, and draws inspiration from many sources. And there is the hedgehog, who has one big idea, and devotes their intellectual life to refining and expanding it. The Internet, says Macintyre, makes us all into foxes, browsing and scavenging for what we need.

But, of course, the fox must be able to avoid wasting time, and suffering from continuous partial attention, and all the other perils into which the ubiquity of internet information can lead us. The fox must become a canoe builder, skilfully hacking away the dross, to quickly reveal the structure within.

I cannot help wondering however, if there is really no place for the hedgehogs, contentedly floating their kayaks over the waters of cyberspace. The Internet is a big ‘place’; is there not room for more than one species in its ecology?

Born in Australia in 1918, Brian Vickery – like so many information scientists of his generation and the one which followed – graduated in chemistry. Having worked for a period as a chemist in an explosives factory, perhaps more due to the necessities of wartime than by choice, he then made the move into librarianship, within a research institute in Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), then the UK world-leader in the chemical industry. He moved, through a series of posts in British national and academic libraries, to direct the research department at Aslib, then a major player in information research of the more applied kind. Finally he became head of the then School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at University College London, from which post he retired in 1983.

His career path was similar to several information scientists – including myself – who first studied chemistry, and then worked in industry before entering academia or information research organisation. Perhaps the uniquely sophisticated ontologies, nomenclatures and structure representations of the subject led us to an interest in more general information issues. Certainly, I think that our experience as information practitioners helped us in the academic world. Fortunately for me, I was of a later generation than Vickery, and was spared war service; I doubt that my practical chemical skills would have been at all suitable for application in an explosives factory.

Although he was perhaps best known for his studies in information organisation and information retrieval – his seminal paper ‘Structure and function in retrieval languages’ (Vickery 1971) was selected as one the most influential Journal of Documentation articles from the journal’s first six decades – Brian Vickery’s interests spanned the whole of what he and his contemporaries regarded as “information science”. An issue of Journal of Documentation (1988, volume 44 issue 3) was devoted to a series of essays presented to him; including a list of his publications up to that date, this shows clearly the breadth of his contributions. This breath is also shown by his scientific autobiography “A long search for information” (Vickery 2004A), by his magisterial textbook which went into a third edition (Vickery 2004B), and by the fact that he was regarded as the natural choice to be editor of a monograph of reviews celebrating 50 years of Journal of Documentation (Vickery 1994), and guest editor of a similar monograph marking the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Institute of Information Scientists (Gilchrist 2009).

In this last guest editorial – his last professional article – Vickery noted that a number of contributors to the volume – including myself – seemed rather uneasy or uncertain about the future of information science. I am not sure that I was really uneasy: the passage which he quoted had me commenting that we had not fully worked out the theoretical insights of the founders of the discipline, let alone replaced them with new insights. I intended this as a call for further progress to be made, rather than an expression of unease. But perhaps Vickery was right, in implying that if more progress has not been made so far, then perhaps it is not likely to come in the future.

At all events, and to whatever extent we feel uneasy or uncertain about the future of the information science discipline, I think we should all be encouraged by Brian Vickery’s convictions, expressed consistently over many years, that ‘traditional’ information science insights are still very relevant, and not yet fully appreciated in a wider academic and professional world. Regardless of advances in technology, Vickery insists, there are some fundamentals of human information-related behaviour and of the organisation of information, which do not change. It is the business of the information scientist to investigate them, and to show their relevance in whatever information environment they may be instantiated. I think that is a message we would do well to hold on to.

References

Gilchrist, A. (ed.) (2009), information science in transition, London: Facet

Vickery, B.C. (1971), Structure and function in retrieval languages, Journal of Documentation, 27(2), 69-82

Vickery, B.C. (ed.) (1994), Fifty years of information progress: a Journal of Documentation review, London: Aslib

Vickery, B.C. (2004A), A long search for information, Occasional Paper 213. Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne

Vickery, B.C. and Vickery, A. (2004), Information Science in Theory and Practice (3rd edn.), Munich: K.G. Saur