The Occasional Informationist

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”. [...]

Coming back to the blog after an enforced lay-off during a busy term, I was more than a little disconcerted to find that someone had hacked into it, and vandalised it; or so it seemed when viewed on an iPad. Of course they hadn’t really. It was just that WordPress had thought it a good [...]

In a previous post, I wrote about Maurice Line, the eminent British librarian, who died last year. One of Maurice’s specialities was his ability to show up what he regarded as the failings of the profession in a pithy and very quotable style. I reproduce a selection of typical Line-isms below, taken from just two [...]

Rather belatedly, we should note the death in September 2010 of Maurice Line. One of the leaders of his generation of British librarians, Line was always a proponent of the value of research in library and information. I am not sure whether he would have liked the terms ‘evidence-based practice’ or ‘reflective practitioner’, but he [...]

City University London is offering 75 fully-funded studentships for doctoral study, with information science as one of the areas to be supported. The Centre for Information Science, set in the wider Department of Information Science, is City’s focus for the study of the academic foundations of the information disciplines and professions. Our research and publications, [...]

News of the death of Benoît Mandelbrot should lead us to reflect on his creative work over wide areas of mathematics, his innovative use of computer graphics to convey his results, and his enthusiastic popularisation of his works, through books such as The Fractal Geometry of Nature. Mandelbrot, whose obituary in the Guardian gives a [...]

This is a version of an editorial written for the Journal of Documentation. The future of the book has received a good deal of attention, as we move into an increasingly digital information environment. The e-book has become a reality, and the prospect of books being superseded entirely by blogs, wikis and other novel digital [...]

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 [...]