The Occasional Informationist

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 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”.

Editor Blaise Cronin (writing in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(4), 639, 2010) adds that he is sad, but “mindful … of the shifts in author’s and readers’ behaviour that led to the decision”. ARIST will be, to a degree, replaced by a series of what the ASIST announcement refers to as “shorter, more tightly focused review articles” in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, which Cronin tells us will “focus on hot topics and emerging areas of interest in addition to providing more conventional bibliographic or historical reviews of a field or subfield”. What makes the decision rather unusual is that the publisher, Information Today, is apparently willing to continue with the series; a reversal of the common situation where a publisher argues for closure on economic grounds, while sponsors and editors argue for continuation.

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.

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 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.

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 come in at inconvenient hours and move the books around. On the other, there must be a responsiveness to changes in the intellectual world which these tools represent, or they will soon decline to irrelevance.

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’?

Pluto was discovered in 1930. Calculations of the orbits of the other planets suggested that there might be one or more extra planets still be found. It was spotted from a lengthy and painstaking manual comparison of photographic plates by Clyde Tombaugh, a farm boy from Kansas, working at the Lowell Observatory to earn the money to pay for a college degree.

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.

Ultimately, in 2006, the International Astronomical Union, after considerable in-fighting, voted for a new definition of a planet within the solar system; essentially a roughly round body in orbit around the sun with sufficient gravitational force to have removed other objects from its orbit. This reduced Pluto to the status of a ‘dwarf planet’, on a par with many other similar bodies, and not a really a planet at all. What a come down from its status as one of the Nine Planets, their names memorised by generations of school children, often with the aid of mnemonics such as My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nice Pizza.

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.

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 would grow up to be a scientist. Sadly, secondary school convinced me that I neither liked laboratory work, nor had any particularly mathematical ability. Nonetheless, I decided to take science subjects in my later school years, to the irritation of my teachers, who pointed out – correctly – that I was much better at arts subjects. Browsing in the school library, I discovered that there was a profession of “information science”, which sounded ideal for me, involving, as it seemed, dealing with the concepts and ideas of science, without the tedious practical and calculation aspects. I tried to find out more, and received a pleasant letter from the Institute of Information Scientists, advising me, as initial steps, to get a science degree and learn at least two foreign languages.

I studied organic chemistry at Liverpool University. I was really more interested in physics and astronomy, but realised that I was unlikely to do well enough in maths to make a real success of either. Unknowingly, I was entering the path of ‘chemist to information scientist’, which was remarkably common among those of my generation, and the previous one. I certainly found the logical structure of chemistry, and the range of classifications and representation for structures, reactions, and concepts in general, to be the most interesting aspect.

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.

After finishing my PhD, I wanted a change from the academic world, and went to work in the research information services of the Pfizer pharmaceutical company. My interviewer was interested to know if I considered myself an ‘information scientist’ or a ‘scientific informationist’. At the time, I don’t think I understood fully what he meant. With hindsight, I can see that at that time I was the latter; I considered myself to be a chemical scientist who happened to work with information systems, rather than in the laboratory. It was only later that I began to think of myself rather as someone socialising in information per se, and with library/information services.

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.

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 quarters still is, hailed as a forerunner of the personal computer, the web, hypertext, and modern information retrieval in general.

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.

Michael Buckland, in a book written in 2006, has developed in detail one of these themes; that many of Bush’s ideas were previously developed by Emanuel Goldberg (1881-1970), a German/Israeli engineer and photographic scientist. In particular, the Rapid Selector device, development of which leant Bush much of his scientific authority, was by preceded by Goldberg’s Statistical Machine.

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

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 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.

In information terms, Dyson writes, we have all necessarily been kayak builders, scraping together the bits of information we need from wherever we can find it. The Internet now pushes us towards the dug-out canoe strategy. We can find large amounts of information easily on almost any topic; the essential skill is being able to swiftly discard the inappropriate and inessential, ‘cutting away’ until we have the knowledge structure we need.

Dyson laments that “I was a hardened kayak builder, trained to collect every available stick. I resent having to learn the new skills. But those who don’t will be left paddling logs, not canoes”. As one who was an information science practitioner when kayak building was the order of the day, I can empathise. But, as I tell my students, a change came over information services about a decade ago, though not all practitioners have yet noticed. In the old, kayak-building, days, the task was to find as much good information as we could. The task now is to protect our users from the influx of information which threatens to overwhelm us all, making discrimination and rational selection difficult; canoe-building indeed.

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?

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.

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

I attended the second of the INFuture conferences, organised by the Department of Information Sciences at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, in early November. The general theme of the conference series is ‘The Future of Information Sciences’, and the focus for this conference was ‘Digital Resources and Knowledge Sharing’. By comparison with the first of the conferences, held two years ago, this one had many more papers, with parallel sessions the norm, and a larger and much more internationally diverse audience.

Most of the conference was held in the renovated grandeur of the Palace Hotel, set in the ‘Green Horseshoe’ of parks in Central Zagreb. As before, the organisers had arranged a nice social programme, culminating in the conference dinner amid the Art Deco surroundings of the Zagreb journalists’ club.

With over 70 papers presented – the main themes being digitisation and preservation, knowledge management, language technologies, cultural heritage, and the use of web 2.0 and virtual environments – picking out highlights is difficult. My own presentation, on possible future scenarios for the library / information environment, provoked some interesting discussions, and attracted the attention of the Croatian TV network, who interviewed me immediately after the talk. It may yet be on YouTube…

A number of presentations particularly interested me, across the whole range of topics covered.

A presentation by Steven Krauwer on the development of the CLARIN project, which aims to promote language tools within the EU, looked forward to retrieval systems which could answer questions such as: find a video clip of a person speaking German with a Spanish accent; find articles on a specific topic from a French newspaper, and summarise them in Polish; find negative remarks about football in the proceedings of the German Parliament. We are not there yet, but progress is being made.

Kia Ng, from Leeds University, gave a fascinating talk on the i-Maestro system for recording the whole of a cultural performance, in multimedia form. He gave examples for the recording of dance, conducting, performance art, and violin playing. In the latter, as well as the image of the player, and the sound recording, the system recorded the detailed movements of the bow and the pressure on each string. While this was designed mainly as a teaching aid, it is potentially searchable by many parameters, and could in principle be used to recreate a performance…. this way to the Star Trek Holodeck.

A presentation by Senka Drobac of the Ruder Boskovic Institute in Zagreb outlined the EU’s Dariah project, aimed at building an ICT infrastructure to support the arts and cultural sector, in the same way that grid computing is supporting the physical and biological sciences. This particular perspective showed how such initiatives can be valuable in smaller countries such as Croatia.

I also liked the contribution of the UK information consultant, Bob Bater. Speaking generally of knowledge management issues, he reminded us that, according to a study by the UK National Archives, 80% of information lives ‘in the wild’: in unstructured and uncatalogued environments such as emails, blogs, wikis, and twitter messages. Bob also reminded us that the 17th century English savant Francis Bacon is often quoted as saying that “Knowledge is power”, whereas what he actually said that “But mere knowledge is not power: it is only possibility. Action is power; and its highest manifestation is when it is directed by knowledge”. Not really the same thing at all.

A very good conference overall, and the organisers should feel pleased with themselves. The full materials will be available soon on the conference website.