This is an adaption of an editorial to appear in Journal of Documentation, jointly written by myself and Lyn Robinson Ever since Rolf Landauer famously announced that “information is physical”, there has been an increasing tendency by scientists including David Deutsch, Seth Lloyd and Anton Zellinger to claim a place for information as a fundamental… Continue reading As long as we don’t pretend that it is science?
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CoLIS8 Copenhagen
The eight in the series of CoLIS (Conceptions of Library and Information Science) conferences was held this month in Copenhagen. The splendidly efficient organization was provided by the Royal School of Librarianship and Information Science, the Danish iSchool, now being incorporated into the University of Copenhagen’s Arts faculty. As always with CoLIS, the topics covered… Continue reading CoLIS8 Copenhagen
Requiem for AltaVista
“AltaVista”, you will say, if you are an Internet user of a certain age; “ah yes, I used to use it before Google came along”. The news of the demise of the venerable - in Web terms at least, since it’s been around since 1995 - search engine will not cause many ripples in the… Continue reading Requiem for AltaVista
Visualizing, saving time and promoting insight
An interesting recent paper by Luciano Floridi, doyen of the philosophy of information, and his colleagues Min Chen and Rita Borgo asks what information visualization, one of the hottest topics in the information sciences over recent years in really for. Their answer is an intriguing one; it is not, as most visualization enthusiasts would have… Continue reading Visualizing, saving time and promoting insight
Senate House Library and the context of documents
“Research is concerned with discovery”, Christopher Pressler tells us in his introduction to Scala Publishing’s splendid new book on the University of London’s Senate House Library, “Libraries are the essential mode of travel.” The centrality of collections of documents in an organized space is the intellectual theme to what might (wrongly) be dismissed as a… Continue reading Senate House Library and the context of documents
Physical plus digital, but more physical than you might think
Until quite recently, the world of recorded information was physical: print-on-paper, plus the paper card ‘machinery’ well described by Marcus Krajewski’s book Paper Machines. Mechanised documentation – punched cards, edge-notched cards, and the like – added some automation, but were still very much physical objects. Then the information world became a bit digital, with computer… Continue reading Physical plus digital, but more physical than you might think
Imagination, exciting mixes and the improvement of information research
“It is my contention”, writes Paul Sturges in a recent article on imagination in LIS research’, “that much of LIS research at all levels, throughout the world, is dull formulaic and often disgracefully bad”. This is bad for research, of course, but “given that LIS is a practical discipline, it is something of a professional… Continue reading Imagination, exciting mixes and the improvement of information research
The declining impact of the impact factor?
This is an amended version of an editorial to be published in Journal of Documentation. Impact factors have been, for quite a few years now, the single metric most closely associated with the ‘quality’ of an academic journal, or similar dissemination mechanism. This simple, perhaps simplistic, measure has been receiving an increasing level of criticism… Continue reading The declining impact of the impact factor?
Thomas Jefferson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and information history for the future
I gave a talk to a meeting of CILIP’s Library and Information History group, which was celebrating its 50th anniversary. It was a short and informal presentation, which – as it was US election day – had a presidential theme, and looked at some reasons why library and information history is worthwhile as a subject… Continue reading Thomas Jefferson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and information history for the future
Knowledge, documents and a London location
As documents, and the whole information and communication environment, become increasingly digital, it is natural to assume that physical location becomes of less importance. Two newly published books remind us that this idea should be examined with a critical eye. Rosemary Ashton’s Victorian Bloomsbury, a splendidly scholarly and well-produced intellectual and cultural history of that… Continue reading Knowledge, documents and a London location
The Occasional Informationist 