So, the 2011 International Online Information Meeting will be the last to be held in the Kensington area of London. Next December, the show moves east to the ExCel conference centre in Docklands. I have to say I feel rather melancholic at the news. True, the exhibition had looked a bit lost for the past… Continue reading A Farewell to Kensington
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The city, the world, what cannot be measured, and the information environment
An interesting critique under the title 'The city, the world and what cannot be measured', written by Adam Frank in a blog post for the US National Public Radio Service in the last days of the old year (Frank 2011), discusses a speech given in 2010 by the Václav Havel, the former Czech president who… Continue reading The city, the world, what cannot be measured, and the information environment
Very Short Information
Oxford University Press's Very Short Introductions series will be familiar to anyone who is old-fashioned enough to still visit serious bookshops. Small enough to fit into an average pocket at 18 by 10 cms, and around 160 pages, and attractively printed and produced, they have proved very popular. It helps, of course, that they are… Continue reading Very Short Information
Remembering Ludvik Finkelstein
Rather belated, this posting marks the death in August this year of Ludwik Finkelstein, formerly Dean of Engineering at City University London. Finkelstein was born in Lvov in Poland (now Lviv in the Ukraine) in 1929, and seemed destined for a career in his family's iron and steel business. Like so many from that part… Continue reading Remembering Ludvik Finkelstein
Information Ecology in Bratislava
Last week I had the chance to attend a conference on the topic of 'Information Ecology and Libraries', held at the library of the Comenius University in Bratislava. Organised by Jela Steinerová, of the University's department of library and information science, the meeting attracted participants from several countries. The city of Bratislava has now entirely… Continue reading Information Ecology in Bratislava
The Philosophy (or a philosophy?) of information
The publication of Luciano Floridi's magisterial work on the philosophy of information should, I think, be counted as a major contribution to the study of the foundations of the information sciences. This post is a modified version of a review written for journal publication. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "I wouldn't have minded if he'd called it A philosophy… Continue reading The Philosophy (or a philosophy?) of information
The mapping of science and the information sciences
It is just over fifty years since Derek de Solla Price produced his best known work: Little Science, Big Science. It was on the required reading list for my information science masters course, and – I suspect like many other students of the subject at that time – I wondered what it was doing there.… Continue reading The mapping of science and the information sciences
The document in the cave?
When I talk with my students about the history of recorded information, we usually agree that the rock and cave art of prehistoric times is a good starting point. The people who created such art clearly had a technology for conveying a form of communication across long periods of time, if not across space. As… Continue reading The document in the cave?
iPads, blogs and the information future
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".… Continue reading iPads, blogs and the information future
Why it’s always nice to ask first
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… Continue reading Why it’s always nice to ask first
The Occasional Informationist 