Introduction to Information Science

Citation

Cossham, A. (2013), "Introduction to Information Science", Library Management, Vol. 34 No. 3, pp. 265-267. https://doi.org/10.1108/01435121311315469

There is no single introductory text to information science, and this aims to be “the definitive information sciences text book for students of this subject and of information and knowledge management, librarianship, archives and records management worldwide”. Bawden and Robinson provide a concise discussion of many of the aspects of information science, emphasising the diversity of understandings and perspectives on information drawn from various disciplines. Six forewords by leading scholars set the book and its subject matter in context, and remind us what an interesting discipline this is.

Information science may mean different things to different people, and so the authors initially consider the scope and definition of this discipline (or set of disciplines), drawing from Buckland (2012) and identifying it “as being concerned with information recorded in documents, with meaning and knowledge” (p. 2), rather than with “computing, algorithms and information technologies” or “entropy in information theory and information physics”. Their chosen approach is that “Information science can best be understood as a field of study, with human recorded information as its concern, focusing on the components of the communication chain, studied through the perspective of domain analysis” (p. 4).

It is worth the reader bearing this in mind, as it may not match their own understanding of “information science”. The authors acknowledge the variety of understandings and in the summary to the “What is information science?” chapter, state “It is sensible to speak of the information sciences in the plural, to emphasise the breadth, multidisciplinary nature, and interconnectedness of the field” (p. 13). However, they do not return to this point elsewhere.

This book has a somewhat different emphasis to the 2011 ASIST Introduction to Information Science and Technology (Davis and Shaw, 2011), and is more broadly framed than Librarianship: An Introduction (Chowdhury et al., 2008). The aim, as stated by the authors in the Preface, is to point out topics and issues, describe them and show how they fit together, explain the terminology, and show where more detail can be found, rather than discuss any of this in depth. In this, they succeed admirably, and there is an impressive coverage.

Chapters on the history of information, philosophies and paradigms of information science, and basic concepts, are provided, and there is good coverage of domain analysis, which may be less familiar to many students. Chapters on information organisation, infometrics, and information behaviour likewise provide a clear outline of each topic, and a great deal is included in each.

The book moves on to broader concepts with chapters on communicating information, the information society, information management and policy, and digital literacy (including information literacy). The penultimate chapter on information science research presents a range of methods and approaches that a student might come across, and the final one considers the future of the information sciences, a topic also dealt with in the forewords.

Information technologies are quite rightly given a chapter, but this is somewhat less satisfactory than other chapters. One of the main problems with writing an introduction to information technology is working out how much a reader might know and how much can be considered a given. There is a huge amount that could potentially be written here, and the authors acknowledge that they can only briefly mention topics of importance to the information scientist. The Key Readings are in themselves all excellent texts but not, I think, necessarily key to this particular topic.

The book is impressively up to date, including works published in 2012 as well as identifying older works that a student of information science should be familiar with. Each chapter provides a guide to the Key Readings and significant publications. Several chapters, including the research chapter, provide relevant recent examples to illustrate the discussion, quite apart from the References themselves. Each chapter works as a coherent whole, but additionally, each sub‐section is a self‐contained unit that does not rely on the whole chapter for its sense and coverage.

Despite its approach and stated audience, the book is less strong in the area of archives and records management. In particular, archives are not the same as libraries, even if many skill and knowledge sets are similar, and the fundamental principles behind recordkeeping (notably provenance and original order) are not addressed well, reducing the ability of this book to be used as an introductory text for students interested in those disciplines.

Additionally, some topics are missing significant authors, although these omissions are few and the difficulty of covering everything in a book with this scope is acknowledged. A minor point is the inconsistencies in some references and the predominance of “cataloguing” where “cataloging” is required (something that is always obvious to cataloguing librarians).

This is a book that can be consulted as well as read, an impressive achievement. While it will not substitute for reading in depth on any topic, it will act as an excellent guide to what should be read. It provides an engaging and informative discussion of the many aspects that make information science the fascinating discipline that it is today.