Handbook of Information Science (Review)

Citation

David Bawden (2014), "Handbook of Information Science (Review)", Library Review, Vol. 63 No. 1/2, pp. 166-167. https://doi.org/10.1108/LR-10-2013-0131

Something called a handbook would be expected to be comprehensive, authoritative, detailed and of value for a substantial period. Within the limits of its coverage, which is considerably lesser than one might expect from the title, this book lives up to these expectations.

The book is a comprehensive, in-depth and – at over 900 pages – extensive survey of what the authors consider to be the core sub-disciplines within information science: information retrieval and knowledge representation, each of which gets one of the book ' s two major sections. Other topics – the nature of information and knowledge, information literacy, informetrics, user behaviour, and a few more – get quite brief coverage. Information society topics and information markets, including many applications of the techniques described in this book, are omitted on the basis that they are covered in a companion work, and there is very little on information and knowledge management.

This means that the book covers considerably less ground than the other texts on the subject (Davis and Shaw, 2011; Bawden and Robinson, 2012), to the extent that any buyer believing that they will have coverage of all – or even most – of information science will be disappointed. However, it is much more exhaustive and detailed in its treatment of its main topics. The extent of the information provided means that it will, in most cases, be unnecessary for the reader to consult the original literature, so that it will serve as a one-stop shop for those topics.

Those interested in the library science aspects of the information disciplines will probably find these sections on information organization and representation of more relevance than those on retrieval. However, all parts of the book may be of value to those wanting to have a clear introduction to those parts of the disciplines covered here, and in particular, to understand the basis of the research literature.

This is a resource for students and researchers, rather than practitioners, for the most part. It is well-written, clearly divided into sections and sub-sections and has a good subject index and an author index, with a glossary and list of abbreviations. These features support what will certainly be its main usage, as a reference work, or a source of detailed information in specific topics, rather than an introductory text or a practitioner ' s guide. Its price alone ensures that it will be mainly an institutional rather than a personal purchase.