I was both happy and sad last week to attend the opening of the new University Library in Vilnius.

Known as the National Open Access Scholarly Communication and Information Centre, (Library to its friends), the building was formally opened on February 6th in a packed celebration which featured congratulations from the Lithuanian President, Dalia Grybauskaitė, as well as contributions from Director General, Irena Krivienė and the architect Rolandas Palekas. A choir sang and ballerinas flitted about the foyer, echoing the falling snow outside. The reception, originally planned for the evening, was held after the ceremony in the late morning in order to accommodate the President’s schedule. It would have been rude to refuse, so a joyous time was had by all, even if some of the attendees did have to go back to work afterwards. Wandering around the light, airy spaces, catching up with friends and colleagues whom I don’t see very often, I felt happy and privileged to be invited to join in.

Irena Kriviene

Sad however, that my very wonderful friend and colleague, Audronė Glosienė did not live to see this beautiful library; something which she believed in so passionately, and for which she fought so determinedly.

Julija Glosiene and Marija Prokopcik

In spite of economic difficulties, new libraries still catch the imagination to the extent that they attract financial backing. This new library was funded partly by the Republic of Lithuania, and party by the European Regional Development Fund. I have also just heard about the new undergraduate library given the go ahead for Leeds University.

Whilst this is excellent news, it is often easier to write about why not to build a library. Why not close them down and use the building for designer flats? The impertinent question dampening all our enthusiasm is “why do we still need physical library spaces in the (digital) 21st century?”

The reasons for this question will seem trite and obvious to anyone remotely interested in library and information science. The world is digital and wireless. We can access pretty much anything we need from wherever we happen to be. On our smartphones, tablets or laptops. Information comes out of the ether and computing is pervasive. Why would we want to go to a specific place to get something we can accessfrom wherever we happen to be?

Furthermore, there are the costs of maintaining a physical collection to consider. Although somewhat offset by the need to preserve digital files, physical documents require care and conservation. And a physical building needs maintenance, cleaning, heating and light.

So why build a physical library space?

This has been answered before in the concept of the library as a 3rd space. Somewhere that is not your home and family, and not your place of work, but rather a place you choose to inhabit – a 3rd choice of space.

A contemporary update on this is easy to get – just ask for a show of hands in answer to the question “would you go to a library?” The resounding response is “yes”. But why? Because the library is a place where it is possible to interact with other people. In our increasingly isolated, digital worlds, that small chance of a conversation is too good to miss. Like real-time, face-to-face lectures, the library offers a chance for social interaction. As a student, if your dormitory is grim, the library is probably also the place you go to soak in a clean, warm bright space too. With added network access and friends. Let us not forget that library and information science is about managing recorded information for human communication. It underpins our civilized society. The death of the library, it seems, has been greatly exaggerated.

So much for the new then – what about the old? I was treated to a tour of the fabulous Vilnius Old University Library, which was established as part of Vilnius University in the late 16th century. I first visited this library about a decade ago, and it was a pleasure to see how the recent government-sponsored renovations had turned an undoubtedly gorgeous, historic city focal point into somewhere pleasant and appealing to 21st century students – without losing any of its ancient ambiance.

Vilnius Old University Library

Vilnius Old University Library – Renovations

Finally to mention the current exhibition in the main library hall, “Vetera Reducta” – the past regained. I often mention to my students that the one sure way to obliterate a nation’s identity is to destroy its cultural heritage – starting with the library. Vilnius is no stranger to this process. Yet the extraordinary efforts of Levas Vladimirovas, Director General of Vilnius University Library during the 1950’s, resulted in the recovery of over 18,000 books of Vilnius Public Library, and the old University Library. Amongst these treasures was the first Lithuanian printed book from 1547 “Martynas Mažvydas’ “Catechism”. Still celebrated in today’s digital age, books then, do not entirely die, and the physical object still holds its meaning to us.

Change. From LIS curricula to company mergers. From changing your password to changing your job. From who do you know to who do you trust.

These were a few of the conversational themes raised over breakfast with Sue Hill, members of her team (@suehillrec) and other IM colleagues yesterday, as we met to consider what’s prominent in the profession today and what might be round the corner.

I am always keen to hear from the world of work, and although there is much to angst about (applying for a job, getting a job, keeping a job) the feeling I came away with was one of realism, leaning towards the optimistic. Information will always need organising won’t it? Those journals will not circulate themselves. And someone has to do all those analytics. But the services we provide are continually on the front line for budget cuts and job losses, and although it’s getting old, we still need to ‘prove’ ourselves. Even when we do, it is sometimes not enough. What can we say to be convincing?

I am not the only person to ponder on the fact that the phrase ‘we are all information specialists now” is kind of true … but has a troubling undertone. Because although every baby born today looks for the Google box before crying, there seems little concern over what it all means. 30 years ago, library and information science was concerned with books, journals and newspaper articles. The avante garde dealt with images. Accurate indexing and ‘truthfulness’ were taken for granted in dealing with search and retrieve. But this is the 21st century, and its main concern is making money.

Is there any place for truth, then? Knowing what is out there to find, who wrote it, and what they really meant; an awareness of who is quietly keeping track of everything you click on, purchase or read. Let’s not forget that Google knows and remembers every time you search for your ex, or anything else burning away at the front of your mind. Do we trust them? Isn’t it creepy that every time I use a social media site I am offered an opportunity for online dating, weight loss schemes and cosmetic surgery. Yeah. All this ‘new’ personal information mining, entirely possible since everything we do is online now, and pouring ourselves into social media is as normal as breathing. As one of us said:

“As we become more free, we become more captive.”

Is trust our trump card then? Is the point not just to understand what is there and how to find it, but to highlight the risks and benefits associated with every shred of information? To tell the truth, and be trusted to do so.

If so, we can argue for information professionals. There is no need to ban Twitter, set up alternative networks, or to come off-grid entirely (some recent national responses to the power and the threat of our information society). We simply need to encourage more people to think about the concepts underlying information dissemination, its organization, storage, preservation, access and use. It is not so much that we are all information specialist now, but that we should be. Information skills are valuable and our civilization depends on them, as it always has.

For anyone contemplating an academic career in library science let me draw your attention to City University London’s current ad for a new team member …

Here is an excerpt from the specification:

“City University London has been a centre of excellence for research and teaching in library and information science for over 50 years. As part of the University’s strategy to develop academic excellence for business and the professions, we now wish to appoint a Lecturer in Library Science. The new lecturer will work alongside David Bawden and Lyn Robinson in City’s Centre for Information Science, teaching on our Masters programmes in Information Science, Library Science and Information Management in the Cultural Sector, and being actively engaged in research and publication.

This is a post for an early-career academic, with a good level of academic maturity and independence. Applicants should hold a PhD in a relevant subject area, and have at least four significant publications in peer-reviewed journals. Relevant professional experience, and experience of teaching in higher education, would be advantageous. Areas of expertise of particular interest are: GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector issues; collection management; culture and heritage information and informatics; digital humanities; social informatics; and publishing.

For an informal discussion, please contact David Bawden (db@soi.city.ac.uk) or Lyn Robinson (lyn@soi.city.ac.uk).”

Introduction
There is never less to read – only more. I sometimes use nice historical quotes in my lectures to show how famous people of yore also felt they lived with too much information, and that our concerns about there just being too many books are hardly new. I offer the usual advice of the need to be selective, and emphasise that the ability to choose reading materials is a fundamental skill for the information worker. I would go further, and argue that it is a fundamental skill for all – but already I am veering off into the waters of information literacy, when all I want to do is to say something brief and informative about background reading for library and information science.

This post is for all those of you who are joining one of our LIS masters courses this September (see http://www.city.ac.uk/lis), or those who are interested in learning a bit more about library and information science as a subject. I don’t mind if you are going to study LIS at a different institution – these personal recommendations should still work.

The most important book
Obviously our own “Introduction to Information Science”. I am a shamelessselfpromoter, and will often wear sequins to get attention. But, the book has emerged from around 60 (combined!) years of thinking and writing about information science; what it is, how it relates to library science (and other related subjects), its main components, protagonists, its past, present and future, and how it can be presented within the context of an academic masters course.

Neither DB nor myself imagine our book to be the last word in information science. It is not the first either! Rather we set out a contemporary landscape, and signpost many other resources and references. Since we signed off on the text, vowing ‘never again etc.’, we have thought of far more to add – there may be a second edition – but at least for the forthcoming academic year this will do for starters. The chapters do not correspond exactly with modules offered on the City courses – there are more modules than topics we cover. The content (listed below) does however, reflect what we believe to be the current core of Library and Information Science, and it should therefore be of interest to anyone who, for whatever reason, finds themselves concerned with LIS:

1: What is information science? Disciplines and professions
2: History of information: the story of documents
3: Philosophies and paradigms of information science
4: Basic concepts of information science
5: Domain analysis
6: Information organisation
7: Information technologies: creation, dissemination and retrieval
8: Informetrics
9: Information behaviour
10: Communicating information: changing contexts
11: Information society
12: Information management and policy
13: Digital literacy
14: Information science research: what and how?
15: The future of the information sciences

I should add that we are privileged to have a collection of forewords to the book, all written by internationally famous LIS professionals, and obviously friends of ours.

Other background reading
I am often asked to recommend background reading, or ‘summer reading’. I love making these suggestions as it gives me a chance to enthuse about things I have read in the past, or just come across recently. I enthused about James Gleick’s “ The Information” for about a year before it was published.

My short list of four for this summer is shown below – although I am always changing my mind according to what comes to my attention. Ours is not a dull subject, nor one that is short of lovely new volumes. I have a lot of books. I think one of the key attractions of LIS for me is that information communication spans each and every subject, even if you are into cult fanfiction and rarely step away from your tumblr account. The task here is to be brief yet inclusive – although anyone else will give you a different selection. And you are completely free to undertake your own voyage around the catalogues and byways to fit your own intellectual preferences once you get started.

I haven’t included journals, conferences, great bloggers or folks to stalk on twitter – wait until you get the course reading lists for those *smallish smirk*.

1. Briggs A and Burke P (2009). A Social History of the Media: from Gutenberg to the Internet. 3rd Edition. Polity: Cambridge.

This will get you thinking about how information communication works in society, and its tenacious relationship with publishing.

2. Chowdhury G G et al. (2008). Librarianship: an introduction. Facet: London.

This is the book to start with if you would like to compare our view of LIS with another one. Gobinda Chowdhury is an excellent writer of textbooks and you can add anything of his to your bookshelf with confidence.

3. Floridi L (2010). Information: a very short introduction. OUP: Oxford.

For all you philosophers … and for those who tend to skip this sort of thing in favour of easier reading – this is easy to read – apart from a few bits..

The ‘very short introduction’ series from OUP is addictive so in the end you will have about 12 different ones, which collectively will take some time.

4. Ince D (2011). The Computer: a very short introduction. OUP: Oxford.

If you are nervous about having to understand how a computer works – this will reassure you – and this is more than enough – ps. computers are not going anywhere other than into your clothes, kitchens home furnishings and anywhere else you thought was safe…

Do you want more? My collection on LibraryThing
There is always more, dearest reader. If you are joining us in just over a month then you can simply wait for your reading lists and lecture notes, but if you are impatient and greedy for books then you may wish to take a look at my LIS collection on LibraryThing.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/lynrobinson and http://www.librarything.com/profile/lynrobinson

Very briefly, to avoid turning this posting into a thesis, LibraryThing is an application which allows you to create a catalogue for your own personal use, or perhaps for a small business, library or information unit. It is also ‘social’, in that it allows you to connect with like minded souls in a variety of ways; your can share your catalogue with others, you can in turn, share theirs, and find out for example, more about a particular work, who has also added it to their collection, how to order a copy, swap a copy, discuss a copy etc. There is plenty of information on the LibraryThing website, so I won’t reproduce it all here, and indeed, although I would never want to live without my personal catalogue, I have to say I probably don’t use as many features as I could.

The link to my profile on LibraryThing above, takes you to a page explaining the background to my collection – i.e. that it contains the LIS books I am familiar with and use. I tag those which I use in class, so if you are in the right frame of mind, you can search for a course code to see what’s coming up … I list the course codes in my profile.

(Limit course-code searches to the comments field if you understand field limiting)

When using the search function, remember to enter terms into the lower box, to search my catalogue, rather than the upper box, which searches the whole LibraryThing universe.

Try also searching for “library-science” or “information-science” (limit to the tag field if you know what this means). This will bring up some relevant books to fill in your free time.

The catalogue is again a personal view of LIS – other documentalists will have a different selection – but many of the books will be found in any good LIS collection.

I started out with the intention of creating a LIS catalogue to accompany the modules which I teach – but then the addiction took hold and I began to add all the other books in my house. This is an ongoing pursuit. If you like book-stalking, you can browse through all my other stuff – but there is no need to if all you want is a masters in library science.

I have been describing library and information science as an understanding and study of the information communication chain for several years now. More recently, I have branched out into an effusive declaration that LIS underpins civilized society – no organization and access to information, no civilization. Having the good fortune to have been working in China earlier this year, I was rather naively stunned when I couldn’t access twitter there – it’s so easy to take for granted that we can make our own decisions about what we read and write isn’t it?

This lovely infographic (not mine, linked to authors) Orwell vs Huxley, reminds me of why I study and teach LIS; facilitating understanding of the information communication chain at least allows us to know what is out there, even if it is not allowed.

I was thrilled to be invited to talk about the British origins of information science at a celebration of the 75th anniversary of ASIST last week – especially as it meant nipping over to Croatia and spending a day in the sunshine (v short stay due to other commitments alas ..).

The celebration concluded this year’s very popular LIDA conference, and attracted an audience ranging from legends such as Tefco Saracevic and Nick Belkin, to bright, beautiful students at the start of their careers.

The theme was Information Science in Europe, and the papers presented alongside ours were a pleasant reminder of how much interest for our subject exists internationally – I was also heartened to meet others who feel that disciplinary history is essential for understanding how we define ourselves today, and for giving any kind of intellectual basis to our speculation on our future. I am always excusing myself for caring about the past and it was good to perform for fellow history dwellers – although not all the presentations took the storytelling angle – German and Nordic colleagues presented a history through scientometrics, detailing counts of institutions, courses and papers in every which way.

Colleagues talking about the origins of information science in Italy and Croatia offered new names and insights that I was previously unaware of; always good to get new material…

The origins of information science in Britain is a story which has already been written about, in depth, and with an eloquence which comes with a lifetime of involvement – authors such as W Boyd Rayward, Michael Buckland, Jack Meadows and indeed my co-author David Bawden all stacked up across my desk as we attempted to add something meaningful, representative of our current day interpretation and understanding of our discipline.

The starting point for us, writing from City University London, has of course to be Jason Farradane, credited with coining the phrase “information-scientist” around 1955. For those new to the story, Farradane established the first information science course “Collecting and Communicating Scientific Knowledge” at the Northampton College of Advanced Technology. The College became City University London; Farradane established the Centre for Information Science (we are his direct descendants… ), and the course became our MSc in Information Science. See:

Robinson L and Bawden D (2010). Information (and library) science at City University London; fifty years of educational development. Journal of Information Science vol 36, 631-654.

Farradane’s original course was vocational, designed to train those handling scientific and technical documents in practice. An obvious, and still largely unanswered question is to consider how the course seeded a new academic discipline. Still further, how we came to our present day definition of information science as the study of the information communication chain, through the techniques of domain analysis, paying attention to factors for change including technology, economics, politics and social mores. There are many papers on this, and there will undoubtedly be more in the future, but try:

Robinson L (2009). Information Science: the information chain and domain analysis. Journal of Documentation, vol 65(4), 578-591.

The story of information science in Britain is intertwined with the development of the subject in the US, as well as in Europe, and most accounts agree that although the 1950s provided the right societal, technological and economical environment for the new subject, the issues surrounding the processes of information organization and retrieval were hardly new. Those championing information organisation and access have always endured an impossible torrent of new materials, and the cry of “too much information” can be traced back to biblical times.

As the 1950s heralded a new, post-war, industrial optimism, the accompanying flood of scientific publications brought attention back to the need to harness new knowledge in a way which facilitated its use; a way which promoted the prosperity presumed to arise from exploitation of information and intelligence. This movement centred on information within documents, reports and papers, as a crude division from librarianship and/or library science, which concerned itself primarily with whole “books” and the services associated with organising, storing, preserving and lending specific items.

This rather coarse difference between librarianship and information science, in terms of the level of indexing they dealt with, was certainly still evident in the mid-1980s, and is used to argue in favour of separate library and information science disciplines. However, a closer look at work undertaken at the turn of the nineteenth century reveals that our contemporary understanding of a document and the processes of the information communication chain, i.e. the idea that library science and information science are part of a single disciplinary spectrum, are Victorian in origin – although the main protagonists of these insights, (Otlet and la Fountain in 1895), used the term “documentation” rather than library or information science.

Information science as we understand it today is pretty much agreed internationally to have its origins in the Belgian/European documentation movement. The role of special libraries – well documented and represented in both the UK and US schools – is also acknowledged, but the relationship between the two movements, and their separate influences remains largely uncharted territory, (a question posed by Michael Buckland in 1998) and it may stay that way if, as seems to be the case, no particular records exist as to how the two movements came together. It is important to note that ‘history’ is just what we make out from memory or surviving records. If it was never recorded, we may never know.

The point at which documentation and/or special librarianship became “information science” is still open to consideration, and will be the focus of our next paper. The question of the extent to which the UK origins of information science differ from those of the US was also something we though worth highlighting – a brief glance at the contents of any US text or information science course content will reveal a much heavier computer science bias – and whilst it is easy to dismiss US information science as UK computer science, the overlap is more complex and it would be of interest to explore this in historical context in order to understand more completely how the discipline is regarded in different geographical locations. For anyone who cares, we do not consider information science to be part of computer science, although the disciplines undoubtedly have areas of overlap, especially, as is already well known, within the area of information retrieval.

In addition to the variance in emphasis on technology, our US colleagues did not focus so much on the intellectual tools associated with the documentation movement – although in the UK the information retrieval, or systems paradigm certainly had its day in the history of what is information science.

Nick Belkin reminded me of all the names I had not mentioned (enough!) during my 30 minute romp through our underpinnings – those names associated with classification (Ranganathan, Mills, Foskett), information retrieval (Spark-Jones, Robertson) and user behaviour (Wilson) – all subjects traditionally regarded as comprising the core of information science. Quite so– but constrained by time I attempted to focus on the origins of our endeavours, which (although Belgian rather than British), still describe with startling prescience, our 21st century mandate, and of necessity, left out much of the middle.

Several colleagues at the ASIST 75 event raised their own questions, and we were collectively convinced that a publication drawing together the national origins, similarities and points of departure for information science would make a good read – let’s hope it happens. For now, with respect to the origins of information science then, there is always more to add to the story.

I am always drawn to events professing to talk about the future, especially if it gives me a chance to listen to William Gibson (@greatdismal) in person, and so I was at the British Library for one of their panel discussions in the series The Future: Science and Society, earlier this week.

The other commentators were by no-means lightweights in their respective fields (writers Cory Doctorow [@doctorow] and Mark Stevenson, economist Diane Coyle and chair Jon Turney) but obviously I was not the only starry-eyed Gibson fan in the room, which was packed with the sort of people who cannot resist treating their idol to a rambling monologue on metaphysics drawn from the random clutter of their inner psyche, during question time.

No matter – for in addition to hearing some of William Gibson’s clever, considered comments, I could not help the comforting smugness which enveloped me as it became clear that for many people in the audience, “the future” was all about information – (ha!). Mark Stevenson reminded us that “.. it is not called the information society for nothing..”.

Ostensibly, the discussion was to draw out ideas from current scientific research on what our future may look like – thus the mix of science/sci-fi writers on the panel. Although Mark Stevenson mentioned he had been talking to people at IBM and MIT who were engaged in “amazing stuff”, I did not catch what this might be. I did count four mentions of Star Trek though, and have to admit that although my almost word-perfect knowledge of the original series episodes far exceeds my knowledge of most of the other sci-fi writers that were mentioned, I feel well equipped to deal with the future as foreseen in the 1960s Kirk/Spock era.

The future, it seems, is very personal. And William Gibson commented that it is only possible to write about the future from the perspective of the present. He wondered about the reception that his first novel, Neuromancer (1984), would have had if he had described today’s world of personal wifi, AIDS, international terrorism and the non-existence of the Soviet Union in his early 1980s vision of the future. So I guess that hints at the future we envisage as being a product of our personal view of the present.

Diane Coyle provided the economist’s perspective – that the future is all about investment, and that investors rarely look beyond the next 5 years – the near future. There was then discussion around whether there were any “far future” ideas any more, and whether we were currently experiencing such an enormity of technological advancement that we were simply “rendering” what we already have – a rather good analogy from a member of the audience. Other voices commented on the fact that technology already exceeded its promise, and gave as an example the lack of augmented reality apps. I have seen some interesting early instantiations of augmented reality (Aurasma, and the Museum of London’s Street Museum app) but have to say for the moment I agree that it doesn’t propel me very far forward. Maybe in time though.

To information then, and the concern that so much information will never be digitized that finding it will be impossible. Cory Doctorow argued that Google had digitized over 90% of books anyway, and that the rest would soon be dealt with. I am not sure his figures are quite right – digitization is not always that easy or straightforward, and, for sure a lot of documents have not yet reached the scanner. The enthusiasm for digitized material may lead to relevant items being missed in a search – unless you happen to be an information specialist – the question being rather whether anyone is looking hard enough, in the right place, in the right way.

In response to the issue of relevant documents being lost within “too much information” Diane Coyle argued that it was about attention; most information can be found, but is missed because no-one is looking at it – for example if it is listed beyond the first page on the Google search results listing.

On the flip side, we moved on to “bit rot” where information is lost because the technology to read it no longer exists. Cory Doctorow again voted for confidence in technology, stating that if information was held on “spinning platters” then it could be transferred to another type of spinning platter indefinitely. No-one considered whether this was always cost-effective though.

And to one of my favourite concerns – that nothing is ever deleted, and the more dire the image, the more likely it is to pop up again and bite you at some inconvenient time in the future. “Its tweeted in stone” – William Gibson’s observation, seemed entirely apposite.

So what about the story of the future – and who writes it? I don’t think the discussion answered this, although I was pleased to think that the future will clearly contain a lot of information which will need to be organized, and that thus, LIS specialists could still find employment. Interestingly the information related concerns were all problems of the present, so at least we are recognizing that things that are problematic now may go on to be a bigger nuisance in the future.

Other discussion centered around what it means to be human, and what we mean by “progress” – more knowledge, or a “better society”. And what is a better society – longer lived? Better informed? And how can we know how the future will be fashioned by our present?

William Gibson wondered if the inventors of the pager knew how much it would change drug dealing.

Humanity’s motto, he concluded, could well be “ who knew?”

It must be the popularising effect of James Gleick’s new book “The Information”, because suddenly everyone I meet wants to talk about information: its history, its epistemology and Shannon-Weaver’s 1948 mathematical theory of communication (MTC), which became known as the mathematical theory of information. This is certainly good news for our information science course, where information has been considered from an academic perspective since 1961. I feel my time has come; all those hours spent memorizing equations to show that I truly, deeply understood how many signals you can push down a channel of a certain size, allowing for noise, have finally been rewarded, and I can now brandish my information-science credentials with a superior air of I told you so. Information is the new black, and everyone is wearing it.

I believed that I would forget Shannon’s theory entirely, as soon as the exam was over. It did not seem so relevant to my work at the time, which was with information resources in toxicology. Life, however, with a patient smirk, ensured that the ashes of the MTC rose like a phoenix 20 years later, when I was faced with presenting the mathematical good news to contemporary LIS students taking our Library and Information Science Foundation module as part of their masters. I dusted off my 1986 copy of Robert Cole’s “Computer Communications”, my notes still there in the margins of page 10, where I left them.

The issue I faced was one of presenting a definition of ‘information-science’, and of outlining its history as a discipline, to modern LIS students. Many of the papers considering the origins of information science gaze back in time to illuminate Shannon’s equations with a rosy pink glow, suggesting that his theory somehow led to the birth of information science as a true science (Shera 1968, Meadows 1987). This was the story in the 1980s, but in the 21st century, a more plausible thread is emphasized, the work of Kaiser, Otlet and Farradane on the indexing of documents, which suggests that the MTC was a bit of a red herring in respect to the history of information science. Rather then that information science grew out of a need to control scientific information, coupled with the feeling amongst scientists that this activity was somehow separate from either special-librarianship or the more continental term for dealing with the literature, documentation (see Gilchrist 2009, Vickery 2004, Webber 2003).

MTC

A look back at the original ideas and documents show that Shannon’s work was built on that of Hartley (1928). Stonier (1990 p 54) refers to Hartley:

“.. who defined information as the successive selection of signs or words from a given list. Hartley, concerned with the transmission of information, rejected all subjective factors such as meaning, since his interest lay in the transmission of signs or physical signals.”

Consequently, Shannon used the term information, even though his emphasis was on signalling. The interpretation of the MTC as a theory of information was thus somewhat coincidental, but this did not prevent it being embraced as a foundation of a true ‘information science’.

Shannon himself suggested that there were likely to be many theories of information. More recently, contemporary authors such as Stonier (1992) and Floridi (2010), have reiterated that MTC is about data communication rather than meaningful information.

Floridi (2010 p 42 and 44) explains:

“MTC is primarily a study of the properties of a channel of communication, and of codes that can efficiently encipher data into recordable and transmittable signals.”

“.. since MTC is a theory of information without meaning, (not in the sense of meaningless, but in the sense of not yet meaningful), and since [information – meaning = data], mathematical ‘theory of data communication’ is a far more appropriate description…”

He quotes Weaver as confirming:

“The mathematical theory of communication deals with the carriers of information, symbols and signals, not with information itself.”

Floridi’s definition of information as ‘meaningful data’ is more aligned to the field of information science as understood for our LIS related courses. Whilst we can still argue what is data and what is meaning, we can see that the MTC utilizes ‘information’ as a physical quantity more akin to the bit, rather than the meaningful information handled by library and information scientists.

This difference is set out  by Stonier (1990, p 17):

“In contrast to physical information, there exists human information which includes the information created, interpreted, organised or transmitted by human beings.”

Nonetheless, the MTC is still relevant to today’s information science courses because it has a played a pivotal role in the subsequent definitions and theories about information per se. And it is rather hard to have information science without an understanding of ‘information’. Many papers have been written on theories of information, and on the relevance of such theories to information science (see, for example Cornelius 2002).

MTC and other disciplines

The MTC provides the background for signalling and communication theory within fields as diverse as engineering and neurophysiology. At the same time that Shannon was writing, Norbert Wiener was independently considering the problems of signalling and background noise. Wiener (1948 p 18) writes that they:

“.. had to develop a statistical theory of the amount of information, in which the unit amount of information was that transmitted as a single decision between equally probable alternatives.”

Further (p 19), that

“This idea occurred at about the same time to several writers, among them the statistician R.A. fisher, Dr. Shannon of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and the author.”

Wiener decided to:

“call the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name Cybernetics”.

The relationship of information to statistical probability (the amount of information being a statistical probability) meant that information in Shannon and Wiener’s sense related readily to entropy (anecdotally von Neumann is said to have suggested to Shannon that he use the term entropy, as it was already in use within the field of thermodynamics, but not widely understood).

“The quantity which uniquely meets the natural requirements that one sets up for ‘information’ turns out to be exactly that which is known in thermodynamics as entropy.”

Shannon and Weaver (1949) p 103

“As the amount of information in a system is a measure of its degree of organization, so the entropy of a system is a measure of its degree of disorganization; and the one is simply the negative of the other.”

Wiener (1948) p 18

The link between information and entropy had been around for some time. In 1929, Szilard wrote about Maxwell’s demon, which could sort out the faster molecules from the slower ones in a chamber of gas. Szilard concluded that the demon had information about the molecules of gas, and was converting information into a form of negative entropy.

The term ‘negentropy’ was coined in 1956 by Brillouin:

“… information can be changed into negentropy, and that information, whether bound or free, can be obtained only at the expense of the negentropy of some physical system.”

Brillouin (1956) p 154

Brillouin’s outcome was that information is associated with order or organization, and that as one system becomes organized, (entropy decrease), another system must becomes more disorganized (entropy increase).

Stonier (1992 p 10), agrees:

“Any system exhibiting organization contains information.”

A well-known anomaly becomes apparent, however, when over 60 years later we try to understand the correlation between information and either entropy or probability. A trawl through the original equations and explanations, and subsequent revisitations, reveals that an increase in information can be associated with either an increase or decrease in entropy/probability according to your viewpoint. Tom Stonier (1990) refers to this in chapter 5, but Qvortrup (1993) gives a more detailed explanation:

“In reality, however, Wiener’s theory of information is not the same, but the opposite of Shannon’s theory. While to Shannon information is inversely proportional to probability, to Wiener it is directly proportional to probability. To Shannon, information and order are opposed; to Wiener they are closely related.”

The correlation between the measurement of entropy and information did however, lead to the separate field of information-physics, where information is considered to be a fundamental, measurable property of the universe, similar to energy (Stonier 1990).

This field stimulates much debate, and is currently enjoying what passes for popularity in science. A recent article in New Scientist tells how Shannon’s entropy provides a reliable indicator of the unpredictability of information, and of thus of uncertainty, and how this has been related to the quantum world and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Ananthaswamy (2011).

Information-biology also appears to stem from work undertaken around the MTC. The connection between signalling in engineering and physiology was made by Wiener in the 1940s, and in 1944 Schrödinger, in his book “What is Life?”, made a connection with entropy as he considered that a living organism:

“… feeds upon negative entropy.”

Further that:

“.. the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness (= fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.”

In the same book, Schrödinger outline the way in which genetic information might be stored, although the molecular structure of DNA was not published until 1953, by Crick and Watson (see Crick 1988). The genetic information coded in the nucleotides of the DNA is transcribed by messenger RNA and used to synthesize proteins. Information contained in genetic sequences also plays a role in the inheritance of phenotypes, so that informational approaches have been made within the study of biology (see Floridi 2010, also for discussion of neural information).

Information and LIS

For the purposes of our library and information science courses here at City University, we consider information as that which is ‘recorded for the purposes of meaningful, human communication’. Although I personally find Floridi’s definition helpful, information in our model is open to definition and interpretation, and is often used interchangeably with the term ‘knowledge’. In either case we regard the information as being instantiated within a ‘document’. The term ‘document’ also does not demand a definitive explanation, it merely needs to be understood as the focus of ‘information science’, its practitioners and researchers.

To complete the picture, when I became Program Director for LIS at City University London, I wanted to strengthen and clarify the way in which we defined ‘information science’, and particularly to explain its relationship with library science (Robinson 2009). I suggested that library science and information science were part of the same disciplinary spectrum, and that information science (used here to include library-science) could be understood as the study of the information-communication chain, represented below:

Author  —> Publication and Dissemination —> Organisation —> Indexing and Retrieval —>  User

The chain represents the flow of recorded information, instantiated as documents, from the original author or creator, to the user. The understanding and development of the activities within the communication chain is what library and information specialists do in both practice and research. As a point of explanation, I take organisation in the model to include the working of actual organisations such as libraries and institutions, information management and policy, and information law. Information organisation per se, fits within the indexing and retrieval category.

Our subject is thus a very broad area of study, one which is perhaps better referred to as the information sciences. The question of how we study the activities of the model can be answered by applying Hjorland’s underlying theory for information science, domain analysis (Hjorland 2002). The domain analytic paradigm describes the competencies of information specialists, such as knowledge organization, bibliometrics, epistemology and user studies. The competencies or aspects distinguish what is unique about the information specialist, in contrast to the subject specialist. Further, domain analysis can be seen as the bridge between academic theory and vocational practice; each competency of domain analysis can be approached from either the point of view of research or of practice.

There are many definitions of information science, and there are other associated theories or meta-theories. The latter of which may also be associated with a philosophical stance. Nonetheless, the model portrayed above has proved to be a robust foundation for teaching and research, yet it is flexible enough to accommodate diverse opinions and debate as to what is meant by ‘information’. It allows for diverse theories of information.

It is interesting to reflect on whether ‘information’ as understood for the purposes of library and information science has any connection with ‘information’ as understood by physics and/or biology, or whether it is a standalone concept. Indeed later authors such as Bateson (1972) have suggested that if information is inversely related to probability, as Shannon says, then it is also related to meaning, as meaning is a way of reducing complexity. Cornelius (2002) reviews the literature attempting to elucidate a theory of information for information science (see also Zunde 1981, Meadow and Yuan 1997).

At a recent conference in Lyon, Birger Hjorland’s (2011) presentation considered the question of whether it was possible to have information science without information. He writes that there should at least be some understanding of the concept that supports our aims, but concludes:

“.. we cannot start by defining information and then proceed from that definition. We have to consider which field we are working in, and what kind of theoretical perspectives are best suited to support our goals.”

I agree with him. I do not think we can have information science without a consideration of what we mean by information – but information is a complex concept, and one that can be interpreted in several ways, according to the discipline doing the interpretation, and then again within any given discipline per se. It is not an easy subject to study, despite its sudden popularity. The literature of information theory is extensive, and scary maths can be found in most of it. Nonetheless, it is essential for anyone within our profession to have in mind an understanding of what we are working with; otherwise it is impossible to justify what we are doing, and we appear non-descript. Understanding information is like wearing black. Any colour will do, but black makes you look so much taller and slimmer.

References

Ananthaswamy A (2011). Uncertainty untangled. New Scientist. 30th April. 2011, 28-31

Bateson G (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. Ballantine: New York

Brillouin L (1956). Science and information theory. Academic Press: New York

Cornelius I ( 2002). Theorizing information science. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 2002. 393-425

Crick F (1988). What mad pursuit. A personal view of scientific discovery. Penguin: London

Floridi L (2010). Information: a very short introduction. Oxford University Press: Oxford

Gilchrist A (2009). Editorial. In: Information science in transition. Facet: London

Hartley RVL (1928). Transmission of information. Bell system Tech. Journal, vol 7 535-563

Hjorland B (2011). The nature of information science and its core concepts. Paper presented at: Colloque sur l’épistémologie comparée des concepts d’information et de communication dans les disciplines scientifiques (EPICIC), Université Lyon3, April 8th 2011. Available from: http://isko-france.asso.fr/epicic/en/node/18

Meadow CT and Yuan W (1997). Measuring the impact of information: defining the concepts. Information Processing and Management, vol 33(6) 697-714

Meadows AJ (1987). Introduction. In: The origins of information science. Taylor Graham: London

Qvortrup L (1993). The controversy of the concept of information. Cybernetics and Human Knowing, vol 1(4) 3-24

Robinson L (2009). Information science: communication and domain analysis. Journal of Documentation, vol 65(4) 578-591

Schrödinger E (1944). What is life? The physical aspect of the living cell. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge

Shannon CE and Weaver W (1949). The mathematical theory of communication. University of Illinois Press: Urbana

Shera JH (1968). Of librarianship, documentation and information science. Unesco Bulletin for Libraries, 22(2) 58-65

Stonier T (1992). Beyond information. The natural history of intelligence. Springer-Verlag: New York

Stonier T (1990). Information and the internal structure of the universe. Springer-verlag: New York

Szilard L (1929). Uber die Entropieverminderung in einem thermodynamischen System bei Eingriffen intelligenter Wesen. Zeitschrift fur Physik, vol 53 840-856

Vickery B (2004). The long search for information. Occasional Papers no. 213. Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Webber S (2003). Information science in 2003: a critique. Journal of Information Science, vol 29(4) 311-330

Wiener N (1948). Cybernetics: or control and communication in the animal and the machine. Wiley: New York

Zunde P (1981). Information theory and information science. Information Processing and Management, vol 17(6) 341-347

Well that’s what the “happiness engineers” at WordPress think. When I logged on to this blog yesterday on my iPad, I found my carefully crafted reality had been re-mastered into dream magazine utopia. This was not, actually, a hack, but a crass attempt at getting on down with the kids, in association with #onswipe. Turns out this company specializes in turning websites into magazine dreams for reading on the iPad, and  WordPress felt that it would be super fantastic fun to force this redesign theme  onto all those boring WordPress blogs. Not funny. Not polite. Astounding arrogance on the part of WordPress. Ever heard of asking nicely first ?

“..oh but we announced this a week ago in our newsletter” … cried the happiness engineer, who recommended that I should read the WordPress godgiven newsletter prose regularly (yeah I have nothing better to do..) … no excuse guys – impolite and rude to change my stuff because you think it would look better your way – and there I thought that I paid for you to host my blog as I want it to look? Silly old me then.

The magazine dream re-mix choose a picture from my blog at random and used it as a ‘cover’. This happened to be a picture of University College London, which I had taken myself, and used to illustrate a brief posting on a research project there. The new format made it look as if my blog was written and produced by University College London, rather than a personal effort by me. Not laughing.

To say nothing about the complete lack of menus or contextual information which I spent hours incorporating into my blog. But hey – dreamworld – #onswipe is go go go.

This whole shabby debacle, which ended when WordPress hastily implemented a “shut this down now” option for writers, forces me to consider something nasty which I have been pushing to the back of my mind. Who owns my social media content?

I have read a lot of stuff about Facebook taking liberties with personal information:

• facebook will make your personal details available to search engines unless you act now

• facebook will make your personal details available to third party marketers right now and just too bad for you

• facebook sells your stuff to anyone who will pay them and you are totally frigid if you object – ya boo.

But I have so far avoided the thought that any social media site is a come on to those destined to spend their lives coding. Even if I don’t upload all those photos of me as a baby in the bath. Personal privacy is yesterdays news – social media content is a cybermall free-for-all.

Tempted to delete my blog and go home. But I like social media. I want the people who know who I am to read my stuff. I hope to be re-tweeted at least once a week. I am pleased if my students find my communications helpful/fun – I don’t mind if other library and information science professionals want to agree, argue and debate. But I don’t want my online persona (whatever that means exactly) to be parodied simply because it exists.

Is it that I have to accept that if I upload anything of myself to a social media site, the gleaming owners can re-mix the content howsoever they wish? Without telling me, and without any repercussions? Is this where we are in 2011? Is personal content so potentially valuable\invaluable? Hey let’s remix lyn and see how much she can be improved?

Are social media site owners nothing more than purveyors of content-manipulation? Photo-manip freaks cut and paste here? Thought this only happened in slash fiction (..er …seen some v good slash fiction manips..).

I was struck by the image-heavy focus of the #onswipe theme forced on my blog. Particularly by a random picture of me, horizontally cropped at eye-level and made into headline news. An image of a much younger me. Somebody I only dream about in later years. Really nice eyes.

And I recalled Wim Wenders’ movie “Until the end of the world”, in which one of the characters has a dream-machine – a device which records and subsequently lets her watch her dreams.

• Until the End of the World

• Brain Computer Interfaces for Manipulating Dreams

Well who wouldn’t rather sit watching a fantasy version of their life than face the reality of another day at the computer? Those dreams in which tiny moments of life are enhanced, where colours are brighter, in which we fly, in which we are forever young and skinny, – in which, after signing my book Brian Cox leans over to kiss me. ….

Doesn’t my blog look better the #onswipe way?

Real life sucks. Let’s spend all our time watching the dream-machine – how about a social media site for dreams …  how enticing to see what someone else dreams about –the ultimate social-media marketing coup. Don’t like your life – live your dreams – or even someone elses.

And why don’t we start by remastering my blog into something much more glitzy and totally devoid of anything I meant to convey.

No thanks. Maybe for some. But I am not quite despondent enough to give up on reality yet. So dear WordPress – get your own life, and please leave my tiny reality alone.

Persuaded to get up this morning by the thought of one of my favourite breakfast meetings, one of those regularly hosted by Sue Hill and her team, where eight lucky information professionals from diverse environments get together to consider the contemporary professional landscape.

We started by suggesting two words that we each felt represented the biggest impact on our work today, and then added in one which we felt embodied the most significant factor for change over the last 5 years. The ensuing discussion focused on the concepts identified in this simple but effective conversation starter. I suggested information-anxiety, and mobile.

The concepts fell, for the most part, into four categories: economy, technology, skills and organizational culture.

As would be expected, everyone felt the pressure of needing to achieve more with less, and the accompanying ‘de-motivation’ as candidate ways to economise failed to materialize due to services having already been rendered maximally effective and efficient. There was a feeling that excellence in service was no longer attainable, as physical resources, dependant on human care and attention, were downsized in unison with staff numbers.

Technology affects most aspects of our lives, and so again it was not surprising that discussion turned to how mobile devices and cloud computing are changing the workplace in ways we have difficulty imagining. We need strategies for cloud computing. And what of future technology? Can we imagine it? Who would have thought of mainstream smart-phones and augmented reality 5 years ago? Possibly secret Star Trek followers – and I’m not admitting to anything – but I did happen to hear that the science behind the Romulan cloaking device was now a reality (tiny reality – just a paperclip at the moment …)

Social-media received a mixed response. Some felt it was a ‘dumbing-down’ medium, which implied that trained professionals were no longer needed. Others pointed out that many organizations ban the use of these time-wasting, potentially ruinous applications. I am a social-media advocate. Genie and bottle. Be careful what you wish for though.

My role as a masters course director means I am always soliciting first-hand views on what sort of skills employers want from prospective new team members, although balancing this with the requirements for an academic masters can be problematic – the question of vocational training versus learning how to think and develop – quick fix for now or investment in a framework for life-long-learning? As already stated, technology is a key driver for change. Nothing stays the same and the systems in place today will be superseded in increasingly shorter time-spans. Technological-literacy, flexibility and adaptability are key aspirations for prospective job applicants, but how to capture this on a cv, and to stand out from the crowd is less evident.

I was concerned to hear that recent LIS graduates were perceived to have limited abilities in using query language for bibliographic databases – this is something they should definitely take away from any LIS masters course, and most alumni will agree that search was included on the curriculum. I wonder if the Google free-text search box is somehow overriding all our carefully planned lessons in Boolean logic? Perhaps we need to focus on information literacy in schools, as by the time students reach masters level, quick and dirty keyword addiction damage is done.

It was unanimously agreed that the focus on information technology management, rather than information management, meant that the higher paid role of ‘Chief Information Officer’ invariably indicated someone with a computing, rather than LIS background. Although as an aside, the importance of ‘softer’, information related skills may be being recognized in newer courses, such as the masters in information leadership (MIL) at City University. The feeling that for higher paid jobs, business, rather than LIS skills were sought was mentioned, and I am interested in pursuing evidence for this, and indeed to identify what exactly is meant by ‘business skills’.

On the positive side, the evaluative and analytical skills of a trained information professional were perceived to be highly valued, with clients preferring to engage with those who offered ‘added-insight’ to research results. This requires subject knowledge, and adds weight to my belief that information professionals also need to be subject specialists, and that LIS needs to remain a postgraduate profession.

The failure of many IT-led implementations was noted – it is obviously helpful to ask the users and creators of content about system requirements before spending huge sums on something designed for some other purpose entirely. Never happens though – except in systems design courses.

Organizational culture is changing to interpret and work with moving technological, economic, political and social factors. With lawyers charging in ever decreasing units of time, it is essential that information and research related tasks are undertaken by lower-paid information professionals, so that clients are not overcharged. Not sure I am entirely comfortable with information workers being openly worth so much less per hour than lawyers, but its one of those unpleasant facts of life. Often, the idea is to outsource this kind of work, rather than to develop a skilled, in-house team. It’s the economy.

Other observations were that there was a demand for information-skills training from clients themselves, (i.e. a mentoring role outside the LIS profession),  that increasingly innovation came from connectivity between specializations, and that we need to ensure we have the infrastructure to cope with the landslide of information  produced from government open-data initiatives and e-science. There is just too much information. Hence I end where I started, with information-anxiety. Which is now mobile.

Many thanks to Sue for her innovative get-togethers – and just to mention that her events also raise money, this year for Macmillan Cancer Support.