📰 THE INVISIBLE SUBSTRATE OF INFORMATION SCIENCE
by rebesatt · 27 things on NewTwos
- Author: Marcia Bates
- Introduction
- One motivation for this article, is the observation that due to new forms of information technology there are many newcomers joining the field of information which do not have a solid background in information science. While the paradigm of information science is clearly defined, there are some aspects of the field that lie below the surface. Those are the ones, the author wants to address in this article in order to give a solid overview of information science.
- Paradigm Above the Water Line
- The paradigm of information science states back to 1968 and was first framed by Harold Borko stating that information science studies the following aspects of information processing: gathering, organizing, storing, retrieval and dissemination.
- Paradigm Above the Water Line
- The Meta-Field of Information Science.
- Information science is a discipline like education and journalism which rather then focusing on one content area is concerned with an aspect of transmission of human knowledge, i.e. storage and retrieval.
- The Content of Form.
- The main focus of information science is the structure and organization of information in contrast to the content which is the prime focus of most other domains.
- Being and Representing.
- The expertise of an information scientist lies within the capacity of representing information in databases and catalogues. While domain experts, might have more knowledge of their field, the representation of that knowledge/information requires different strategies which are mainly studied and applied in information science.
- Subject Expertise.
- Profound expertise of a specific domain is not needed, is not needed in order to for example create an index database of the field. What is needed is information expertise. This is why information science often do a better job at creating a database index for a domain than the domain experts.
- Domain knowledge is useful, while information knowledge is crucial.
- Librarianship and Information Science.
- Library and information science share the same information perspective which other fields like computer science, cognitive science, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence don't have.
- Information Science Theory.
- The beginnings of Information science theory date back to 1930-1970. In this period arose different information theories from related fields that had in common the especially the information form and structure, giving information science its theoretical foundation.
- Information Science's Universe.
- The difference of information science to other related fields is the primary interested in (human) recorded data and how they relate to it.
- Information Science's Big Questions.
- The field is summarized into three main investigation areas: physical, social and design.
The physical question deals with the underlying laws and features of the universe of recorded information.
The social question deals with how people interact with mainly recorded information.
Finally, the design question studies ways of making information accessible to people in a fast an effective manner.
- Methodological Substrate.
- Information science includes methods, and fields of interest with both social science and engineering science. For someone to be successful in the field, it is necessary to be acquainted with both fields, even though naturally one would always be more professional in one of the two fields.
- Values.
- There seems to be a different perception in information science which seems to relate more to the value neutral perspective of engineering science. Librarianship on the other hand has a more service oriented perspective with a desire to empower the people which implies underlying values and goals to reach this outcome.