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Celebrate Michael Buckland's impressive legacy to LIS by showing his humanity, generosity and versatility.

This article is walk through a scientific career in LIS. Through personal anecdotes and life history and building upon Michael Buckland's legacy, it summarises the author’s own work seen through the prism of her interactions with Buckland, leading to scholarly contributions articulating significant statements about the field of LIS as well as pointers to past relevant publications.

Michael Buckland has a unique way of putting an end to thorny LIS issues as well as being a documentator extraordinaire.

It is a personal account, as such cannot be evaluated through the classical norms of empirical research as there is no ground truth. This account shows how chance encounters with fellow scholars can have a lasting influence on one's academic career as well as wider impact in a field.

The object of this study is to develop methods for automatically annotating the argumentative role of sentences in scientific abstracts. Working from Medline abstracts, sentences were classified into four major argumentative roles: objective, method, result, and conclusion. The idea is that, if the role of each sentence can be marked up, then these metadata can be used during information retrieval to seek particular types of information such as novelty, conclusions, methodologies, aims/goals of a scientific piece of work.

Two approaches were tested: linguistic cues and positional heuristics. Linguistic cues are lexico‐syntactic patterns modelled as regular expressions implemented in a linguistic parser. Positional heuristics make use of the relative position of a sentence in the abstract to deduce its argumentative class.

The experiments showed that positional heuristics attained a much higher degree of accuracy on Medline abstracts with an F‐score of 64 per cent, whereas the linguistic cues only attained an F‐score of 12 per cent. This is mostly because sentences from different argumentative roles are not always announced by surface linguistic cues.

A limitation to the study was the inability to test other methods to perform this task such as machine learning techniques which have been reported to perform better on Medline abstracts. Also, to compare the results of the study with earlier studies using Medline abstracts, the different argumentative roles present in Medline had to be mapped on to four major argumentative roles. This may have favourably biased the performance of the sentence classification by positional heuristics.

To the best of one's knowledge, this study presents the first instance of evaluating linguistic cues and positional heuristics on the same corpus.

To propose a comprehensive and semi‐automatic method for constructing or updating knowledge organization tools such as thesauri.

The paper proposes a comprehensive methodology for thesaurus construction and maintenance combining shallow NLP with a clustering algorithm and an information visualization interface. The resulting system TermWatch, extracts terms from a text collection, mines semantic relations between them using complementary linguistic approaches and clusters terms using these semantic relations. The clusters are mapped onto a 2D using an integrated visualization tool.

The clusters formed exhibit the different relations necessary to populate a thesaurus or ontology: synonymy, generic/specific and relatedness. The clusters represent, for a given term, its closest neighbours in terms of semantic relations.

This could change the way in which information professionals (librarians and documentalists) undertake knowledge organization tasks. TermWatch can be useful either as a starting point for grasping the conceptual organization of knowledge in a huge text collection without having to read the texts, then actually serving as a suggestive tool for populating different hierarchies of a thesaurus or an ontology because its clusters are based on semantic relations.

This lies in several points: combined use of linguistic relations with an adapted clustering algorithm, which is scalable and can handle sparse data. The paper proposes a comprehensive approach to semantic relations acquisition whereas existing studies often use one or two approaches. The domain knowledge maps produced by the system represents an added advantage over existing approaches to automatic thesaurus construction in that clusters are formed using semantic relations between domain terms. Thus while offering a meaningful synthesis of the information contained in the original corpus through clustering, the results can be used for knowledge organization tasks (thesaurus building and ontology population) The system also constitutes a platform for performing several knowledge‐oriented tasks like science and technology watch, textmining, query refinement.

Purpose — This chapter describes how incoherent government policies implemented in the first two decades (1970–1990) following the official recognition of Information science (IS) as an academic discipline within the broader interdiscipline of Information and Communication Sciences (ICS), shaped the current landscape of IS in France. This led to a narrow conception of IS often reduced to a technical specialty solving the problem of information explosion by setting up bibliographic databases, document indexing and delivery services.

Design/methodology/approach — The approach is historical and comparative. The author relies on earlier accounts by previous French authors and performs a comparison with the situation of IS in Anglophone countries (United States mostly).

Findings — The historical narrow conception of IS is now outdated. IS neither plays the role of gatekeeper anymore to scientific and technical information nor to information access since the generalisation of Internet search engines. Its scientific community in France lacks identity and is fast dwindling. Also, its problematics are not properly identified.

Research limitations/implications — Field work involving interviews of French figures and archival research could not be carried out in the limited time and means available. This needs to be done in the future.

Practical implications — This chapter should stimulate more comparative approach on the way Library & Information Science (LIS) is structured in other countries. Although the French situation appears unique in that IS is embedded within an interdiscipline (ICS) and does not exist autonomously, other similarities could be found in other countries where IS has had a similar trajectory and lessons could be learned.

Social implications — This chapter may serve as a stepping stone for future research on the historical foundations and epistemology of IS in France and elsewhere. It should also help disseminate to the LIS community at large how the French IS landscape has been evolving, since most French scholars publish in French, language has indeed been a barrier to disseminating their research worldwide.

Originality/value — There has not been a recent and comprehensive study which has looked at the peculiarities of the French IS landscape but also at the commonalities it shares with the situation of IS in other countries with respect to how the field originated and how it has evolved.