Tim Gorichanaz, Jonathan Furner, Lai Ma, David Bawden, Lyn Robinson, Dominic Dixon, Ken Herold, Sille Obelitz Søe, Betsy Van der Veer Martens and Luciano Floridi
The purpose of this paper is to review and discuss Luciano Floridi’s 2019 book The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design, the latest instalment in his…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to review and discuss Luciano Floridi’s 2019 book The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design, the latest instalment in his philosophy of information (PI) tetralogy, particularly with respect to its implications for library and information studies (LIS).
Design/methodology/approach
Nine scholars with research interests in philosophy and LIS read and responded to the book, raising critical and heuristic questions in the spirit of scholarly dialogue. Floridi responded to these questions.
Findings
Floridi’s PI, including this latest publication, is of interest to LIS scholars, and much insight can be gained by exploring this connection. It seems also that LIS has the potential to contribute to PI’s further development in some respects.
Research limitations/implications
Floridi’s PI work is technical philosophy for which many LIS scholars do not have the training or patience to engage with, yet doing so is rewarding. This suggests a role for translational work between philosophy and LIS.
Originality/value
The book symposium format, not yet seen in LIS, provides forum for sustained, multifaceted and generative dialogue around ideas.
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Jonathan Furner and Birger Hjørland
This article examines the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), which is the most used subject heading system in the world and an instance of a controlled vocabulary (CV).
Abstract
Purpose
This article examines the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), which is the most used subject heading system in the world and an instance of a controlled vocabulary (CV).
Design/methodology/approach
The method used to examine the system is based on both authors’ subject knowledge in the field of information science (IS) and the subfield of knowledge organization (KO). Core concepts in this domain were examined (1) by checking if they are present or not in the system; (2) if not, by determining whether LCSH contains alternative terms useful for searching documents about the missing concept, by examining books indexed by the Library of Congress; (3) by identifying the semantic relations between subject headings.
Findings
The results demonstrate fundamental problems in the logical consistency of the representation of IS and KO in LCSH.
Practical implications
The implications for CVs in general are discussed.
Originality/value
No previous study has used our method to examine LCSH’s coverage of IS.
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Jonathan Furner‐Hines and Peter Willett
This article presents a summary of the major findings of a survey of the use of hypertext systems and the production of hypertext products in UK libraries. Not surprisingly…
Abstract
This article presents a summary of the major findings of a survey of the use of hypertext systems and the production of hypertext products in UK libraries. Not surprisingly, academic libraries are found to be both the most enthusiastic users and producers. The survey concludes that there are normally four principal stages in a library's development of a hypertext system, although the possibility of leapfrogging via the World Wide Web is acknowledged.
Image collections of various types are maintained by organisations of all sizes, in all sectors. The term ‘picture library’ is commonly used to refer to a commercial operation…
Abstract
Image collections of various types are maintained by organisations of all sizes, in all sectors. The term ‘picture library’ is commonly used to refer to a commercial operation that sells access to a large archive of photographic images: well‐known examples are Getty Images and Corbis. Collections that are smaller in size but equivalent in function are to be found in private‐ and public‐sector institutions everywhere. These collections may be further categorised on the basis of:
In a widely‐publicised article in Business Week magazine, three American journalists pose the rhetorical question ‘What's wrong with the Internet?’, and give three pithy responses…
Abstract
In a widely‐publicised article in Business Week magazine, three American journalists pose the rhetorical question ‘What's wrong with the Internet?’, and give three pithy responses with the intention of summarising the opinion of millions of network users around the world. Firstly, they argue, ‘it's too slow’: people are fed up with the ‘World Wide Wait’. Secondly, ‘it's not built right’: security is poor, support for multimedia is weak, and charging for usage is problematic. And thirdly, ‘good stuff is hard to find’: a commonly quoted aphorism characterises the Internet as a library where the shelves keep moving, where there is no catalogue, and where an extra lorry‐load of books is dumped in the entrance hall every five minutes.
Jonathan Furner‐Hines and Peter Willett
We have recently completed a survey of the use of hypertext systems in academic, public and special libraries within the United Kingdom. A questionnaire and both telephone and…
Abstract
We have recently completed a survey of the use of hypertext systems in academic, public and special libraries within the United Kingdom. A questionnaire and both telephone and face‐to‐face interviews revealed that the largest application of such systems in academic libraries is the use of the World‐Wide Web for networked document retrieval. This paper discusses the current usage of the World‐Wide Web by academic library services, illustrating the range of facilities that libraries are starting to make available to their users.
David Ellis, Nigel Ford and Jonathan Furner
For the purposes of this article, the indexing of information is interpreted as the pre‐processing of information in order to enable its retrieval. This definition thus spans a…
Abstract
For the purposes of this article, the indexing of information is interpreted as the pre‐processing of information in order to enable its retrieval. This definition thus spans a dimension extending from classification‐based approaches (pre‐co‐ordinate) to keyword searching (post‐co‐ordinate). In the first section we clarify our use of terminology, by briefly describing a framework for modelling IR systems in terms of sets of objects, relationships and functions. In the following three sections, we discuss the application of indexing functions to document collections of three specific types: (1) ‘conventional’ text databases; (2) hypertext databases; and (3) the World Wide Web, globally distributed across the Internet.
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DAVID ELLIS, JONATHAN FURNER‐HINES and PETER WILLETT
An important stage in the process of retrieval of objects from a hypertext database is the creation of a set of inter‐nodal links that are intended to represent the relationships…
Abstract
An important stage in the process of retrieval of objects from a hypertext database is the creation of a set of inter‐nodal links that are intended to represent the relationships existing between objects; this operation is often undertaken manually, just as index terms are often manually assigned to documents in a conventional retrieval system. Studies of conventional systems have suggested that a degree of consistency in the terms assigned to documents by indexers is positively associated with retrieval effectiveness. It is thus of interest to investigate the consistency of assignment of links in separate hypertext versions of the same full‐text document, since a measure of agreement may be related to the subsequent utility of the resulting hypertext databases. The calculation of values indicating the degree of similarity between objects is a technique that has been widely used in the fields of textual and chemical information retrieval; in this paper, we describe the application of arithmetic coefficients and topological indices to the measurement of the degree of similarity between the sets of inter‐nodal links in hypertext databases. We publish the results of a study in which several different sets of links are inserted, by different people, between the paragraphs of each of a number of full‐text documents. Our results show little similarity between the sets of links identified by different people; this finding is comparable with those of studies of inter‐indexer consistency, where it has been found that there is generally only a low level of agreement between the sets of index terms assigned to a document by different indexers.
This paper offers a definition of the core of information science, which encompasses most research in the field. The definition provides a unique identity for information science…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper offers a definition of the core of information science, which encompasses most research in the field. The definition provides a unique identity for information science and positions it in the disciplinary universe.
Design/methodology/approach
After motivating the objective, a definition of the core and an explanation of its key aspects are provided. The definition is related to other definitions of information science before controversial discourse aspects are briefly addressed: discipline vs. field, science vs. humanities, library vs. information science and application vs. theory. Interdisciplinarity as an often-assumed foundation of information science is challenged.
Findings
Information science is concerned with how information is manifested across space and time. Information is manifested to facilitate and support the representation, access, documentation and preservation of ideas, activities, or practices, and to enable different types of interactions. Research and professional practice encompass the infrastructures – institutions and technology –and phenomena and practices around manifested information across space and time as its core contribution to the scholarly landscape. Information science collaborates with other disciplines to work on complex information problems that need multi- and interdisciplinary approaches to address them.
Originality/value
The paper argues that new information problems may change the core of the field, but throughout its existence, the discipline has remained quite stable in its central focus, yet proved to be highly adaptive to the tremendous changes in the forms, practices, institutions and technologies around and for manifested information.