Information Science Is an interdisciplinary field
primarily concerned with the analysis, collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information.
Early Definition:
Information science is that discipline that investigates the properties and behavior of information, the forces governing the flow of information, and the means of processing information for optimum accessibility and usability.
Early Beginnings
Information analysis has been carried out by scholars at least as early as the time of the Abyssinian Empire with the emergence of cultural depositories
As a science, however, it finds its institutional roots in the history of science, beginning with publication of the first issues of Philosophical Transactions, generally considered the first scientific journal, in 1665 by the Royal Society (London).
19th century
By the 19th Century the first signs of information science emerged as separate and distinct from other sciences and social sciences but in conjunction with communication and computation
In 1854 George Boole published An Investigation into Laws of Thought..., which lays the foundations for Boolean algebra, which is later used in information retrieval.
European documentation
The discipline of documentation science, which marks the earliest theoretical foundations of modern information science, emerged in the late part of the 19th Century in Europe together with several more scientific indexes whose purpose was to organize scholarly literature.
“As an organized system of techniques and technologies, documentation was understood as a player in the historical development of global organization in modernity – indeed, a major player inasmuch as that organization was dependent on the organization and transmission of information”
RONALD DAY
Transition to modern information science
With the 1950s came increasing awareness of the potential of automatic devices for literature searching and information storage and retrieval. As these concepts grew in magnitude and potential, so did the variety of information science interests.
By the 1960s and 70s, there was a move from batch processing to online modes, from mainframe to mini and microcomputers.
By the 1980s, large databases, such as Grateful Med at the National Library of Medicine, and user-oriented services such as Dialog and CompuServe, were for the first time accessible by individuals from their personal computers.
Today, information science largely examines technical bases, social consequences, and theoretical understanding of online databases, widespread use of databases in government, industry, and education, and the development of the Internet and World Wide Web.
General aspects of Information Science
Information access
to support usability
Information access is an area of research at the intersection of informatics, Information Science, Information Security, Language Technology, Computer Science, and library science.
Information architectureInformation architecture (IA) is the art and science of organizing and labeling websites, intranets, online communities and software
Information retrievalInformation retrieval (IR) is the area of study concerned with searching for documents, for information within documents, and for metadata about documents, as well as that of searching structure storage, relational databases, and the World Wide Web.
Information seekingInformation seeking is the process or activity of attempting to obtain information in both human and technological contexts. Information seeking is related to, but different from, information retrieval (IR)
Information societyAn information society is a society where the creation, distribution, diffusion, use, integration and manipulation of information is a significant economic, political, and cultural activity.
Information managementInformation management (IM) is the collection and management of information from one or more sources and the distribution of that information to one or more audiences.
Relations between Library Information Science and
Information Science
“The common ground between library science and information science, which is a strong one, is in the sharing of their social role and in their general concern with the problems of effective utilization of graphic records”
Tefko Saracevic
Significant differences of Library Information Science and Information Science
(1) selection of problems addressed and in the way they were defined.
(2) theoretical questions asked and frameworks established.
(3) the nature and degree of experimentation and empirical development and the resulting practical knowledge/competencies derived
(4) tools and approaches used
(5) the nature and strength of interdisciplinary relations established and the dependence of the progress and evolution of interdisciplinary approaches
All of those differences warrant the conclusion that librarianship and information science are two different fields in a strong interdisciplinary relation, rather than one and the same field, or one being a special case of the other."