Information science is about research and practice on how people collect, organize, store, retrieve and disseminate information and use it, both at individual and social levels. As an academic discipline, information science is often assimilated with information technology, with computer science, the internet or even the web. Few practitioners and scholars are aware of the real nature of this field which originated in the late 19th century from the foundational works done by European pioneers on documentation and bibliography management. The field has grown since its emergence in the 1960s, alongside progress done in computer science and in telecommunications. The evolution of the field is impacted by that of the web and the changes it has wrought in the ways in which information is handled, accessed and disseminated in our digital society. These rapid changes make information science an exciting field but also one that continually faces new challenges and seeks methods to address them. Hence, the field has continually had to interact with many other fields of education and research, in order to devise theories and methods suitable to tackle the evergrowing number of information-centric needs.

The present book by David Bawden and Lyn Robinson renders a historical and illuminating account of the major figures and contributions in the field. It is a comprehensive but accessible analysis of issues that the field has been dealing with. From a discussion of the epistemological positions and paradigms which form the foundations of the field, to a summary of research in more applied areas like domain analysis, information retrieval and informetrics, the reader is offered a concise and pedagogical insight into the cogent contributions in the field.