Information is at the centre of our society. It is what we often talk about, it appears frequently in the media, it is often labelled as our most important asset. Even our time is, taking into account the importance of information, labelled the ‘information age’. We feel threatened by information overload, some may even suffer from information anxiety. On the other hand we cannot survive without it; we need information every moment of our lives.

And yet information science, the science having information at its focus, is experiencing an identity crisis. This is not new. For more than half a century information scientists have had to explain, over and over again, what their discipline was, and repeat that they were neither computer scientists nor librarians, while closely cooperating with them – and others. Could the reason be the interdisciplinary nature of the field? So outsiders notice the methods and theories taken from psychology, sociology, statistics, philosophy, etc., and do not see the added value of information science, particularly the focus on the object of the research: information.

Or is it because ‘information’ itself is so vaguely and variously defined? Or have information scientists never had good public relations skills, so that they could communicate the message and become more visible? Part of the problem, at least in some environments, may also be attributed to the often used phrase ‘library and information science’ (LIS). While possibly accepted by librarians, the phrase does not do justice to information scientists, limiting them to the context of libraries only.

While all this may seem a less important issue – information science has, after all, survived and flourished – the lack of understanding of information science is the highest hurdle for the implementation of its research results in practice. As the result, we encounter websites which are completely unintuitive, information systems aimed at the general public for which one needs specific training (e.g. library catalogues), unattractive interfaces, confusing subject arrangements, and so on. Let us take library catalogues as an example.