Introduction

Mobile devices are rapidly becoming the main way to access online information. It seems sensible that many of us are investigating ways of making our information more accessible to mobile devices, though often in limited ways.

For most of us, the quantity of information that we provide online has exploded since the early days of the world wide web in the mid-1990s. We still provide some basic information that we may have had online since the start. We show opening times, contact details, news and basic instruction or ‘how to’ pages and guides. Since then, we may have added library catalogues and resource-discovery tools, chat boxes, RSS feeds of useful resources, social media interactions, videos and podcasts, in addition to the same basic information that we have provided for many years.

Some of this information and the opportunities for interaction may be ideally suited to mobile devices. For example, viewing an online video tutorial on a mobile screen while trying at the same time to apply the skills it is teaching on a fixed computer can be extremely effective. While they are in the vicinity of the library, your users may want to know what times you are open, and so they will find it very useful to be able to check opening-hours information on their mobiles.

However, there is a tension between the alternative ways of offering information to mobile devices. We can do it either on the web, using mobilefriendly formats, or by offering platform-specific applications, or ‘apps’. This tension has not yet been resolved. Some of the major issues are covered in this chapter, together with examples of how libraries have addressed the introduction of such services.

Meeting the needs of your users

There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods of providing mobile-friendly online information. Whichever method is chosen, try to make sure that you are meeting your users’ needs rather than copying others. No matter how good looking the final result is, unless it provides the information your users want in the format they need, it will be a waste.

We've covered a wide range of subjects in this book. We've discussed what mobile services students might want. We've talked a little about how information literacy may vary between ‘fixed’ and ‘mobile’ information use. We've shown a range of ways that you could consider of introducing mobile services in your libraries, from text messaging to Augmented Reality, including making your library staff more mobile along the way. But now that you are reaching the end of the book it is time to consider what you should be doing next. Where could you start when thinking about using some of these ideas in your own library?

This final chapter provides an outline for you to use in introducing mobile services into your own library. By the end of this short chapter you should be in a position to decide what steps you should be taking next.

Consider what your users want … and what your staff can Deliver

The worst thing you could do as a result of reading this book would be to pick an idea that seemed exciting to you and immediately try to implement it. Even doing nothing could be preferable, as at least this would not use up any goodwill amongst your staff or users. Instead, the first step should always be to consider your users’ needs. Consider how they use your services at present and how they may want to use your services in future. This could be done by looking at existing feedback they have given you, or by running focus groups, surveys or questionnaires. It could even be done by comparing your service to other, similar library services that have implemented mobilefriendly services and seeing how their users reacted. Choose the route that suits you, your library and your users. The key thing is to consider your users’ needs before acting.

New mobile services need to be viewed as useful by your users from the start, especially if there is some barrier to their use, such as downloading an app or learning how to use a new tool. By making sure that you know what your users want you can also make sure that any new service will be welcomed and used by them. This will also help you in promoting any new service.

Introduction

E-books have been provided through libraries for some time, primarily as texts to read online, through your computer's browser or using a dedicated program. With the advent of electronic ink, e-readers (especially the Kindle), tablet computers and other mobile devices with crisp, clear screens, there has been a shift to users expecting to be able to download e-books from libraries to their own devices. For example, the proportion of US adults who own an e-book reader doubled in six months from November 2010 to May 2011 (Purcell, 2011). This trend continued during the year, with the Kindle, Amazon's flagship e-book reader, selling over a million units a week during December 2011 and becoming Amazon's biggest-selling product in 2011.

Libraries have struggled to meet the demand for downloadable, mobilefriendly e-books because they face many problems in providing e-books in mobile-friendly formats and the whole area is changing fast. Most of the problems can be placed into one or other of two categories: format and licensing. In this chapter we will discuss some of the issues and give examples of the successful provision of e-books for mobile devices.

There are many dedicated e-book readers on the market, some of which have associated applications that can be downloaded to mobile phones and to tablets such as the iPad and that enable you to buy and read books from the supplier of the app, even if you do not own its dedicated device. Some online e-book services are usable on a range of mobile devices. Although dedicated e-book readers such as the Kindle have recently been selling extremely well and some retailers are claiming that e-books are now outselling hardbacks, this chapter will not concentrate on specific handheld readers. Rather than being too specific about devices, formats and platforms, we will focus mostly on generic issues rather than on specific current solutions.

Formats

There are a host of competing formats for e-books, some of which are dedicated to certain devices, others of which are generic and will work across many different technologies (Table 8.1). From a library's point of view, it can be risky to commit to a proprietary format that will work with only one manufacturer's product. However, it can also have benefits, allowing a service to be introduced initially in a focused way, rather than try (and probably fail) to introduce a perfect service that pleases everyone.

Introduction

Since the later years of the 20th century, it has become commonplace for commentators to declare that we are living in an ‘information society’. If this is true, and it must be pointed out that some expert commentators find the whole idea unhelpful, then this must surely have major implications for the information sciences. It is beyond doubt that social issues impinge on the work of information scholars and practitioners alike.

In this chapter, we will first consider the nature of, and criteria for, an information society. We will then look at some of the frameworks – policies, laws, and ethics – which structure the ways in which information is used in society, and the organizations and infrastructures which support its use. We conclude with the role of information in the development of society, and some of the problems and issues which it brings with it.

What is the information society?

We will begin by considering the nature of an information society; how we know one when we see one. We will do so in outline only, referring interested readers to excellent and detailed texts (Feather, 2008; Webster, 2003; 2006; Cornelius, 2010).

There are a number of criteria by which present day Western society may be judged an ‘information society’. None of them is entirely convincing. For one thing, as we have seen in Chapter 2, every society for some thousands of years has had some form of recorded information, and has often regarded these records as important and valuable; yet we do not regard these as information societies. Nor is it sufficient to point to the evident fact that information is abundant and prominent in our society.

Introduction

The organization of information, and information resources, is one of the fundamental aspects of the information sciences. In essence, this amounts to classifying and name-giving: as essential in our sciences as Linnaeus proclaimed it to be in his, though for rather different reasons. It is an extensive and complex subject in its own right, but fortunately it has a particularly wide range of textbooks and articles. We will outline the main topics and issues within the subject, pointing to where more detailed treatments can be found. One of the main aspects of the subject is the way in which relatively old tools and techniques are being adapted to the modern information environment. Therefore, although up-to-date materials are important, older texts may also be very useful. The fundamentals of the subject, particular some of the theory of classification and indexing, go back many years, and – as we saw in Chapter 2 – some of the main tools used today have their origins in the 19th century. They were developed as part of the attempt to provide bibliographic control of printed materials; to record, identify and make accessible all the intellectual output of humanity, as expressed in recorded knowledge. They, and newer equivalents, are now being used to provide access to the rapidly expanding stock of digital material.

We will look first at some of the fundamental issues of information organization, before examining the main tools: terminology, metadata, resource description, systematic and alphabetic subject description and abstracting. Texts covering several of these aspects in detail include Chowdhury and Chowdhury (2007), Taylor (2004), Chan (2007) and Svenonious (2000). For a more detailed examination of all aspects of information organization in one subject domain – healthcare – see Robinson (2010, Chapter 4).

Introduction

The subject of this book is information science. We begin by asking what information science is, as an academic discipline and profession. Obviously, and simplistically, it is the science of information. But what does this mean?

There are three main answers to this question (Buckland, 2012). One considers information science as being concerned with computing, algorithms and information technologies, a second with information as related to entropy in information theory and information physics, a third with information science as being concerned with information recorded in documents, with meaning and knowledge, and hence as growing from the older disciplines of librarianship and documentation. We will focus on the third of these in this book, although we will mention aspects of the other two at appropriate points.

Introduction

In this final chapter, we give an overview of some ideas about the discipline and profession of information science. As the opening quotation from Ross Atkinson indicates, some of the information professions are very concerned about this, perhaps seeing signs of their own demise, overwhelmed by changing technical and social environments.

This is by no means a new concern. During the 1970s, Dennis Lewis, an information manager in the British chemical industry who later headed the professional association ASLIB, became well known for propounding the idea that ‘There won't be an information profession by the year 2000’ (Lewis, 1980). This became known as the ‘Doomsday Scenario’, and Lewis rather revelled in his nickname of Doomsday Den. This focused on the increasing computerization of printed indexes, particularly for the scientific and technical literature, and the increasing trend for academic and professional users who needed the information to find it for themselves, a phenomenon then termed ‘end-user searching’. This, argued Lewis, would lead to the end of the ‘intermediary’ role, by which an infor - mation scientist carried out searches on behalf of those who needed the information, using their searching skills to deal with the ‘difficult’ online inform - ation resources of the time. With this role gone, there would be no place left for the information specialist, and the profession would disappear, leaving only a few librarians and archivists, carrying out custodial functions for heritage material. And Lewis, like all other experts of the time, had not envisaged anything like the web or Google (Bawden, 2007).

Introduction

In this chapter, we will look at some of the changes which have occurred, and are still occurring, to the way in which recorded information is communicated. These changes are largely a result of new technologies, specifically the ‘digital transition’ to a world in which most information is in digital form most of the time, but also reflect economic and social factors.

The significance of these changes for the information sciences is two-fold. The environment in which information practitioners work is very different indeed to what it was 30 years ago, and we may expect it to change equally dramatically in the coming decades. A full understanding of these changes, and an appreciation of what is to come, is essential for effective information provision. Perhaps more positively, the information sciences can make very significant contributions to steering these changes, so as to take best advantage of new capabilities without losing the best of past practices.

We will mainly consider the present situation in this chapter, having looked at historical developments in Chapter 2, and leaving consideration of future trends to the final chapter. We will first look at some general frameworks to help understand the issues, before examining the digital transition from the print-based information environment, changing economic factors and new forms of recorded communication. We will then look at some new forms of research and scholarly activity which both take advantage of, and contribute to, new communication formats, and conclude with a reflection on changing information spaces and places.

Much of the material in this chapter deals with publishing and scholarly communication. Relevant though these areas are for the information environment, and hence for the information sciences, we will only be able to cover them in outline, referring readers to other sources for more detail.

Introduction

Information behaviour, the ways in which it is studied, and the significance for practice of the results of such studies, are central topics within information science. Without reliable knowledge of the way in which people find and use information, provision of effective services can be based only on guesswork and prejudice.

This has been a very popular area of information research, and one of the richest for the creation of models and frameworks to explain the complex data produced.

As Case (2006, 295) writes, the information behaviour literature presents a ‘bewildering array of topics, populations, samples, sites, theories and methods. Readers wishing to investigate this topic in depth are well served by numerous thorough and detailed overviews, including books (Case, 2007; 2012), review articles (Wilson, 2000; Pettigrew, Fidel and Bruce, 2001; Case, 2006; Savolainen, 2007; Fisher and Julien, 2009; Julien, Pecoskie and Reed, 2011) and encyclopaedia articles (Bates, 2010). Urquhart (2011) even provides a review of recent reviews, while Case (2006) identifies sources reviewing older material. Faced with this plethora of material, this chapter will try only to draw out the main issues and findings, and provide some examples.

We will first consider the question of what information behaviour is, and how it relates to similar ideas, and then briefly outline the historical development of the subject, emphasizing the different ways it has been regarded and studied. A section of theories and models takes a very select look at the wide variety which have been proposed, followed by a summary of research methods used. We then look at some examples of studies of the information behaviour of different groups, and at the idea of individual styles of information behaviour. The summary section looks at what general lessons have been learned about information behaviour.

Introduction

Information management is a complicated subject, and can be understood in different ways. Sometimes it is understood as a wide and all-embracing concept, including records management, knowledge management, library management and so on, and sometimes with a much narrower focus. It may, or may not, be taken to include the processes of ‘ordinary’ management – budgeting, managing people, and so on – which are as necessary in an information-providing institution or department as in any other. And it may be considered from a variety of perspectives, emphasizing information resources, technologies, organizational structures, and others; see Detlor (2010), Schlögl (2005), Bouthillier and Shearer (2002) and Rowley (1998) for examples.

In this chapter, we will take information management to include all the concepts, techniques and processes which underlie and enable information service provision. We take a wide view, including all the environments in which information, in all its guises, is managed. We focus on the ideas that recorded information, instantiated in documents, can be understood as a resource, though perhaps an unusual one in some respects; that information has a value, though this may be difficult to determine; and that information management processes can be related to the communication chains and information lifecycles mentioned in previous chapters.

Although this book is intended to be self-contained, with the provision of extensive literature references for readers interested in any particular aspects, we should mention some important resources for the study of information science.

Other textbooks

Two texts are useful complements to this one. Rubin's book covers the topics from a library science and US perspective. The volume edited by Davis and Shaw – in an interesting wiki-based approach to which we both contributed – emphasizes IT aspects, and again a US perspective.

Richard E. Rubin, Foundations of Library and Information Science (3rd edn), New York NY: Neal-Schuman, 2010.

Charles H. Davis and Debora Shaw (eds), Introduction to Information Science and Technology, Langam MD: information Today, 2011.

The books by Norton and by Debons are well written introductions to the subject, which could be used a precursor to our more in-depth treatment of any topic.

Melanie J. Norton, Introductory Concepts in Information Science (2nd edn), Langham MD: Information Today, 2010.

Anthony Debons, Information Science 101, Lanham MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008.

Vickery and Vickery, while once the unquestioned major text on the subject is now mainly of historic interest, although it gives clear coverage of some basics.

Brian C. Vickery and Alina Vickery, Information Science in Theory and Practice (3rd edn), Munich: K. G. Saur, 2004.

Finally, the book edited by Gilchrist contains a variety of perceptive summaries and perspectives of many aspects of information science.

Alan Gilchrist (ed.), Information Science in Transition, London: Facet Publishing, 2009.

Journals

The information science literature is a good example of the ‘scatter’ discussed in Chapter 8. Relevant papers will be found in journals on a wide variety of subjects, from computer science to cultural studies, from librarianship to business management, and from information systems to archiving. A selective list of major journals follows.

Information science is a fascinating field. It is basically about helping people find the books, articles, pictures, music, information, etc., they need or would like to read or experience. Information specialists help students, researchers and everybody else to find the documents they need in order to solve tasks, including writing thesis and research papers. Such documents used to be kept in physical libraries, archives and museums but are increasingly available in digital form, sometimes free, sometimes with toll access. We may term all this ‘the information ecology’ and information specialists are those people studying this universe in order to help people utilizing it optimally for the specific purposes that people have.

Although much information is available in digital form, the study of information is not identical with the study of computers, information technology or communication technology. Information science is rather about knowledge production in society and how this knowledge is materialized in documents, including digital documents, and how it is organized, labelled and managed, in order to serve different groups and individuals (this definition is adapted from Jack Andersen). Information science is about what Google and Wikipedia can do for you, but it is also about what Google and Wikipedia cannot do for you, what else needs to be consulted. It is about how to improve access to information by progress both in computer-based retrieval and in forms of information services provided by information professionals. Such information services include the teaching of ‘information literacy’ to students and helping professionals, for example medical doctors, doing evidence-based practice. Another way to describe the difference between computer science and information science is to say that for the first the interaction between humans and computers is a core topic. In the case of information science it is rather the interaction between people and the whole information ecology. This makes an important difference, although the computer is certainly a central tool in information science.

Information science has many specific branches. Some specialize in specific technologies, for example, the new wave of ‘social technologies’ or specific user groups (e.g. library and information services for children). Some subfields cover kinds of processes such as information seeking and retrieval or knowledge organization and information architecture. Some specialize in specific domains, for example cultural, social or scientific information.

Introduction

In this chapter we will give some historical context for the rest of the book, by looking at the development of recorded information, and the documents which carry it, throughout time. We will do this only very briefly and informally; there are many detailed treatments of the history of information provision and dissem - ination, and we will not try to replicate these in any way. We will give a historical perspective on specific topics in several of the chapters which follow; the history of information science itself has already been mentioned in the first chapter.

It is sometimes suggested that, since information science is a relatively young discipline, there is no need to think about the history of anything which came before, say, 1950. We disagree. Some appreciation of the history of information and documents, as well as being of interest in its own right, can help give a perspective on current problems and solutions. Although contexts and technologies may change, many information issues remain constant over time, and a historical perspective can be of practical, as well as academic, value. It is not possible to understand current information provision, and plan for its improvement, without appreciating how it has come to take the form which it has, and what commonalities and analogies there may be with past information environments. And we are not, in fact, faced with the choice posed by the opening quotation from Thomas Jefferson: reflecting on the information past can help us envisage the information future.

One wonders if there is really a need for another book introducing information science to the world. Surely we have so many already that the best any new volume can hope to offer is topicality or currency? Perhaps we need new ones because the field ceases to remain still, or the emergence of every new technology seems to require expression once more of the importance of organization, context and human use. Either answer is plausible enough but I think there is a simpler one. We don't have a best introduction yet. No single book I can pull from my shelves or locate on Amazon, our collective digital library in the second decade of the 21st century, provides the appropriate weaving of materials together to do justice to this meta-discipline we call information. Not since Machlup and Mansfield's edited (1983) tome The Study of Information, now sadly out of print and extortionately priced on the used market, have I felt comfortable handing a student one text and saying ‘this’ is the one. Consequently, my piecemeal approach to referencing the core has often translated into confusion in students’ minds over what exactly they should be reading.

While the searches for compelling and unifying definitions of information and information science or studies are engaging, I am not convinced by the underlying implication, oft mooted by critics, that we cannot really be a field until we agree such definitions. What hope would there ever be for disciplinary emergence if we had to agree definitions in advance? Further, I suspect many fields could really split hairs about their own definitions and for me there is more to understanding what makes a discipline real than the wording of its self-description. At the very least we should identify the commonalities among the scholastic efforts of those who call themselves information scientists, for it is in looking at what people do rather than what they say that we often find the truth. I am very pleased that David and Lyn have presented ample evidence of doing just this in their efforts at showcasing the logic and language of information science.

Introduction

In this chapter we will consider the nature and purpose of information research, and the methods used to carry it out. We will give an overview with examples, without trying to go into the detail of any particular aspects.

There are a number of good textbooks covering information research methods. These all cover many of the topics in this chapter in much more detail than we give here. We will mention them now, and refer to them again only when they offer some particularly useful material. They should, however, be considered as valuable references for all of this chapter, offering a fuller treatment to material which we treat briefly here.

Two good texts giving a detailed coverage of the area are Alison Pickard's Research methods in information (2007), and Briony Oates’ Researching information systems and computing (2006). Lawal (2009) gives a guide aimed specifically at library and information practitioners and students considering carrying out research, while Moore (2006) focuses on planning and managing information research. Texts on research methods generally may also be valuable, for example Denscombe's (2010) guide to social research methods. So also may be some texts on particular aspects of the information sciences; Donald Case's books (2007; 2012) on information and use, for example, give a very good overview of the research processes and methods used in this area.