Some compass bearings for information policy orienteering

Commentators in the library and information profession habitually voice concern about the perceived lack of a coherent and integrated set of ‘national information policies’ in the UK. These concerns are worthy but ultimately misplaced. The real problem is not our inability to come up with a nice neat package of the ‘right policies’, but our failure to think critically about the value systems that shape our perception of information policy problems in the first place. This article contributes to this new agenda by developing a concept mapping of the Field of information policy, based on term co‐occurrence data. This leads to a broader discussion about the values — rather than the specific laws and regulations — that underpin our conceptions of information policy.