Introduction to Information Science Free

As declared by the World Summit of the Information Society, one of the main global challenges in the third millennium is to build a society where everyone can access and share information, enabling individuals and communities to achieve their full potential in promoting their development and improving their quality of life. Among many notable disciplines that can greatly contribute to the life cycle of information from generation to dissemination, findability, accessibility, and usability is information science. When I recently searched for the phrase “information science” in two leading scholarly search tools, books.google.com and scholar.google.com, 3,710,000 and 1,300,000 records were retrieved respectively, which, in turn, is an indication of the dynamism and importance of the field. As evidence for this liveliness, the book Introduction to Information Science has been published which according to Bawden and Robinson (p. xiii), aims to describe in outline, and to set into context, all the important topics within the information science discipline. It consists of 15 chapters. Asking what information science is, as an academic discipline and profession at the beginning of the book (chapter 1), the focus of the work is on 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. In this line, during chapters 2 to 4, the authors examine historically, philosophically, and conceptually the discussion of information, information science, and some related issues. Among the main topics and sub-fields examined in chapters 5 to 14 are “domain analysis” as a theory for information science, “information organisation”, “the interoperability between information science and information technologies”, “informetrics as measurement of the quantitative aspects of creating, communicating, and using information”, “information behaviour”, “the ever-changing nature of information communication contexts”, “information society”, “information management and policy”, and “digital literacy”. Chapter 14 entitled “Information science research: what and how?” generally reviews the nature and purpose of information research and introduces some common research methods. Finally, chapter 15 gives an overview of some ideas regarding information science as a discipline and profession. Structurally, both the book and its chapters are well-organised. It can serve both as a primary source (stand-alone textbook) that can be directly referred to, and as a secondary source which can be consulted to identify much more relevant references. Totally, it contains a wealth of information for information managers, professors, students, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of library science, information science, communication, and computer science. To attain an adequate understanding of information science, it is recommended that this valuable book is read alongside Introduction to Information Science and Technology, edited by Charles H. Davis and Debora Shaw (Information Today, 2011).