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Abstract

Held for the first time in the United States, the Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science (CoLIS4) is the fourth in the series of international conferences that bring together leading researchers from around the world. CoLIS4 provides a forum for critically exploring and analyzing library and information science as a discipline and as a field of research from historical, philosophical, theoretical, and methodological perspectives. The papers in this volume cover a wide variety of topics, presenting the latest research and information on new developments and new approaches to conceptual frameworks and methods in library and information science. Papers range from a re-examination of the core concepts to empirical studies, analyzing such areas as Web searching, information retrieval, informetrics, information behavior, aspects of learning, business intelligence, and information processing mechanisms. As library and information science is closely associated with a variety of other disciplines and its practice employs technologies that are changing rapidly, presenters focus on the old and the new, address theory and practice, and bridge diverse intellectual areas. From challenging existing approaches and proposing new ones to establishing models and reviewing methods-the presenters lead the way to change and further exploration.

Content

The Fourth International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science (CoLIS4), held at the The Information School, University of Washington, Seattle, continued the tradition of the previous three CoLIS conferences, begun in 1991 at the University of Tampere, Finland. CoLIS4 was organized by Washington in cooperation with the Department of Information Studies, Tampere, the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Denmark, and the American Society for Information Science and Technology. As in the previous conferences, CoLIS4 invited papers presenting new research topics and approaches in library and information science (LIS) and, at the same time, encouraged contributors and attendees to step back from the practice and dissemination of their research to assess the current state of LIS as a discipline, from historical, theoretical, philosophical, and empirical perspectives. Held for the first time in North America-significantly at the home of a revitalized and actively expanding LIS program in a technology-rich region-CoLIS4 attracted 120 attendees from 16 countries. Presenters and attendees were mostly LIS researchers from academic institutions and research institutes, as well as a number from the information and technology industries. Three full days included a keynote address, 17 papers by an international slate of presenters, two panel discussions, and a poster session during an evening reception. The conference was preceded and followed by two days of tutorials and workshops, as well as a doctoral presentation forum. Breakfasts, lunches, coffee breaks, and a banquet at Microsoft Corporation headquarters were provided to give participants ample time to mix informally.
To encourage a spirit of deeper reflection, the organizing committee invited 20-minute paper presentations, each followed by 10 minutes of discussion. (There were no separate, concurrent tracks.) This approach encouraged direct follow-up questions and discussion which carried forward from session to session, providing a satisfying sense of continuity to the overall conference theme of exploring the interaction between conceptual and empirical approaches to LIS. The expressed goals of CoLIS4 were to: - explore the existing and emerging conceptual frameworks and methods of library and information science as a field, - encourage discourse about the character and definitions of key concepts in LIS, and - examine the position of LIS among parallel contemporary domains and professions likewise concerned with information and information technology, such as computer science, management information systems, and new media and communication studies. The keynote address by Tom Wilson (University of Sheffield) provided an historical perspective on the philosophical and research frameworks of LIS in the post-World War II period. He traced the changing emphases on the objects of LIS study: definitions of information and documents; information retrieval, relevance, systems, and architectures; information users and behaviors. He raised issues of the relevance of LIS research to real-world information services and practice, and the gradual shift in research approaches from quantitative to qualitative. He concluded by stressing the ongoing need of LIS for cumulative, theory-based, and content-rich bodies of research, meaningful to practitioners and useful to contemporary LIS education.
LIS research and evaluation methodologies fell under the same scrutiny and systematization, particularly in the presentations employing multiple and mixed methodologies. Jaana Kekäläinen's and Kalervo Järvelin's proposal for a framework of laboratory information retrieval evaluation measures, applied along with analyses of information seeking and work task contexts, employed just such a mix. Marcia Bates pulled together Bradford's Law of Scattering of decreasingly relevant information sources and three information searching techniques (browsing, directed searching, and following links) to pose the question: what are the optimum searching techniques for the different regions of information concentrations? Jesper Schneider and Pia Borlund applied bibliometric methods (document co-citation, bibliographic coupling, and co-word analysis) to augment manual thesaurus construction and maintenance. Fredrik Åström examined document keyword co-occurrence measurement compared to and then combined with bibliometric co-citation analysis to map LIS concept spaces. Ian Ruthven, Mounia Lalmas, and Keith van Rijsbergen compared system-supplied query expansion terms with interactive user query expansion, incorporating both partial relevance assessment feedback (how relevant is a document) and ostensive relevance feedback (measuring when a document is assessed as relevant over time). Scheduled in the midst of the presentations were two stimulating panel and audience discussions. The first panel, chaired by Glynn Harmon, explored the current re-positioning of many library and information science schools by renaming themselves to eliminate the "library" word and emphasize the "information" word (as in "School of Information," "Information School," and schools of "Information Studies"). Panelists Marcia Bates, Harry Bruce, Toni Carbo, Keith Belton, and Andrew Dillon presented the reasons for name changes in their own information programs, which include curricular change and expansion beyond a "stereotypical" library focus, broader contemporary theoretical approaches to information, new clientele and markets for information services and professionals, new media formats and delivery models, and new interdisciplinary student and faculty recruitment from crossover fields. Sometimes criticized for over-broadness and ambiguity-and feared by library practitioners who were trained in more traditional library schools-renaming schools both results from and occasions a renewed examination of the definitions and boundaries of the field as a whole and the educational and research missions of individual schools.

Date

22. 2.2007 18:56:23
22. 2.2007 19:12:10

LCSH

Library science / Congresses

Subject

Library science / Congresses