Information Science – What the Hell Is It?

Information science?

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Welcome to my „Information science“ series. What comes to your mind when you hear Information science? Nothing too concrete? Don’t worry, for even information scientists haven’t reached consensus regarding what kind of science it is and whether it can even be called science. Aim of this article will be the presentation of what is understood by “Information science” among us, information scientists.

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What kind of field of study is it anyway?

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If we were searching for a naturalist, or a biologist, we would definitely try to do so in science faculty. But where would we do so if finding an information scientist was our aim? Everywhere! Information science is being taught at faculty of computer science, faculty of economics, faculty of social sciences and even at the science faculty. It is the supreme multidisciplinary subject, just like the philosophy was up until now. Or maybe it still is philosophy and information science is just a part of it (like every other field of study is/ or used to). Maybe IT IS philosophy and maybe it is no science at all. LOL so those are basically all the open options about what Information science might be.

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Basic elements and the core of Information science

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The core terms of Information science like knowledge, information, communication and representation are by no means terms of only Information science. That supports the “supreme multidisciplinary” definition, but doesn’t really help us in setting up some kind of “subject matters”. Deemed as basic elements are infometrics, searching for information, information management and library/archiver studies. As we can see Information science is rather wide subject and it’s pretty hard to localize small and unequivocally defined set of topics. But we have to start somewhere, therefore those listed above will be our anchoring point.

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Points of intersection with other fields of study

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Let’s illustrate the multidisciplinary science (or metascience?) by exact intersections with other subjects.

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Collections

I shall not forget to pay the tribute to the roots. Information science has been born from institutes cherishing the cultural inheritance – in other words GLAM. This abbreviation stands for galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Historically those were the first institutes where it was necessary to effectively work with information in order to provide and run good service and thus the information started to be studied.

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Computer science

One of the most obvious intersections. Even though the whole physical world is formed by information, it’s easier to study it in the virtual world. People often times think that Information science is Computer science, but that is not the case and will be further explained in one of the upcoming article from this series.

Social sciences

The society has become information society not long ago. The intersection has been there though forever, because social communication (inter/intra…doesn’t really matter) is the core element of any social science and communication is nothing but transmission of information.

Management and Politics

Information management and information strategies are the core components of information science too.

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I guess that by now you see why there are intersections with basically any science field. This world is the world of information. And information is what we study! This is it for the first Information science article. I hope that you have at least rough understanding of what it is by now. Don’t worry though, there will be TONS of articles to explain it even further:).

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