Alan Gilchrist

Are we at a turning point in digital information? The expansion of the internet was unprecedented; search engines dealt with it in the only way possible - scan as much as they could and throw it all into an inverted index. But now search engines are beginning to experiment with deep web searching and attention to taxonomies, and the Semantic Web is demonstrating how much more can be done with a computer if you give it knowledge. What does this mean for the skills and focus of the information science (or sciences) community? Should information designers and information managers work more closely to create computer based information systems for more effective retrieval? Will information science become part of computer science and does the rise of the term informatics demonstrate the convergence of information science and information technology - a convergence that must surely develop in the years to come? Issues and questions such as these are reflected in this monograph, a collection of essays written by some of the most pre-eminent contributors to the discipline. These peer reviewed perspectives capture insights into advances in, and facets of, information science, a profession in transition. With an introduction from Jack Meadows the key papers are: Meeting the challenge, by Brian Vickery The developing foundations of information science, by David Bawden The last 50 years of knowledge organization, by Stella G Dextre Clarke On the history of evaluation in IR, by Stephen Robertson The information user, by Tom Wilson The sociological turn in information science, by Blaise Cronin From chemical documentation to chemoinformatics, by Peter Willett Health informatics, by Peter A Bath Social informatics and sociotechnical research, by Elisabeth Davenport The evolution of visual information retrieval, by Peter Enser Information policies, by Elizabeth Orna Disparity in professional qualifications and progress in information handling, by Barry Mahon Electronic scholarly publishing and open access, by Charles Oppenheim Social software: fun and games, or business tools?, by Wendy A Warr Bibliometrics to webometrics, by Mike Thelwall. This monograph previously appeared as a special issue of the Journal of Information Science, published by Sage. Readership: Reproduced here as a monograph, this important collection of perspectives on a skill in transition from a prestigious line-up of authors will now be available to information studies students worldwide and to all those working in the information science field.

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