Theoretical development of information science: A brief

history

Birger Hjørland

University of Copenhagen, Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark

Pnl617@iva.ku.dk

Abstract

This paper presents a brief history of information science (IS) as viewed by the author. The term
‘information science’ goes back to 1955 and evolved in the aftermath of Claude Shannon’s
‘information theory’ (1948), which also inspired research into problems in fields of library science
and documentation. These subjects were a main focus of what became established as ‘information
science’, which from 1964 onwards was often termed ‘library and information science’ (LIS).
However, the usefulness of Shannon’s information theory as the theoretical foundation of the field
was been challenged. Among the strongest “paradigms” in the field is a tradition derived from the
Cranfield experiments in the 1960s and the bibliometric research following the publication of
Science Citation Index from 1963 and forward. Among the competing theoretical frameworks, ‘the
cognitive view’ became influential from the 1970s. Today information science is very fragmented,
but a growing number of researchers find that the problems in the field should be related to theories
of knowledge and understood from a social and cultural perspective, thereby re-establishing
connections with idea’s such as social epistemology which may have remained implicit in in the
field much of the time.
1. Introduction
This paper briefly expounds theoretical developments in information science (IS). In practice
information science today may be considered synonym with library and information science, LIS
(see Hjørland, 2013for a more detailed discussion). This article is based on former accounts of the
subject (e.g. Wersig 2003; Bates 2005 and Talja, Tuominen and Savolainen 2005). Information
science has, however, a very disordered history, and the former descriptions need to be reconsidered
and extended. Therefore, this article attempts to fill a gap and to provide a broad overview of the
theoretical development of the field. It is necessarily selective and also subjective in the sense that
it reflects the priorities made by the author. As Pierre Bourdieu wrote about his outline of the
history of another field:

It is clear that it is not easy to construct the history of the sociology of science [or, as here,
of information science], not only because of the vast volume of ‘literature’ but also because
this is a field in which the history of the discipline is at stake (among others) in struggles.
Each of the protagonists develops a vision of this history consistent with the interests linked
to the position he occupies within the history; the different historical accounts are oriented
according to the position of their producer and cannot claim the status of indisputable truth
(Bourdieu, 2004, p. 9)

The point of departure in this paper is the term “information science” which according Shapiro
(1995) was quoined by Jason Farradane (1955). It was established in the same period as were
concepts such as ‘information technology’, ‘information processing’ and ‘information storage and
retrieval’ appeared. All these terms seems to owe their appearance to the new ‘information theory’
developed by, among others, communications engineer Claude Shannon (1948) in the article A
Mathematical Theory of Communication. As Proffitt (2010) noted about the Oxford English
Dictionary’s coverage of the term “information”:

“The Supplement’s editors identified and included many of the earliest compounds evoking
the sense of information as data, something to be stored, processed, or distributed
electronically: information processing, information retrieval, information storage (all three
dated from 1950). In quick succession came terms relating to the academic study of the
phenomenon, appearing in a neatly logical sequence: first the idea (information theory,
1950), next its budding adherents (information scientist, 1953), then the established field of
study (information science, 1955).”

Shannon’s (1948) ‘information theory’ seems therefore to be the direct or indirect reason for
establishing ‘information science’ about seven years later. One may claim, however, that the field is
older, that only the label is new. Rayward (1994, p. 238), for example, wrote that Paul Otlet’s
(1934) Traité de Documentation is one of the first information science textbooks (implying that the
content of information science is older than the name; see also Hjørland, in press c). We shall
return to this “pre-history of information science” below and here start with Shannon, who brought
not just a new theory, but in a much stronger way the idea that a theory in this field is possible at
all. Shannon’s theory brought a new conception of ‘information’, which in the narrow sense is
something which can be measured (e.g. in ‘bits’) and in a broader sense has been defined by
Michael Buckland (1991) as “information as thing” and by the Oxford English Dictionary as:

[2]d. Separated from, or without the implication of, reference to a person informed: that
which inheres in one of two or more alternative sequences, arrangements, etc., that
produce different responses in something, and which is capable of being stored in,
transmitted by, and communicated to inanimate things. [Oxford English dictionary, 2010
update]
Although information science thus seemingly owes its name to Shannon’s information theory, it
also developed out of library science and documentation; but, as we shall see below, information
theory that founded the field bearing the name ‘information science’ later lost influence as other
theoretical frameworks became more important.

2. Selected aspects of the prehistory of information science

Fields like ‘library science’, ‘the science of bibliography’, ‘scientific information’ and
‘documentation’ can be understood as the predecessors of information science.

Called bibliography, documentation, and scientific information during the first five decades
of the twentieth century, the field became known as information science in the early 1960s.
(Kline, 2004) Pre-Ref
Version
One demonstration of this was the change in name that the American Documentation Institute
(founded in 1937) underwent when it became the American Society for Information Science in 1968
(now the Association for Information Science & Technology). The many names for fields that are
sometimes synonyms and sometimes separate fields in relation to information science, as well as
their rather complicated relations, are outlined in Hjørland (2013c) and shall not be repeated here.
Before the term ‘information science’ was used (i.e. before 1955) fields existed which were
concerned with how documents are described, classified, organized, communicated and used. In
other words information science may be seen as part of a family of fields that all aimed to provide
optimal services, systems and infrastructures for different kinds of user groups. Such systems and
services might be termed ‘information systems and information services’; however, this is an
extremely broad concept that includes, among others, bibliographical systems and services, memory
institutions, scientific and scholarly information systems, documentation systems, management
information systems and knowledge organization systems. Many subtypes of what might be
considered information systems and services tend to form separate fields of study with separate
literatures. Library science, bibliography and documentation are basically about helping people find
the books, articles, pictures, music, information and so on they need or would like to read or
experience (including digital content and the application of advanced information technology),
which may be termed document representation and searching (often termed information storage
and retrieval). Librarians and information specialists help users retrieve the documents needed to
solve tasks, including writing theses and research papers (and to make systems that make such
retrieval optimal). They also help to ‘keep the valuable from oblivion’ (Wilson, 1968, p. 1). Thus,
prior to the establishment of information science, the core concept was the document. A document
should not be understood in the narrow, everyday meaning, but instead it is ‘any concrete or
symbolic indication, preserved or recorded, for reconstructing or for proving a phenomenon,
whether physical or mental’ (Briet, 1951, p.7]; here quoted from Buckland (1991, p.47). Briet’s
understanding of documents seems to be influenced by semiotic theory, although this is not made
explicit in her writings. Her famous example is that an antelope in Africa is not a document, but a
species that is kept in a zoo is. The example shows that the concept of ‘document’ should be
understood in connection to documenting activities.

Different theoretical views have had their effects in library science, bibliography and
documentation. We shall not here consider them all. Subfields such as information retrieval (IR),
knowledge organization (KO), bibliometrics, and information behavior have a long ranges of
approaches. The facet analytic school with Ranganathan IN KO, for example, will not be
considered (see Hjørland, 2013b). The following presentation is thus highly selective and is
constructed in order to demonstrate developments considered overall important by the author.

2.1. Melvil Dewey

Library pioneer Melvil Dewey (1851–1931) had a strong practicalist influence on the field. His
classification system (DDC) did not attempt to optimize findability in any specific collection or for
any specific user group. Nor did it try to find optimal scientific or philosophical solutions to the
problem today termed ‘information retrieval’ (IR). Instead DDC was a compromise and a standard
which could be used by many different collections. His system is the dream of library management
much more than the dream of users. Dewey’s approach may have blocked the development of
library science towards becoming a true scholarly field by not connecting the field to philosophy
and subject fields. Although Dewey felt it important that libraries mediated high-quality books and
culture, he saw it as the job of subject specialists to make the document selection. His library
science was thereby reduced to purely technical issues (and such technical issues were not
understood as being connected with content, but were based on a dualistic view of technology and
content). It is also characteristic of Dewey that he took the cultural values of his time and of his
class and sex for granted: they were not examined, but were considered as given.

2.2. Henry Bliss

Library scientist Henry Evelyn Bliss (1870–1955), on the other hand, based library classification on
knowledge developed in science and scholarship. He actually studied the different disciplines in
order to learn how scientists classified their fields. His main idea was that although there are many
different perspectives, it is possible to find overall lines of consensus on which to base
bibliographic classification (a view which was in accordance with the logical positivism dominant
at that time). His view is thus not as practicalist as Dewey’s, but it made library science much better
connected to and founded in scholarship, although his view on consensus perhaps seems
problematic from the perspective of our post-Kuhnian area.

2.3. The documentation movement

The documentation movement has already been mentioned with Briet’s development of the concept
of “document” as a broad term related to a semiotic point of view in which a document is
understood as a sign used to document something. The founders of this movement were Paul Otlet
(1868-1944) and Henri Lafontaine (1854-1943). This movement is not limited to libraries, but
focuses on bibliography and the task to provide documentation services based on subject analysis
and classification, but also on providing abstracts and using the most advanced information
technology. Documentation (and the concept of document and the – often implicitly - underlying
semiotic philosophy) lost influence with the growing influence of the term “information” (see
Hjørland, 2000). It is important to say, however, that an important re-introduction of documentation
theory with the concept of documents has taken place with information science (see Buckland,
1991a; Hjørland, 2000, 2002; Frohmann, 2004; Furner, 2004; Lund, 2008 and Ørom, 2007).

2.4. Social epistemology

Library scientist Jesse Shera (1903–1982) and his colleague Margaret Egan (1905–1959) developed
a conception termed ‘social epistemology’. Shera found that ‘previously, librarianship had
developed merely “as a body of techniques evolved from certain ad hoc assumptions about how
people use books ...”’ (Shera, 1970, p. 29) and he tried to develop the field on the basis of
sociological theory. Social epistemology was defined as the study of those processes by which
society as a whole seeks to achieve a perceptive or understanding relation to the total environment--
-physical, psychological, and intellectual (Egan and Shera, 1952, p. 132; original emphasis). The
‘focus of attention’ of this new discipline should be ‘the analysis of the production, distribution, and
utilization of intellectual products (Egan and Shera, 1952, pp. 133–134). Jonathan Furner (2002)
does not, however, consider Egan and Shera’s social epistemology related to either the later field
known by this name or to the sociology of science; alternatively Furner suggested that Egan and
Shera’s view should be understood as a psychological or individualist approach later to be taken up
by the cognitive perspective. I do not fully agree with this view (although Furner indicates some
obvious links and also correctly says that their writings have ‘an air of quaintness when placed
alongside representatives of newer sociologies’). Egan and Shera were not satisfied with the
individualist approaches of their own time and tried to formulate an alternative:
 As she [Egan] has pointed out, psychologists have studied behaviour with reference to the
conduct of the individual; epistemologists have studied the origins, growth, and
development of knowledge, but again with reference to the individual. The sociologists
have studied the behaviour of people in groups, but never really with reference to the
influence of knowledge upon that behaviour. In other words, epistemology has never been
taken out of the realm of individual’s relation to knowledge and studied in relation to the
sum total of social behaviour, social action. (Shera, 1970, p. 85).

It should be considered that Egan and Shera wrote at a time, in which Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy
(which is a social epistemology, cf. Wray, 2011) had not yet revolutionized the theory of
knowledge. Egan and Shera’s approach was also based on documents (or ‘graphic records’) as the
core concept of the field. An interpretation in retrospect might be that they too were searching for
something like a semiotic theory, in which the meaning attributed to documents is determined by
human social documenting practices. However, given the background knowledge of their time, this
project remained somewhat unclear, as indicated by Furner (2002). There are two issues which in
my view make Egan and Shera’s approach social (contrary to Furner’s view):
(1) Shera found that librarianship has to be based on subject knowledge:

“[A] good undergraduate major in a subject field is essential to the librarian, and he should
pursue his subject specialty as far as his resources permit” (Shera, 1968, p. 317)

(2) Shera was obviously interested in libraries and their social and cultural importance in a
historical perspective (cf., Shera, 1968), which is a perspective clearly distinct from psychological
and cognitive approaches. A positive evaluation was also expressed by philosopher and information
scientist Patrick Wilson (1927–2003):

Social epistemology with a focus on textual objects and with an eye on the actual and
possible roles of information systems is a productive approach to our field (Wilson, 2002,
electronic source, no page).

Unfortunately, social approaches were discontinued or marginalized and less fruitful approaches
came to dominate the field in the next decades. Today, however, such social-epistemological
conceptions have got a renaissance, as discussed later.
jis.sagepub.co.uk
3. Information theory
As mentioned above, engineer Claude Shannon developed the so-called information theory in 1948
(which, however, is often considered a misnomer for a theory of data transmission). Information
theory is a mathematical theory about the technological issues involved whenever data is
transmitted, stored or retrieved. Its basic idea is that the harder it is to guess what is received, the
more information one has got. The theory involves concepts such as communication channels,
bandwidth, noise, data transfer rate, storage capacity, signal-to-noise ratio, error rate, feedback and
so on (see Figure 1as Haigh (2001, p. 31) describes how Shannon’s theory became affiliated with
documentation.

Information gained a new cachet from ‘information theory’ and Shannon’s information
theory resonated far beyond its technical niche. During the late 1950s, ‘information’ seemed
scientific, modern, and fashionably. The 1950s saw a flurry of interest in the problems of
‘scientific information’. Scientific and technical work was being published in unprecedented
quantities, spurring interest in technologies and systems to classify, abstract, distribute, and
index it. Alarmists warned that an ‘information explosion’ threatened Western scientific
leadership during the cold war because America’s lack of centralized indexing and
abstracting left scientists and engineers doomed to repeat previous published work.

Shannon’s ‘information theory’ has been and still is extremely important in engineering and
computer science. However, the question for us is how important is Shannon’s theory for the field
now established as ‘information science’ (or LIS)? Linguist and information scientist Henning
Spang-Hanssen (2001, electronic source, no page) wrote:

‘information theory’ is not concerned with documents, and not even primarily concerned
with the content or meaning of documents or other symbolic representations, but
concentrates on the efficient transmission of signals, which may – or may not – convey
meaning. It is therefore unfortunate to confuse the term information theory with
information as occurring in “information science” and “information retrieval”.

As already mentioned information theory gave rise to a new understanding of ‘information’ and it
became extremely popular, not just in telecommunications, but also in many other fields, including
psychology, and it became common to consider libraries, journals, reference books and the whole
scientific communication system as ‘information storage and retrieval systems’. An example that
demonstrates this influence is The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Sills, 1968),
which contains an overall entry for ‘Information Storage and Retrieval’ (IS&R), which is
subdivided into five subsections:

I: The field [Information Storage and Retrieval] (Becker, 1968).

II: Information services (Mitchell, 1968).
III: Libraries (Shera, 1968).
IV: Reference materials and books (Vose, 1968).
V: Bibliographic issues in the behavioral sciences (Bry, 1968).

By assigning these subjects under the label ‘IS&R’ this entry (with its subentries) reflects a new
information-theoretical view of libraries, bibliographies, documentation and the scholarly
communication system. On the other hand, information theory is not really considered in the
content of the entries. It seems just to be a new label for what was formerly termed library science
or documentation. There is no direct discussion of the relation between subjects presented and the
terms ‘information’, ‘IS&R’ or ‘information theory’, although the article about the field (Becker,
1968) focused on the application of technology and the creation of a new research field named
‘IS&R’ urged by the problems caused by the so-called ‘information explosion’ (implying the
concept of information defined by [Oxford English Dictionary, 2010, sense 2d], and explicitly
criticized by, for example, Buckland (1991b), Spang-Hanssen, 2001). Also the article on
information services (Mitchell, 1968) mentioned the application of new technology and the paper
has ‘the information crisis’ as its point of departure, but at its core the paper reflects a traditional
documentation perspective rather than anything inspired by information theory. It should also be
mentioned that Shera (presented above) wrote the section about libraries (Shera, 1968) and if
anything this article reflects an alternative to the information-theoretical point of view. It is
therefore not convincingly demonstrated that the subjects described under the label ‘information
storage and retrieval’ can adequately and fruitfully be presented and discussed from the perspective
of information theory. On the one hand the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences
provides an example of an influence of information theory in information science and on the other
hand it indicates that information theory did not influence the content of the field in a deeper way.

This use of terms like ‘information’ and ‘information storage and retrieval’ properly reflected
expectations and hopes about the usefulness of Shannon’s theory (or something like it) in the future
more than it reflected the actual use of that theory or considerations about the nature of the field.
Another indication of this expectation was a Danish conference in 1957 (Blegvad, Elberling,
Johnsen and Rode, 1957) documented that prominent scholars had then found that – at last – a
theory or theoretical framework (Shannon’s) which seemed to be fruitful for attacking the problems
of scholarly and scientific communication.

Shannon’s theory gave rise to the measurement of information by the unit of the ‘bit’, which may
be applied to, for example, how information can be compressed and stored on a disk drive (not to be
confused with the number of binary digits that may be stored on a given drive, which are not ‘bits’
in Shannon’s sense). However, as pointed out by many, this measure is not particular relevant to the
field of library, information and documentation studies. Michael Buckland, for example, wrote:
There is a valid and respectable field of formal information theory based on propositions,
algorithms, uncertainty, truth statements, and the like, but its formal strengths are also its limits and
make [it] inappropriate and inadequate for the concerns of LIS (Buckland, 2005, p. 686). Spang-
Hanssen explained why Shannon’s theory does not apply to information science:

The amount of information is here [in Shannon’s information theory] measured by the
decrease of uncertainty resulting from the choice of a particular message among a set of
possible messages. […] I shall only mention a few points to show the limitation of this
measure to our conception of information.
In Shannon’s sense, the amount of information is proportional to the length of the message
(in a given code). This obviously does not apply to the utilization of literature as
information. Among other things, an abstract may be as informative as the complete paper.
Shannon’s amount of information presupposes a measure of the uncertainty on behalf of the
receiver. By the utilization of literature as information no measurable uncertainty can be
defined generally.
Shannon’s amount of information applies to some explicit coding and cannot in the case of
normal writing (or speech) account for semantic relations that are not shown by similarities
of expression. E.g. the synonyms ‘serials’ and ‘periodicals’ would be treated as different
messages (or parts of messages) having different ‘amounts of information’. (Spang-
Hanssen, 2001, electronic source, no page).

As mentioned there were – particularly in the 1950s – great expectations that Shannon’s theory
might, at last, provide a fruitful theoretical foundation for the study of scholarly communication,
libraries, information searching, and reference books and so on. However, much of this must have
been nothing but a dream. Most information researchers today do not find Shannon’s theory a
proper theoretical basis for the field, although some (e.g. an editorial in Journal of Information
Science) have argued otherwise:

‘The boundaries of information science: information theory is alive and well’ (Cawkell,
1990).

However, Cawkell’s examples are about technological problems rather than about library,
documentation or information problems, because Cawkell was in my opinion talking about
computer science rather than about information science. It is not the job of information scientists,
for example, to construe an algorithm that makes it possible to compress images in order to reduce
computer space (but rather to say something about which images should be retrieved for given
purposes, how they should be made findable). Information theory does play a role in modern
information retrieval research, in which the information of a given term is measured in relation to
term frequencies (Baeza-Yates and Ribeiro-Neto, 2011, p. 218-219). Although this is the case, it
would be wrong to say that information theory is the theoretical basis for IR research. As van
Rijsbergen stated:

In the context of information retrieval (IR), information, in the technical meaning given in
Shannon's theory of communication, is not readily measured (Shannon and Weaver
[1949]). In fact, in many cases one can adequately describe the kind of retrieval by simply
substituting 'document' for 'information' (van Rijsbergen, 1979, p. 1).

Chew et al. (2011) is an example of a recent paper which takes information theory very serious in
relation to IR, but it also indicates that information theory has not been strongly connected with this
area:
It would probably be fair to say that IT [information theory] (not to be confused with
information science) has been at most incidental in the development of IR. Nevertheless,
IT has not passed IR completely. (Chew et al., 2011, p. 39).

Whether modern IR research should be considered part of information science is also an issue.
Historically leading IR-researchers used to publish in IS-journals, but today the mathematical and
statistical parts of IR seems to have immigrated to computer science publications. This supports the
view that information theory is affiliated with computer science, but not with IS.

Gernot Wersig (2003, p. 312) found that the very notion of semiotics ‘in fact became one of the
most important critiques of too simple an application of information theory to human
communication’. This may be an understatement, although each theory has, of course, its own
domain in which it is the best model. Today, the information-theoretic understanding is often
contrasted with the semiotic understanding, for example, by Fiske (2011, pp. 37–60). Information
theory may have been a barrier to establishing information science in its own right because this
field is related to meaning and semantics, which are dimensions which are not considered by
information theory (see Nöth, 2013, for an overview of the criticism of information theory from
semiotic perspectives).

If information science has rightfully skipped its foundation in information theory, the concept of
‘information’ itself may turn out to be superfluous. Furner found that
 …philosophers of language have modeled the phenomena fundamental to human
communication in ways that do not require us to commit to a separate concept of
‘information.’ Indeed, we can conclude that such a concept is unnecessary for IS. Once the
concepts of interest have been labeled with conventional names such as ‘data,’ ‘meaning,’
‘communication,’ ‘relevance,’ etc., nothing is left (so it may be argued) to which to apply
the term ‘information.’ One corollary of such a conclusion is the equally negative judgment
that the field of IS is itself misnamed, and that its subject matter should more appropriately
be treated as a branch of communication studies, semiotics, or library studies (Furner, 2004,
p. 428).

Also Bernd Frohmann deflated the idea that information is more important than documents, arguing
instead that information...exists only as an effect of the ontologically primary elements: documents
and documentary practices. It has, therefore, only a secondary or derived ontological status; it is an
effect of the relative stability of documentary practices. Once practices stabilize, information can
emerge (Frohmann, 2004, p. 18). It would be unfortunate now to skip the name “information
science” but we should consider information as secondary to social documentary practices, as
suggested by Frohmann (2004), Day (2011) and Goguen (1997), among others.

4. “The systems oriented paradigm” and “the subject knowledge view”

We have seen that there were great expectations to Shannon’s theory, and Wersig wrote:

One could call the developmental stage [of information science] from1948 to the 1970s the
'Shannon and Weaver phase', because most of the discussions and attempts to structure the
concept of information relied on the reception of Shannon via Weaver (Wersig, 2003, p.
313).

Following the 'Shannon and Weaver phase' Wersig presents “the cognitive viewpoint”. But before
we turn to that, it should be said that an important issue seems to be lacking in his outline (which
may be due to a neglect of considering development in practice).

The period from the beginning of the 1970s to about 1990 was a period in which online information
services developed rapidly and influenced information science and information professionals very
much. Such online services revolutionized library reference services and from my point of view
such services is very much what information science and information profession is about. As
explained in Hjørland (in press, a) information specialists developed roles as expert searchers and
contributed to the design of online databases (including knowledge of thesauri, natural language,
citation searching, etc.). This development cannot be considered an application of Shannon’s theory
and must therefore be based on some alternative framework (to be discussed below).

At the research front around 1970 – and important to this day – was a paradigm developed by the
so-called Cranfield-experiments (see Cleverdon, Mills and Keen, 1966; Cleverdon, 1970), which
was later labeled “the physical paradigm” (e.g. by Ellis, 1992a, b) or “the systems centered
approach” (e.g. by Saracevic, 1999). The experimental environment was Cranfield College of
Aeronautics and the tests were carried out in the same way as other technological products are
tested (hence the name “physical paradigm”).

The physical paradigm is derived from the importation of the scientific method into LIS. It
views information as flowing from a source to a destination, the user, who is relatively
passive. The focus is on the process of translation information into a message that the
system can convey to the user, as suggested by Claude Shannon’s Communication Theory.
…
Research that adheres to the physical paradigm typically compares systems to a relatively
arbitrary notion of what a successful search might be. For example, Cyril Cleverdon’s
Cranfield studies (discussed in Chapter 4 and 11) compared different forms of subject
representation using predetermined searches with predetermined results. If the
predetermined results were retrieved, a search was considered successful. Cleverdon’s
studies were among the most influential, but many other studies follow the same paradigm
(Olson and Boll, 2001, p. 266)

The Cranfield studies introduced the famous measures “recall” and “precision” in order to evaluate
the efficiency of different systems and search strategies – which gave rise to an enormous literature
about the concept “relevance”. The simple idea is that all relevant documents should be retrieved
while non-relevant documents (noise) should be avoided. All three terms are still core terms in
information science, but it is an issue whether they should be based on scientific criteria (and expert
evaluations) or on user-based criteria and on user-evaluations. In the Cranfield experiments, the
evaluation of systems and search strategies were done by subject specialists, whereas the later user-
based approach let the users make the evaluation. The most explicit scientific criteria of relevance
and recall have been developed in evidence based medicine, cf. Hjørland (in press a). Olson and
Boll’s quote above said that the Cranfield experiments used “relatively arbitrary notion of what a
successful search might be”. I do not agree in this statement (and not either in view that the physical
paradigm should be understood as based on Shannon’s theory). In a former publication I described
how evaluations were actually carried out:

Cleverdon (1970) reanalyzed some results from the Cranfield II experiments. The types of search
questions discussed were both “realistic” or “real-life questions” and “prepared questions” (which is
surprising, given the description of this view from the user-oriented community). Relevance assessments
were made by people with different backgrounds, mostly scientists in the field. Each assessor evaluated
each document (in full text) on a five-point scale and made qualitative notes about the assessment. Most
important is that relevance was evaluated in relation to its possible function for the user because this is
directly opposed to how the systems view is mostly being described. The paper further discussed how
relevance assessments vary greatly among different assessors. Appendix 1 in Cleverdon (1970) lists the
test-questions and the real documents used in the test. This seems important because it makes
interpretations of the relevance-assessments possible. This procedure seems different from how it is
described by the user-oriented researchers (Hjørland, 2010, p. 220).
I do not see this procedure as a “relatively arbitrary notion of what a successful search might be” as
quoted above, but it is correct that the view of that time was mostly based on a positivist
assumptions. What was not investigated was how different “paradigms” in the field have different
evaluation criteria (and a discussion of on which subject knowledge view evaluations should be
performed). The reservations raised by Olson and Boll in relation to the physical paradigm may be
seen as a justification to their next section, which is: “The cognitive paradigm”. However, if the
cognitive paradigm does not in reality make better solutions for users – as I claim I fail to do – then
Olson and Boll’s reservations posed against the physical paradigm fall flat.

Information science started with the underlying premise that information specialists needs subject
knowledge (just as we saw that Shera, 1968, argued for subject knowledge in librarianship). The
term “information scientist” was first used by Farradane (1953) two years before the term
“information science” was first used and was used specifically to denote a scientist trained to help
other scientists in finding information: the qualifications were a degree in science or engineering, a
second language and 5 years’ experience in information work. The Institute of Information
Scientists established 1958 reflected this definition (see Vickery and Vickery, 1987, pp. 361-369).
Robinson and Bawden (2013) also underlined the subject-based nature of early British information
science. It seems therefore that information science in practice was founded on “the subject
knowledge view”, somewhat related to what was later named “the domain-analytic view” by
Hjørland and Albrechtsen (1995). The important difference may be that the subject knowledge view
that time was mainly “positivist” (assuming consensus among researchers) while the theory of
knowledge today is more influenced by paradigm theory (assuming conflicting values and dissensus
in “information”). In other words: The subjectivity in relevance assessments in both experts and
users should be examined, and perhaps the best explanation in the variations is to be found in the
different theories and paradigms to which the assessors subscribe.

“The systems centered approach” is, by the way, a bad term because it not just about computers, but
also about the documents represented in the databases, their different genres, terminology,
relevance, properties, subject access points etc. (and in this respect can be seen as a continuation of
documentation as described above). I do not see information science as primarily about human-
computer interaction but about human interaction with mankind’s recorded knowledge and culture
(via computers). It can be mentioned, for example, that Science Citation Index was among the
important bibliographic databases developed (in 1963). This gave rise to the study of how
researchers and documents are connected in citation networks. It also provided basis for coupling
information science with the sociology and philosophy of science (e.g. studying how disciplines
differ, motivations to cite other papers etc.). This field (bibliometrics) has today developed into one
of the most important research fields in information science (as well as other fields), and because its
links with sociology and philosophy, it has potentials to be an important part of the theoretical
foundation for information science (although that field too is often based on positivist assumptions).
From this perspective information science is a metascience concerned with the optimization of
infrastructures and scholarly communication in different domains (cf., Talja, 2010; Hjørland, in
Press, b).

5. Cognitive theory
‘Cognitive science’ or ‘cognitive sciences’ is an interdisciplinary research field with roots in
cognitive psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence and philosophy. It is an offshoot of
Shannon’s information theory along with fields like cybernetics and control theory, and the
development of computer technology. The field was established around 1975 with Norman and
Rummelhart’s Explorations in Cognition (1975) being among the first books about it. The journal
Cognitive Science started in 1977 and The Cognitive Science Society held its first annual meeting
in 1979. Cognitive theory, or more precisely, the computational theory of mind, as it developed in
this movement represents a particular kind of functionalism in which cognitive processes (in
humans, animals and computers) may be described as information processing. All behavior is
understood as rule-based (implemented in programs). Units of information take the form of mental
representations. The computational theory of mind redefined human beings as processors of
information, whereby they opened the way for researchers to rigorously study mental processes
using the tools of science and computer technology, enabling them to make thinking visible and
open to experiments. It is therefore also characteristic of cognitive science that theories and models
about human cognition may be tested on computers and vice versa, and that new developments in
computer science inspired new models of human cognition. Much of the technical language used in
cognitive theory is appropriated from information theory and computer technology. An important
part of the theory is the dichotomy between hardware and software – and that software may run on
different kinds of hardware (brains or computers). One of the underlying assumptions is also that
the study of general psychology can be used to develop computers which imitate human
intelligence (‘artificial intelligence’). Like Shannon’s information theory, cognitive science was
received with extraordinary optimism and excitement in the beginning. Philosophically it
represented a rationalist turn:
The philosophical antecedents of cognitive theory are numerous, but one philosopher
stands out as having a profound effect on the assumptions made by many cognitive
theorists. René Descartes (1596–1650) is often referred to as a rationalist philosopher,
meaning that he focused upon the workings of the mind. … Descartes posited the notion
that humans have innate ideas and that there is a duality between mind and body. These two
 ideas were to be seminal for cognitive theory. They, along with the computer metaphor,
significantly directed the course cognitive theory would take and would be the source of
many of the critical debates concerning it (Faux, 2014, p. 250).

5.1. Criticism of cognitive theory

There has been much criticism of the view that humans are information processing devices. The
criticism seems different from the criticism of Shannon’s theory where everybody seemed to agree
that this would be a fruitful theory if it was just used in its proper domain. Although this may also
be the case with the computational theory of mind, the debate here seems to be much more
existential: whether or not it is a fruitful theory of human cognition at all. We saw above that there
is a link between the computational theory of mind and rationalism. The classical opposition to
rationalism came from empiricism. Empiricism does not assume innate ideas, but is based on the
view that humans are born with a tabula rasa, an empty mind. Empiricism is related to
associationism and behaviorism, and based on these alternative philosophical perspectives the
computational approach known as neural networks was developed. The theory (and technology) of
neural networks represents an alternative theory that does not assume the existence of mental
representations, as cognitive theory does. However, we shall not go deeper into behaviorism and
neural networks because both rationalism and empiricism are based on an individualist philosophy,
which in my view represents a trap which can be avoided if we take a historicist and pragmatic
point of departure. Before we turn to that, it should be emphasized that the point raised in this
paragraph is extraordinary: that core issues related to the development of today’s front-line
technologies are based on classical philosophical issues.

Cultural psychologist Carl Ratner wrote about ‘the psychological fallacy’ which is as relevant to
cognitivism as it is to other alternatives to cultural psychology:

In 1910 Dewey wrote a statement that expresses a central tenet of cultural psychology. He
said that the processes that animate and form consciousness lie outside it in social life.
Therefore, the objective for psychologists is to use mental phenomena (e.g., perception,
emotions) as clues for comprehending the life processes that they represent. […] ‘The
supposition that these states [of consciousness] are somehow existent by themselves and in
this existence provide the psychologist with ready-made material is just the supreme case of
the ‘psychological fallacy’’ (Ratner, 2002, p. 3).

Two of the major critics of the computational theory of mind were also two of cognitive theory’s
architects. Ulrich Neisser (1976) criticized cognitive theory for being too focused upon laboratory
research, arguing that it lacks face validity because of this; thus, its applicability to the study of how
people think and solve problems in real-world settings is limited at best. To overcome this, research
needs to be conducted in real-world settings. Jerome Bruner (1990) has criticized cognitive theory
for becoming technicalized (p. 4): cognitive theory has fixated on how people process information
at the expense of understanding how we construct meaning. Bruner thus shifted the perspective
from cognitivism to cultural psychology.

‘Through a cultural lens, the notion of abstract, individual processors of information

becomes a shallow and one-dimensional view of the very deep and complex set of activities
we call thinking’ (Faux, 2014, p. 251).

Faux also summarizes the critique of cognitive theory by social constructionists, postmodernists
and humanists. These critiques converge on the notion that we are embodied beings in the world
and that our thinking is a function, not of information processing, but of social interaction in
cultural contexts.

In an article in Human IT the Swedish philosopher Peter Gärdenfors noted that

 The role of culture and society in cognition was marginalized in early
cognitive science. These were regarded as problem areas to be
addressed when an understanding of individual cognition had been
achieved. . . .
 However, when the focus of cognitive theories shifted away from
symbolic representations, semantic and pragmatic research reappeared
on the agenda . . .
 . . . a second tradition turns the study programme upside down: actions
are seen as the most basic entities …. (Gärdenfors, 1999).

Gärdenfors thus put forward a view related to that of Frohmann (2004) that the study of information
has to start with human activities, and that the approach used in cognitive science and in
information science has to be turned upside down. This is also the view that informs the present
author.

5.2. The cognitive view in information science

The above section has focused on the cognitive view in general. We shall now focus on the
discourse about the cognitive view in information science. The cognitive viewpoint in IS was
initially formulated by Brookes (1980), Belkin and colleagues (Belkin, 1984, 1990; Belkin, Oddy
and Brooks, 1982) and Ingwersen (1982, 1992). Core theoretical assumptions seem to be:

 That abstract models of the human mind can be applied directly in computer systems and
provide a basis for research in IR. Belkin (1984), for example, proposed the MONSTRAT-
model and Ingwersen (1992) proposed the closely related MEDIATOR model.
 Belkin’s “ASK” hypothesis (Anomalous State of Knowledge) (e.g. presented in Belkin
2005), which understands a recipient’s recognition of a conceptual state of knowledge that is
 anomalous with respect to some goal of the recipient. The recipient has a desire to resolve
this anomaly and this desire motivates the recipient’s information seeking behavior.
 An understanding of criteria of relevant information as something that depends on users’
judgments of quality of the relationship between information and information need at a
certain point in time, and which can be measured (Borlund, 2003; Schamber et al., 1990)
 An emphasis on the study of users in an abstract or generalized sense (rather than, for
example, on the study of documents, domains, cultures, information systems and services,
“memory institutions” – or on the study of users from cultural, historical and social
perspectives)
 A tendency to seek explanations about information phenomena in universal, psychological
mechanisms rather than in social, historical and culturally specific circumstances.

Two concrete examples of systems claimed to be based on the cognitive approach are the Book
House (developed in information science) and WordNet (developed in cognitive science, not within
information science). The analysis of such concrete achievements seems important in order to
understand a given approach. Hjørland (2013e) made an examination of these two systems and
found that it is unclear which role the study of users has in reality played in their development. In
spite of their explicit basis in cognitivism, they may actually largely be based in subject knowledge.

Sanna Talja, Kimmo Tuominen and Reijo Savolainen provided an examination of different views in
information science in which they placed ‘the cognitive view’ under ‘constructivism’ (more
specifically under ‘cognitive constructivism’) and wrote:

In IS [information science], constructivist ideas are commonly labelled under ‘the

cognitive viewpoint’. The cognitive viewpoint in IS […], does not represent cognitivism,
however. Cognitivism is an approach that significantly informed artificial intelligence in
drawing straightforward analogies between human information processing and computing
(Ingwersen, 1992, pp. 19–25, 227). The cognitive viewpoint in IS differs from cognitivism
by laying major emphasis on the way in which knowledge is actively built up by the
cognising subject, that is, by the individual mind to serve the organisation of internal and
external reality (Talja, Tuominen and Savolainen, 2005, p. 81).

I agree with Talja, Tuominen and Savolainen that it is unclear what the cognitive view stands for
because it seems not to be a consistent position. Before 1991 the cognitive view did in my opinion
represent cognitivism and the attempt to draw analogies between human information processing and
computing and to provide cognitive models for information transfer such as Belkin’s (1984)
MONSTRAT, Ingwersen’s MEDIATOR Later on Ingwersen (1992) made a distinction between
cognitivism and his own view, labelled ‘the cognitive view’ (probably due to criticism raised by
Hjørland, 1991). And later on again Ingwersen (1996) suggested a “holistic cognitive framework
for IR”. In his 1992 monograph, Ingwersen (p. 157) saw the cognitive view as a synthesis between
user-oriented approaches and the “traditional approach” and wrote: “The transformation from the
user-oriented and the traditional approaches into a cognitive one happens when IR research comes
to have each other’s isolated models in mind.” In Ingwersen and Järvelin (2005, 191), however,
user-oriented and cognitive views seem no longer to be separated. Here, the authors “[discuss] the
development of cognitive and user-oriented research from the 1970s and onwards under one
umbrella” and state that “the cognitive approach to IR could briefly be characterized as user- and
intermediary-oriented.” I interpret this—in line with other writings—as a tendency to give up the
cognitive approach as differentiated from user-based approaches.

The cognitive view in 2005 now claim to have turned from an individualist to a social perspective:

The present book … reflects a further development of the cognitive viewpoint … by

providing a contextual holistic perspective. The quite individualistic perspective laid down
in the former monograph [Ingwersen, 1992] is hence expanded into a social stance including
generation, searching and use of information” (Ingwersen and Järvelin, 2005, p. vii).

Although the cognitive view started as a reaction to the systems-oriented view (including IR
research and bibliometrics), the latter seems to be the approach that Ingwersen has mostly later
turned towards. “The cognitive view” in Ingwersen’s research seems therefore to have missed its
characteristic as a distinguishable approach, while other researchers seems to continue the original
cognitivist profile (e.g., Jörgensen, 2003; Todd, 2005; Zhang, Liu, and Belkin, in press). Therefore,
the cognitive view may not really be considered a unified theory or tradition.

Of this reason the question of whether or not cognitivism in information science is related to the
constructivist position of Jean Piaget and others, as suggested by Talja, Tuominen and Savolainen
(2005) cannot be answered with yes or no, but only be answered by analyzing specific suggestions
that have been put forward. Belkin’s ASK hypothesis (Belkin, 2005), for example, should it be
considered constructivist rather than cognitive? We shall not answer that question here, because
both views share an individualist approach, which I find problematic. It is also outside the scope of
this paper to provide introductions to and discussions of theoretical positions such as
constructivism, constructionism, discourse analysis etc. Many of the assumptions of the cognitive
view turn out to be problematic; rather than openly recognize or debate such problems, the strategy
of some cognitivist researchers seems to be to try to make the label fit whatever approach seemed to
be proposed in the community of information science.
Tefko Saracevic wrote about two traditions of research in information retrieval: a systems-centered
tradition (in computer science) and a user-centered tradition (in information science):

The split is not only conceptual, looking very differently at the same process, but also
organizational. The systems centered side is now mostly concentrated in the Special
Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) of the Association for Computing
Machinery (ACM), while the user-centered cluster congregates around the American
Society for Information Science (ASIS). Each has its own communication outlets—
journals, proceedings, and conferences. There is less and less overlap of authors and works
between the two outlets. We have two camps, two islands, with, unfortunately, relatively
little traffic in-between. (Saracevic, 1999, p. 1057).

In this quote Saracevic assumes that the research on IR taking place in information science (the
user-centered tradition) has something important to offer. However, a much more pessimistic
interpretation was put forward by Wersig:

Information science has not reached a stage of development where it relies on a sufficiently
sound theoretical and methodological base to be accepted at least as an important field of
study. It is still looking for its identity (Vakkari and Cronin, 1992) and one of the reasons is
that its representatives have never been able to demonstrate that they are pursuing
something really different from computer science, due to the strong retrieval component,
which remains one of the main features of recent information science (Wersig, 2003, p.
314).

Today we all know that IT research in computer science has produced important tools such as
Internet search engines. However, in the period dominated by the cognitive view, the field ‘has not
reached a stage of development where it relies on a sufficiently sound theoretical and
methodological base to be accepted at least as an important field of study’ (Wersig, 2003, p. 314). If
this is true (as I believe it is), it is indeed a serious situation that demands a reconsideration of the
theoretical basis of the field.

Sanna Talja’s view in the following quotation corresponds to my own evaluation of cognitivism and
the cognitive view in information science:

It is widely recognized that both individual information needs and institutional information
access are socially conditioned. However, conducting information seeking research on a
macro-sociological level has turned out to be difficult within the cognitive viewpoint, since
it is basically a theory of how individuals process information. The cognitive viewpoint
offers no concrete and obvious solutions to the question of how to conceptualize and study
the socio-cultural context of information processes (Talja, 1997).

The criticism of the cognitive view in information science is thus strong, and its influence seems to
be declining. What replaces it?
6. The diversification of viewpoints
Information science seems today to be in an extremely diversified and fragmented theoretical
position. There are many indication of this. Marcia Bates’ (2005, p. 10-14) overview of
metatheories in the field briefly presents thirteen different approaches:

(1) A historical approach

(2) A constructivist approach
(3) A constructionist or discourse-analytic approach
(4) A philosophical-analytical approach
(5) A critical theory approach
(6) An ethnographic approach
(7) A socio-cognitive approach
(8) A cognitive approach
(9) A bibliometric approach
(10) A physical approach [which Bates exemplify with Shannon’s information theory]
(11) An engineering approach
(12) A user-centered design approach
(13) An evolutionary approach.

We cannot in this paper present each of these 13 perspectives. Bates’ own descriptions are very
short and catalog-like.

The situation is, however, even more fragmented than these 13 different approaches suggest. Fisher,
Erdelez and McKechnie (2005) have provided an introduction to ‘theories of information behavior’.
It describes 72 ‘theories’. However, it is arguable whether all 72 are really theories of LIS? Some
appear to be theories from other disciplines and others appear to be subfields rather than theories.
Also, many theories are missing (e.g. information theory itself, quantum theory, (cf., Bawden,
Robinson and Siddiqui in press) and evidence based library and information practice (cf., Booth and
Brice, 2004)). This means that in spite of the broad coverage the book is not suitable for providing
an overview of all the theories in information science. The number (72) indicates that LIS has
become very fragmented: there are few overall views, but extremely many isolated and fragmented
proposals.

A third example is Leckie, Given and Buschman’s (2010) Critical Theory for Library and
Information Science, which contains introductions to 26 ‘critical theorists’ presented in 23 chapters.
A fourth example is Arnold (2013), an edited book published in the series Routledge Studies in
Library and Information Science about Traditions of systems theory: Major figures and
contemporary developments. There are no authors from LIS among the authors or editor, there is no
chapter relating systems theory to information science, and the literature about systems theory from
our field is not cited. We do have systems theory in information science and people believing in its
fruitfulness. But these voices tend to disappear in the overwhelming number of other voices and of
voices like Arnold (2013) in which one would expect them to be present.

These four examples do not overlap much, and there is no sign that they together cover all the
approaches, or even most of the approaches which have been put forward in the literature, as a little
browsing easily produces many other theories. Thus, many theories may be considered to be ‘a
flash in the pan’. Howard D White expressed a similar concern:

I see the field of library and information science (L&IS) as highly centrifugal and greatly
in need of high-quality syntheses. Library and information science has always been easy to
enter by persons trained in other disciplines, particularly if they bring quantitative skills.
The pattern has been many fresh starts by new entrants rather than strong cumulation. Nor
is there full agreement as to which work is paradigmatic. Therefore, I would give warm
encouragement to writers who show a talent for creative integration and criticism of ideas
already embodied in the literature. Their efforts should indeed go into reading and
organizing existing claims, rather than gathering new data (White, 1999, p. 1052).

This fragmented state of the field may also be related to the high level of uncited papers in the field:
Schwartz (1997) found that 72% of the articles published in library and information science are
uncited within five years of publication.

Under the heading ‘The diversification of viewpoints’ Wersig wrote:

At the beginning of the 1970s, when information science started to establish itself, it was
faced with the problem that while nearly everybody used the term information, nearly
everybody meant something different by it. The problem was complicated by the fact that
most of the users of the term thought that everybody else would understand and therefore
they very often did not define which kind of meaning they had in mind (Wersig, 2003, p.
312).

Wersig here echoes Machlup and Mansfield's suggestion that information science is ‘a rather
shapeless assemblage of chunks picked from a variety of disciplines that happen to talk about
information in one of its many meanings’ (Machlup and Mansfield, 1983, p. 22). Thus, one major
cause of the fragmented cognition of the field is that the term ‘information’ is used in many fields
and that anyone from any perspective feels free to consider himself or herself a part of information
science without seriously relating to discourses that have taken place or are taking place in the
institutionalized field of information science. Another major cause is the practicalist influence,
which tends to reduce information specialists to people with ‘how-to’ knowledge about certain
systems or information sources. As expressed by Buckland:

One might have thought that, for so important a field, a general introduction would be
easily written and redundant. This is not the case. Each different type of information
system (online databases, libraries, etc.) has a massive and largely separate literature.
Attention is almost always limited to one type of information system, is restricted by
technology, usually to computer-based information systems, or is focused on one function,
such as retrieval, disregarding the broader context. What is published is overwhelmingly
specialized, technical, ‘how-to’ writing with localized terminology and definitions.
Writings on theory are usually very narrowly focused on logic, probability, and physical
signals. This diversity has been compounded by confusion arising from inadequate
recognition that the word information is used by different people to denote different things.
(Buckland, 1991a, p. xiii).

I consider all these examples as indicating a serious condition in information science. Is it necessary
to argue why? Can the opposite view: that such plurality is a good thing, be claimed with equal
right? I do not think so. I would use the metaphor of a badly managed chatroom in which all
participants are speaking in the mouth of each other with first listening to what has already been
said. An argument for such pluralism has forgotten that the goal of a scholarly field is to provide
theoretical clarity and that such a clarification is a collective responsibility. The accumulated
knowledge of a field in its published literature represent much of its heritage and thus what we and
our students are supposed to live by. Therefore it should be carefully nursed.

At the present LIS seems not to be in a process where the relative fruitfulness and failures of
different approaches are clarified over time. People who are interested in a given approach mostly
fail to consider their own view in relation to other views, and they also mostly fail to present their
view in relation to the kinds of problems information science is trying to solve.

7. Too much theory?

“I consider myself a theorist. That is, my inclination is to theoretical
argument, to achieving theoretical understanding,
in information retrieval as in other realms” Robertson (2000).

We have already considered Melvil Dewey and what we termed practicalism, an attempt to improve
practice without deeper scholarly involvement. From the point of view of a research based field, it
is disappointing that his DDC system today is the most used library classification in the world and
that other systems, based on research, such as the Bliss Bibliographical Classification 2nd edition
have not been able to gain foothold. Of course research and theories should make a difference, they
are not developed just out of some interest in research and theory for its own sake.

It is important to consider that much academic knowledge is not just explicit theory, but also, for
example, procedural knowledge. Academics in languages are, for example, supposed to master the
language, not just know theories of it. Information specialists are supposed to be able to use
bibliographic databases professionally and master specific standards (e.g. metadata standards) etc.
Theoretical studies and such practical issues should support each other. It should also be considered
that theoretical knowledge may is often built into practical systems, and when you learn to use such
systems, you learn implicit about the theoretical knowledge on which they are based.

In the following quote Stephen Robertson makes a distinction between theory-driven versus
pragmatic driven information science:

“I have to admit that the field of information retrieval in which I have chosen to be a theorist
is not a very theoretical one. This is true in two senses: in a negative sense, there are few
strong theories in IR, and certainly no overall theory of IR, to which one might appeal to
solve all difficulties. In a positive sense, the field is very strongly pragmatic: it is driven by
practical problems and considerations and evaluated by practical criteria. Actually, the
pragma of IR comes in two distinct forms. On the one hand, we have commercial
pragmatism: IR, systems and services operate in the marketplace, and stand or fall by
market forces - customer satisfaction, willingness to pay, competition etc. On the other
hand, we have technological pragmatism: we design systems to perform certain tasks, and
provided we have the ways and means to measure success or failure in the performance of
these tasks, then we can try out mechanisms and techniques to our heart's content, selecting
those that help in the pursuit of performance, and rejecting those that do not. Why they work
or do not work is a secondary consideration” (Robertson, 2000, p. 1-2).

That there are “few strong theories in IR, and certainly no overall theory of IR” is in my view
something like an integration of social epistemological, semiotics, activity theory and domain
analysis might contribute to develop (or in short: a point of departure in a social and cultural
perspective). We should be aware, however, that such a strong theory may have to be modified by a
large number of narrower theories, such as theories about specific languages (such as Swedish, cf.
Hedlund, Pirkola and Järvelin, 2001), genres, domains etc. In other words, we should not in
beforehand assume too universal theories. The great success of classical IR-approaches may be seen
as easy pickings due to the establishing of huge databases (this said without disrespect for the
highly qualified work done in the field). To improve things from here may involve more specific
solutions based on a deep understanding of language, knowledge, genres etc.

Also, I do not see an opposition between theories versus pragma. The purpose of theories is to be
practical: “there is nothing as practical as a good theory” (Lewin 1943:35). A given theory may, for
example, say how best to utilize a given technology.

Robertson specifies the kind of theory he is skeptical about:

Well, we have cognitive science, and linguistics, and epistemology or ontology, and
probability and statistics, and probably other things. There is some tendency to regard these
as alternative ways of looking at IR, but of course they are really complementary. And their
complementarity resides precisely in the combination of low-level logic and experience. It
seems unlikely that we can find a Grand Theory that will tell us exactly when we should be
worrying about the linguistics and when, by contrast, we should take the linguistic entities
we have identified at their face-value and treat them as statistical clues. I'm not claiming
that such a theory is impossible - just that it's a tall order.
This is not at all to say that the search for theory is futile - far from it. I believe that the
models we have at present can indeed be extended, by theoretical argument as well as by
both kinds of pragmatism, to cover more ground than they do at present and to be more
useful as tools. But when I read a paper (as one does, occasionally) which seems to make a
claim to represent a Grand Theory, then I shall continue to take it with a pinch of salt. And
if I myself should ever seem to make such a claim, you have my full permission, nay
encouragement, to do the same to me! (Robertson, 2000, p. 9-10).

My expectation are more favorable in relation to “Grand theory” compared to the view here
expressed by Robertson, but I admit the task is “a tall order”. I also share his view we often
encounter such grand theories without proper examination of their fruitfulness to the tasks they are
supposed to solve. As I concluded elsewhere:

Buckland (2012:5) has stated that Brier’s (2008) cybersemiotics provides a coherent
unifying theory for an existing field, namely LIS. However, this has to be shown by
concrete studies, which have hitherto not been carried out by Buckland, Brier, or anybody
else. Bawden and Robinson, in a similar way, have great expectations for the philosophy of
information developed by Luciano Floridi, but this philosophy has not hitherto been applied
in the specific areas of LIS described in the rest of their book. We need to go from the
concrete to the abstract and back again. This is the most urgent task for research in LIS.
(Hjørland, 2013c, pp. 230-231).

The answer to the question in the section headline is therefore: We may have too many theoretical
suggestions, which are proposed without proper examination. All too often it seems to be
considered legitimate to take a theory from another field, introduce it and claim that it might be
relevant. A presupposition seems to be that there are enough qualified people in the field to do the
rest of the job: Prove the relevance of the theory (what I consider to be a wrong assumption: The
burden of proof is on those who suggest a new theory). It is important that theoretical suggestions
are compared with other theoretical suggestions and that there is a strong dialectics between theory
and practice.

8. What influences the theoretical development of information science?

At first sight, information science does not seem to be much driven by theory. It seems to be much
more driven by external factors such as new technologies and overall trends in society. When a new
information technology such as online databases, CD-ROMs, the Internet, social media and so on
arises, it is followed by new research fields in information science. We need therefore to consider
two main sets of factors influencing the development of science (and correspondently two
tendencies in the history of science to explain the development of science): One set are the internal
factors in science (one discovery leads to new discoveries, science is seen as independent and
relatively cumulative). Another set of factors are external to science itself (such as new
technologies, the people attracted to the field or new developments in philosophy. Science is here
understood as consisting of relatively more breaks and new approaches). In order to consider the
development of approaches to information science we may need to consider a range of mutually
interacting external and internal developments:

A. Overall developments in society

 We speak about the ‘information society’ and the ‘knowledge society’, implying the
growing importance of information and knowledge and of associated technologies and
studies of information and knowledge production, communication and use.
 The increasing commercialization (both research itself, of research structures such as
journals and libraries, of educational institutions etc.). Concepts such as the Triple Helix
(referring to the increasing interdependency between industries, universities and
governments) are important (see Hessels and van Lente, 2008).
 A third important factor is internationalization.
These overall factors influence information science and the way researchers in this field look at
their own field.

B. Technological developments
Most important here is the development from printed media to digital media, the challenges
traditional libraries and other memory institutions face, and the challenges librarians face from
computer scientists, the plurality of new information fields and professions and so on.

C. Media and communication developments

Media development is of course also the above mentioned development in the direction of digital
media, but it is broader and involves the development of symbolic systems, including languages,
and of communication systems considered from overall perspectives such as those offered by
developments in science, commerce, education, the development of open access and so on (See the
UNISIST model in Fjordback Søndergaard, Andersen and Hjørland, 2003).

D. Developments in libraries, archives, museums and databases

Developments in research libraries and other memory institutions include library automation,
library shortcut and the changing economic and political conditions under which such institutions
have to function; developments in the information professions are also important.

E. Theoretical developments Interdisciplinary developments

 Developments from logical positivism to alternatives such as paradigm theory, neo-
pragmatism, semiotics and towards a Grand theory.
 Developments internal to information science/LIS. Developments of theory within LIS
include research traditions, teaching traditions, theories and ‘paradigms’. Also, there are
debates about whether LIS should be considered a scientific field, a technological field, a
part of computer science, of the cognitive sciences, of the cultural sciences, of science
studies and whether or not it should be considered an independent field. In an ideal world
theories and approaches in information sciences should be examined and fruitful theories
should be strengthened, whereas unfruitful theories should be discarded. Correspondingly,
the approaches that have survived should be those with the strongest arguments in favor
of them; however, this does not seem to be the case in reality.

In order to develop fruitful theories science must consider epistemology. As Albert Einstein wrote:

The reciprocal relationship of epistemology and science is of a noteworthy kind. They

are dependent upon each other.
Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without
epistemology is – insofar as it is thinkable at all – primitive and muddled (Einstein,
1949, p. 683).

It is important to consider and evaluate the different theories and traditions in the field. In this
connection it is also important consider how different traditions are related to overall philosophical
perspectives, which practical problems information specialists are sufficiently educated to work
with and the dialectical relations between theory and practice.

Table 1 shows different layers of mutual interactions between philosophy, subject theory,
interdisciplinary theories and information practices. The views expressed in the present article may
be considered an emphasis on a kind of Grand theory (cf., Skinner, 1985); they are opposed to the
view that good research can be done without considering the theoretical and philosophical issues. p

Table 1. Information science’s theories and traditions.

General How are great thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Thomas Kuhn, René Descartes
philosophical and Hans-Georg Gadamer relevant to information science?
level
Meta-level/ LIS approaches include facet analysis, user- General social
paradigms: based views and cognitive views, bibliometric science/humanities theory
Information views, systems-oriented views, domain- used in information science
sciences’ oriented views, critical approaches etc. (see,
e.g. behaviourism,
paradigms for example, Bates (2005), Ellis (1992, a, b),
cognitivism, activity theory,
and Fisher, Erdelez and McKechnie, 2005; Fuchs
genre theory, structuralism,
traditions (2011), Hjørland (2013a+b+e).
semiotics, new public
management …
Theory level The theory level is the level of the specific assumptions which may guide
practitioners’ decisions. For example: ‘users’ utilization of a library is inversely
correlated with distance to the library’; ‘users’ preferences are based on their
individual personalities; ‘users preferences are formed by market forces’; ‘the
most cited documents are the best documents’; ‘the most cited documents
reflect the dominant ideology’ etc.
Each theory is related to a metatheory, which is again related to the general
philosophical level.
Application Helping users search for documents, information, knowledge and art.
level Designing and evaluating search systems, classifications, ontologies and só
(practical on. Cataloguing, classifying, indexing and annotating documents.
activities Building and managing collections/Cultural Resource Management
done by
….
information
specialists) Problems at the application levels are connected to the theories that information
professionals have (and which have influenced their tools, e.g. classification
systems), which are again connected to metatheories and again in turn
associated with the general philosophical level. (However, a given paradigm
 may not influence all subdisciplines; each subfield may – so to speak – live its
own life, cf. Spear, 2007.)

Problems at the application levels are connected to the theories that information professionals have
(and which have influenced their tools, e.g. classification systems), which are again connected to
metatheories and again in turn associated with the general philosophical level.

9. A social and cultural turn in information science?

RSLIS has in last five years had a goal of developing information science ‘in interplay with issues
such as the contextual, social, philosophical or cultural perspectives’. This goal is expressed, for
example, in announcements about the position of Professors at RSLIS. This expressed goal of a
leading international information science institution is one (albeit a small) indication of a social and
cultural turn in information science. Other indications are views expressed by leading scholars in
the field such as Blaise Cronin (2008) who wrote about the ‘sociological turn in information
science’ while Michael Buckland (2012, p. 1) wrote that ‘…information science is […] a form of
cultural engagement’. The above mentioned indications and views do not in themselves provide
evidence of any social and cultural turn in the field. It is probably also the case that some (many?)
colleagues and scholars in the fields do not share this view (at least for now).

The idea of relating information science to cultural studies is one in a long range of ideas relating IS
to other fields such as computer science, management studies, cognitive science, and many other
fields. To claim that field A is related to field B is a hypothesis that has to be examined. What really
counts, of course, are strong arguments that such a relation will enable the most fruitful
development of the field, and in this regard also demonstrate the limitations of earlier approaches in
the field such as information theory and the cognitive view. Arguments for a social and cultural turn
may come from inside information science as well as from developments in other fields such as
psychology, linguistics, philosophy and many others. One such argument is, for example, for
methodological holism, about which cultural psychologist Carl Ratner wrote:

Individualism says that the individual element is an independent entity that has self-contained properties,
although of course it draws on resources around it. An example is the popular idea that the individual is
responsible for his or her own fate. One's success and failure depend ultimately on how hard one works.
Holism says that the individual element is inextricably tied to other individuals. Individuals are
interdependent, and they are internally related in the sense that each is imbued with and constituted by the
qualities of others. An example is a child in a family. The child's psychology depends utterly on the way
he or she is treated. Any intrinsic tendencies are modulated and mediated by experience. From this
perspective, the child is not entirely responsible for his or her behavior (Ratner, 2008), p. 514).

Ratner further shows how holism is related to cultural studies. Ratner’s examples are all about
human beings as elements, but this may of course be extended to ‘information’ and ‘documents’. I
believe there is a great opportunity to develop information science from such a holistic perspective.

Computer science has so far dominated the field of information retrieval mostly based on an
atomistic/individualistic frame of reference (e.g. by applying ‘bag-of-words’ approaches). Perhaps
this line of research has exhausted most of its potential? Recently, it has been claimed that there
seems to be no overall progress in the field of IR (Armstrong, Moat, Webber and Zobel, 2009). If
this is true, information science may have important perspectives to contribute, which may be
related to methodological holism and to social and cultural perspectives that, as we have seen, have
lain dormant in the traditions of LIS. From a social and cultural perspective, documents (or
‘information’) are always understood as being produced within a particular tradition, which
contains important clues to its meaning and potential use. In Hjørland (2013a) I argued that
bibliometrics may be able to provide such a historicist perspective.

Finally, we shall return to social epistemology. The term is central because information science is
about communication of knowledge (and thus social) and about criteria of what counts as
knowledge (hence epistemology). There are today at least four versions of social epistemology: (1)
an approach from analytic philosophy in which Alvin Goldman is a leading representative (2) a
critical approach developed by Steve Fuller (see Collin, 2013, for an introduction and comparison
of these two versions) (3) a version developed by information scientist Rafael Capurro on the basis
of hermeneutics (see Capurro and Holgate, 2011) and (4) the approach developed by Thomas Kuhn
(see Wray, 2011). We shall here shortly consider Kuhn’s version.

According to Kuhn, we do not conceive the world directly, but – as Kant proposed – through lenses
of the mind. However, contrary to Kant, these lenses are not hard-wired into our brain, but are
changing with cultures and scientific paradigms:

Kuhn maintained that his view was Kantian but “with categories of the mind which could
change with time as the accommodation of language and experience proceeded” (Kuhn
1979, 418-419) (Andersen, 2012, p. 188).

What are the implications of this view for information science? The first thing is that we cannot
study “information” or “users” directly, we always have to consider the cultural or theoretical
perspective from which observations are made and research is done (and technology is developed).
There is no “view from nowhere” to use Thomas Nagel’s (1986) expression.
More directly, the subjectivity of relevance judgments by experts and by users may partly be
explained by different “paradigms”. Understood in this way, we have a third position between
expert evaluations and user evaluations: We have expert evaluations and user evaluations made in
some specific context influenced more or less by different theories and “paradigms”. We should not
just ask: Is X relevant? We should ask: From which perspective is X relevant (and which interests
does X support?).

10. Conclusion
It matters how the history of a scholarly domain is depicted. As Joseph Spear wrote in an analysis
of another field:
The problem, of course, is that the outcome of this story has real and important implications
for the distribution of organizational resources. If indeed every dean, every granting
agency, and every department head “knows” that there has been a cognitive revolution […],
then where does that leave the claims of those who do not identify themselves with
cognitive psychology […]? There is much at stake in how the history of psychology [and
information science] is told. (Spear, 2007, p. 377)

In this paper, the history of information science is depicted from the subjective perspective of the
author – in the more traditional way of scholarly history writing. But would it be better to have
more “objective” descriptions such as, for example, the content analysis made by Tuomaala,
Järvelin and Vakkari (2014) or the many bibliometric maps that have been produced of information
science such as the recent study by Zhao and Strotmann (2014)?

I’ll argue that this is not the case. The main argument is that such studies provides very different
maps of information science (compare, for example, Tuomaala, Järvelin and Vakkari, 2014, and
Zhao and Strotmann, 2014). They provide very different pictures of information science because
they are very vulnerable to which methods are used and which journals have been selected as the
basis for an operational definition of information science. As formerly stated:

One issue that is particularly important in this respect is the selection of the documents on
which the bibliometric maps are based. Imagine that we are going to create a map of LIS.
As Åström (2002) showed, former maps, such as that of White and McCain (1998), seem to
have a bias towards information science. In order to provide a better alternative, Åström
also included more library-oriented journals in his study. However, there is no objective
criterion for judging which documents best represent LIS, and any selected set of journals
can always be shown to have a bias in some direction or another.
Both White and McCain (1998) and Åström (2002) were explicit about which journals they
used in their studies. However, the claim put forward here is that they did not make explicit
arguments for how the journals were selected in relation to their conception of the field. It
is as if the authors’ view of what information science is and should be is considered
“obvious” or of no consequence. As a result, their selection of journals is not based on
arguments about which aspects of information science are being favored and which are
being suppressed. (Hjørland, 2013a, p. 1322)
Tuomaala, Järvelin and Vakkari (2014) based their study on “a purposive selection … of core
journals” with library and information science. However, to consider the full content of a given
journal, such as Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), a
representation of a LIS is problematic, because, as demonstrated by Chua and Yang (2008), “Top
authors [in JASIST] have grown in diversity from those being affiliated predominantly with
library/information-related departments to include those from information systems management,
information technology, business, and the humanities.” Therefore, bibliometric maps based on
JASIST cannot simply be taken to represent the library/information field without further
examination.

In spite of its claim to investigate “what approaches, research strategies, and methods have been
applied during the span of time under review” Tuomaala, Järvelin and Vakkari (2014) can neither
confirm nor disconfirm that a social and cultural turn is taking place in information science. Their
methodology seems not fit to describe changes at the metatheoretical level.

We have seen that Saracevic distinguished two traditions of research in IR: a systems-centered
tradition (in computer science) and a user-centered tradition (in information science). By not
considering such distinctions Tuomaala, Järvelin and Vakkari (2014) is unable to illuminate
whether important parts of IR-research has immigrated from LIS to computer science. We have a
kind of hermeneutic circle: How can we identify a field by a set of journals, a set of departments, a
set of scholars, etc., unless we already know the field? And how can we know the field unless we
know its journals, its research institutions, and its leading scholars? The answer is that it requires an
iterative process. And such arguments, I claim, shows that “subjective” histories of science like the
one presented in this paper is a prerequisite for more quantitative studies.