Introduction to Library Trends 55 (3) Winter 2007: Libraries in Times of War, Revolution and Social Change

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Information revolutions, the information society, and the future of the history of information science

This paper aims to discuss the future of information history by interrogating its past. It presents in outline an account of the conditions and the trajectory of events that have culminated in today’s “information revolution” and “information society.” It suggests that we have already passed through at least two information orders or revolutions as we transition, first, from the long era of print that began over five hundred years ago with Gutenberg and the printing press. We have then moved through a predigital era after World War II, finally to a new era characterized by the advent of the ubiquitous technologies that are considered to herald a new “digital revolution” and the creation of new kind of “information society.” It argues that it is possible to see that the past is now opening itself to new kinds of scrutiny as a result of the apparently transformative changes that are currently taking place. It suggests that the future of the history of information science is best thought of as part of a still unrealized convergence of diverse historical approaches to understanding how societies are constituted, sustained, reproduced, and changed in part by information and the infrastructures that emerge to manage information access and use. In conclusion it suggests that different bodies of historical knowledge and historical research methodologies have emerged as we move into the digital world that might be usefully brought together in the future to broaden and deepen explorations of important historical information phenomena from Gutenberg to Google.published or submitted for publicationOpe

When and Why Is a Pioneer: History and Heritage in Library and Information Science

Underlying this collection of papers is a belief in the value of history in helping us to achieve a reasonably full understanding of current trends of development in what we might call society???s ???knowledge apparatus??? and in the institutional arrangements to which libraries and information services are central. Such a historically based understanding presents a richer, more considered context for planning for the future than would otherwise be possible. I am intrigued by the paradox that history is only in part about the past. History provides us with a way to think about the present and the future. Because we can never know it directly, it is actually constituted and reconstituted by what we bring to it from our ever-changing presents. It offers the opportunity to question both simplistic descriptions and quick and easy explanations of what seems to be happening, what seems to be the case in the present. It also offers the opportunity from the ever-changing perspective of the present to go back to reassess what seems to have happened, what seems to have been the case in the past and how it has influenced the present. It is this dialectical process that keeps history as a discipline always unfinished and alive.published or submitted for publicatio

Librarianship in the New World and the Old: Some Points of Contact

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Systematic bibliography in England: 1850-1895

Bibliography: p. 41-49

Electronic information and the functional integration of libraries, museums, and archives

The increasing availability in electronic form of information generally and of new kinds of information more particularly will lead to a redefinition and integration of the different categories of "information" organisations. Traditionally these have been created to manage different formats and media such as print and its surrogates (libraries), objects (museums), and the paper records of organisational activity (archives and records repositories). Differences in organisational philosophy, function. and technique have arisen from the exigencies presented by these different formats and media. These exigencies no longer apply in the same way when there is a common electronic format. It is clear that if electronic sources of information are to be effectively managed for future access by historians and others, differences between libraries, archives and museums will largely have to disappear and their different philosophies, functions and techniques integrated in ways that are as yet unclear.published or submitted for publicatio

Preface to Library Trends 56 (4) Spring 2008: The Evaluation and Transformation of Information Systems: Essays Honoring the Legacy of F. W. Lancaster

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The Universe of Information: the Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and International Organisation

A biographical study of the life and work of Paul Otlet (1868-1944) focusing on his work for documentation and the creation of a range of international organizations.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Publishing Library Research

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