Why do we encourage students to read widely, think critically, and conduct their own research? We are preparing them for lives in a world filled with ambiguity and complexity, where we don’t actually know the answers to what’s on the test. The surprising outcome of the recent election has prompted us to examine our assumptions about how kno…[Read more]

The late nineteenth century was a crucial moment in Japan, driven by new conceptions of authorship and literary narratives. An influential world of collecting and compilation gave birth to those changes, but its workings are still poorly understood. By showing how compilers assembled the 1894 Kōtei Saikaku zenshū (The Edited Complete Works of Sa…[Read more]

Open Access war anfangs der 2000er Jahre von Umbruchstimmung, Euphorie und Idealismus getragen. Die Erwartungen waren klar umrissen: Wissenschaftlern war an rascher Verbreitung wissenschaftlicher Texte gelegen, Bibliothekaren an einer Abhilfe für stark steigende Journalpreise, den Wissenschaftseinrichtungen an effizienter und freier Verbreitung…[Read more]

This short and speculative paper considers some philosophical approaches to understanding, particularly those related to Luciano Floridi’s Philosophy of Information, and based on the general idea that understanding is a special kind of knowledge. It is a slightly extended and updated version of the paper presented at CoLIS9.

Purpose The aim of this paper is to examine how and if information-seeking behaviour changes when individuals transform a hobby into a business. Design/methodology/approach Four hobbyists who now pursued their activities in a professional context were interviewed via semi-structured interviews. The interviewers were transcribed and analysed to…[Read more]

This is an historical research project that investigates predictions of future information technology made by Paul Otlet, H.G. Wells and Vannevar Bush, specifically those described in the Mundaneum, World Brain and Memex respectively. It is carried out by means of an extended review of the relevant Library and Information Science literature and…[Read more]

The MADDLAIN project aims to analyse the behaviour and the needs of different audiences with regard to digital access to the collections offered by the CegeSoma, the Royal Library of Belgium and the State Archives of Belgium. In the scope of this project, I presented some of the results of the qualitative survey conducted with professional…[Read more]

Report of a pilot study investigating the creation of a digital archive of medieval property transactions along the City waterfront

In recent years, “the archive” as both a concept and an object has been undergoing a transformation. The increased availability of still and video cameras, analog and then digital, has led to a proliferation of indexical documents outside of official archives and prompted questions about what constitutes an “archive,” and, hence, what constit…[Read more]