In 1838 Thomas Mulledy, S.J. signed his name to an agreement selling the 275 enslaved persons who resided on Jesuit-owned estates in Southern Maryland to Louisiana. The sale served as the culmination of the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus’s fraught experience with slaveholding in the colonial and early national period. While much h…[Read more]

Keynote presentation, discussing developments in LIS education in light of Luciano Floridi’s Philosophy of Information

Good Night, Sleep Tight is an interactive virtual reality performance created by theatre and digital arts company ZU-UK. It was previewed at Gerry’s Kitchen in July 2017. Combining VR and binaural technologies, participants are put to bed and transported to a dreamscape composed of childhood imagery and aerial cityscapes. This artistic position r…[Read more]

“Corporate sentiment analysis is a field in which there is limited public research available. Effective research in this subsection of the sentiment analysis field would help provide a more robust understanding of the field and how users interact online. This study evaluated the efficacy of sentiment analysis using Twitter data containing…[Read more]

MIAS based in Oxford, England, took an initiative to collect Ibn ‘Arabi’s rare works and manuscripts through several digitisation projects to preserve the collections for future generations; and at a later stage the MIAS digital archive was formed to facilitate online access and encourage collaborative research and raise the profile of the Soc…[Read more]

A detailed literature reviewing, analysing the multiple and confusing concepts around the ideas of information literacy and digital literacy at the start of the millennium. The article was well-received, and is my most highly-cited work, with over 1100 citations.

Reviews developments in the information science discipline over thirty years, by selecting topics covered in early issues of the Journal of Information Science, and tracing their influence on subsequent developments. Major themes are: the information science discipline itself; foundations of the discipline; nature of information; relations between…[Read more]

A literature review of problems of the digital information environment. It has been quite widely cited in a variety of disciplines in the decade since its publication.

A literature review of individual differences in information behaviour; those due to personality, and to thinking and learning styles.

A chapter in a Festschrift for the occasion of Blaise Cronin’s retirement, this chapter reflects Cronin’s concerns that undue focus on informetrics may lead the information science discipline to descend into a “new age of numerology.
So It reflects on the ways in which a few numbers may helpfully encapsulate important aspects of the subject.

Discusses the collaborations over the past decade between in which the Department of Library and Information Science at City University London and the Department of Librarianship, Information Science and Book Studies at the University of Ljubljana.

The history of Aslib, an independent library/information membership organisation in the United Kingdom between 1924 and 2014, is outlined, with emphasis in the ways in Aslib acted as a de facto national centre for special librarianship and information work, for documentation, and for technical and commercial information. Its activities in this…[Read more]

Gives a short history of Aslib, which was from 1924 to 2010 an independent membership organisation for special librarianship, technical and commercial information work, and latterly for information management, It was highly influential in the development of documentation and information science, in the UK and worldwide. Its activities included…[Read more]

This paper examines B.C.Vickery’s contributions to the development of information science, as an academic discipline and a field of professional practice.

This paper examines some characteristics of the ‘British School’ of information science, tracing its origins in the documentation movement, special librarianship, and the handling of scientific and technical information.

Brookes’ equation, hitherto regarded as a kind of non-mathematical shorthand description of information use in the cognitive paradigm of information science, is extended to show a qualitative pattern of information behaviour.

Describes the development of education for library and information science at City University London over a 50-year period, focusing on seven themes: the nature of the discipline; the library/information science spectrum; the student group; the academic/professional balance; curriculum design; local and global issues; and educational methods.

The changing nature of chemical information literacy over 50 years is examined by a comparison of a number of guides to chemical literature and information. It is concluded that: an understanding of the world of information is the sole aspect to have remained important and essentially unchanged over time; that knowledge of sources, ability to…[Read more]

Based on a paper given at the 2013 CoLIS conference in Copenhagen.

Rolf Landauer famously declared in 1991 that ‘information is physical’. Since then, information has come to be seen by many physicists as a fundamental component of the physical world; indeed by some as the physical component. This idea is now gaining currency in popular sci…[Read more]

The relationship between information and complexity is analysed, by way of a detailed literature analysis. Complexity is a multi-faceted concept, with no single agreed definition. There are numerous approaches to defining and measuring complexity and organisation, all involving the idea of information. Conceptions of complexity, order,…[Read more]