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]