Introduction

Library Trends, Wntr, 2004 by Ken Herold

LUCIANO FLORIDI'S 1999 MONOGRAPH, Philosophy and Computing: An Introduction, provided the impetus for the theme of this issue, more for what it did not say about librarianship and information studies (LIS) than otherwise. Following the pioneering works of Wilson, Nitecki, Buckland, and Capurro (plus many of the authors of this issue), researchers in LIS have increasingly turned to the efficacy of philosophical discourse in probing the more fundamental aspects of our theories, including those involving the information concept. A foundational approach to the nature of information, however, has not been realized, either in partial or accomplished steps, nor even as an agreed, theoretical research objective. It is puzzling that while librarianship, in the most expansive sense of all LIS-related professions, past and present, at its best sustains a climate of thought, both comprehensive and nonexclusive, information itself as the subject of study has defied our abilities to generalize and synthesize effectively. Perhaps during periods of reassessment and justification for library services, as well as in times of curricular review and continuing scholarly evaluation of perceived information demand, the necessity for every single stated position to be clarified appears to be exaggerated. Despite this, the important question does keep surfacing as to how information relates to who we are and what we do in LIS.

Floridi's broader program of Philosophy of Information (PI) may provide intellectual coordinates bridging our community's discussion with that of like-minded colleagues beyond LIS. These invited papers do not directly address my owl intuitions surrounding LIS as a potential applied PI. The collection as a whole results from some preliminary inquiries along those lines, but practically speaking it required little provocation and amounts to a treasure trove on the subject of information. In the actual working of our libraries, special collections, archives, and physical repositories, we find ourselves struggling with new information policies and protocols and changing long-term strategies for dealing with a plethora of new and old information objects, types, and artifacts. For instance, the paradox of invention and discovery runs rife through our conceptions of knowledge classifications and retrieval languages. Another difficult challenge is how nonphysicality affects the bases for our assumptions about records, evidence, works, storage, access, ownership, and provenance. Of the multiplicity of additional questions of concern to the reader, the following synopses are offered as all-too-brief overviews of the extensive and complex contents of this issue.

To paraphrase Cornelius, who expresses careful reservations of the practicing librarian, let us not info-educate ourselves beyond the social bounds of our traditional duties. He admits, however, any PI must "offer an explanation for a very wide range of phenomena and practices, from book history and curatorship, reading stories to children, and model-building in information retrieval (IR) and information seeking." This is the exciting challenge, and Cornelius cites as wide-ranging goals for better understanding information within a future PI both our subjective identities, personal and library-practitioner, evincing our individual cognitive apparatus, as well as efficacy in the social context of our host environments. Frohmann disclaims a putative status for information as a primary category, favoring instead documents, practices, and ties of documentary authoritativeness. His phenomenological tour de force supports a Wittgensteinian shift "away from mentalistic pictures of meaning and toward practices with documents ... from theories of information to descriptions of documentary practices." [emphasis in original] Frohmann presents four properties for the latter: materiality, institutional embeddedness, social discipline, and historicity, with examples of how a document becomes informing.

While Day investigates the paramount linguistic and, generally, affective bases for these social relations in his exploration of an anti- or a-metaphysical concept of information, his engagement is through political philosophy and ontology. He utilizes a Negrian critique of representation, agency, and power and a Heideggerian and Negrian critique of time, arguing for a concept of information as an event and for a concept of being as a codeterminate emergence, both grounded in information as affect and respons(ibility). Furner, too, delves into the philosophy of language in an analysis disclosing deeper questions into the relationship of classes and propositions with purported information objects or structures. His terminological distinctions and information taxonomy are delivered in a general ontological system of categories rich in detail and implication for further study. Budd expounds a dynamic theory of relevance and describes the importance of the dialogic, phenomenological, transformative, and performative qualities of relatively inner and outer information contexts. Among his sources are Habermas and Bakhtin, and particularly pertinent is his assessment acknowledging the sheer complexity of the relevance concept, noting its psychological, cognitive, and linguistic aspects.