Arguments for philosophical realism in library and information science

Library Trends, Wntr, 2004 by Birger Hjorland

I find a connection between antirealist trends in IS, lack of domain-specific knowledge, and the critique that David Bade raises concerning KO in databases:

   Virtually all of the literature on cataloging and on database
   quality is concerned with technologies or methods and standards.
   Acknowledgement that cataloging is an intellectual activity that
   requires an ability to understand what an item is about, and prior
   to that, an ability to read the specific language of the text, is so
   rare as to be disturbing. However librarians may have thought in the
   past, in the present climate of technological possibilities and the
   excitement they generate, librarians increasingly see themselves as
   information scientists, and their work as information handling,
   brokering, and management. What must not be forgotten is that
   information always has a specific content. Catalogers,
   bibliographers, and reference librarians in fact work not with
   abstract information devoid of content, but with autopoiesis,
   prosopography, logotherapy, Rechtsextremismus, amparo, Ujamaa,
   sultawiyya, Babad Buleleng, Yuan chao pi shih, arianism, Brownian
   motion, Empfindungslosigkeit, chocolate chip cookies, and
   anti-semitism. Information science knows nothing of these matters,
   in any language. (Bade, 2002, p. 18, emphases in original)

This connection is related to the neglect of subject knowledge in LIS. The founders of KO recognized this need. Richardson/Bliss, for example, wrote:

   "Again from the standpoint of the higher education of librarians,
   the teaching of systems of classification ... would be perhaps
   better conducted by including courses in the systematic encyclopedia
   and methodology of all the sciences, that is to say, outlines which
   try to summarize the most recent results in the relation to one
   another in which they are now studied together...." (Ernest Cushing
   Richardson, quoted from Bliss, 1935, p. 2)

This suggestion was in practice followed in schools of LIS. The Royal School of Library and Information Science in Denmark, for example, actually had departments for science and technology, social sciences, and humanities teaching subjects such as special bibliography, subject literature, subject encyclopedism, and the philosophy and communication of subject knowledge. These departments were gradually fusioned, and the last trace of them disappeared from the organizational structure of the school in February 1999. Students still have to take courses in KO and information seeking in specific domains, however, and the Domain Analytic approach to information science (especially Hjorland, 2002) was developed as a theoretical frame of reference of IS to cope with the core problem of how to tackle subject knowledge in the education of information specialists.

In this section, I have made a connection between interdisciplinarity and realism. The main thought is that if a piece of research is reflecting a reality, then this will be confirmed by other researchers (and practitioners), and knowledge will tend to grow in a cumulative way. On the other hand, if a field of research is isolated, it might well be an indication that the field is just construing some kind of pseudo-knowledge based on, for example, a professional ideology. Eugene Garfield wondered that psychiatry journals were very rarely cited by psychology journals, and he opined: