SLIS Faculty News

Changing of the Guard - JASIST, 60(1), 2009

•"The challenge for JASIST, both now and in the future, will be to maintain a balance between the known and the novel, the canonical and the emergent..."

•"In an age of inbuilt obsolescence and warp speed, it is reassuring to know that some things perdure. The Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (American Documentation in its first incarnation) is a case in point. This issue inaugurates the 60th volume of the Journal, and for 24 of those years Donald Kraft was at the editorial helm. That is a remarkable accomplishment by any standard; all the more remarkable when one considers how JASIST has grown in terms of page count, breadth of subject coverage, and the diversity - both geographic and disciplinary - of contributing authors. It is at once an honor and no mean challenge to follow in Don's footsteps.

Information science is a protean term, one that has been appropriated at various times over the years by scholars in fields such as computer science, artificial intelligence, and information systems and technology. The staples of information science may still not be - may never be - universally agreed upon, but if one were to undertake a content analysis of JASIST since its inception a core set of issues would likely emerge, including but not limited to knowledge representation, user needs and behavior, information retrieval, bibliometrics, information theory, and scholarly communication. As it happens, you'll find some support for my speculation in the results of an elegant cluster-mapping study conducted by Frizo Janssens and colleagues (Janssens, Leta, Glänzel, & De Moor, [2006]). That said, a vision for the field of information science and by extension a vision for JASIST that proceeds by enumeration is doomed to failure. Our enterprise is not the sum of current trends and technological advances. New developments and toolsets need to be contextualized and theorized: embedded, in a word.

Information science may have a promising future, but it also has an illustrious past, as Alan Gilchrist's editorial in the August 2008 special issue of the Journal of Information Science commemorating the 50th anniversary of the establishment in the U.K. of the Institute of Information Scientists reminds us (Gilchrist, [2008], p. 395): Many of the ideas of the earlier information scientists are not only still valid today, but became the foundations upon which later generations have built. Gilchrist's view is shared by another doyen of the field, Jack Meadows, but this time it is imparted with a slight sting in the tail (Meadows, [2008], p. 412). The information science activities developed over the past 50 years have triumphed, but information science as a separate entity may be on the wane. For now and from this particular editorial perch, my primary concern will be the intellectual activities that constitute information science rather than the attendant institutional arrangements and their waxing and waning - not, it need hardly be said, that these lack interest for members of ASIS&T and readers of JASIST..."