Information science fiction

Abstract

Howard D. White is @hated with the College of Information Science and Technology at Drexel University in Philadelphia (PA 19104). He can be reached by email at whitehd@drexel.edu hank you, everyone. This is a T very untypical day for me, and I deeply appreciate the work of all those who made it possible. If I had to pick a situation that typifies my life, it would be me standing in front of a bunch of books I haven’t read. Wherever I go and however long I live, I always seem to be doing this; for some reason I like standing there, taking books down and looking into them and putting them back. I have done it at home, at school, in my office, in bookstores and in libraries. I suppose that this fondness for browsing is why I trained at one point to be a librarian: they get paid to stand in front of a bunch of books they haven’t read. But I never worked as a professional librarian; instead, I became an academic, and this allowed me to characterize my relation to books in more stately fashion as “the humanliterature interface.” I don’t apologize for that phrase; one has to set the broader context when one is doing newish things, like mapping authors in intellectual space based on their cocitation counts. But as I looked at these maps over time, I came to realize that all I had created was a miniature version of a bunch of books I hadn’t read. Even so, whether I’m browsing in library stacks or looking at cocitation maps, I’m reminded of the central concern of information science that is, effective intermediation between people and literatures. People have a sharply limited capacity for absorbing recorded information. They can increase this capacity only by extending it over time that is to say, over chunks of their lives, which are finite. People are also sharply limited in where they can be at a given moment. Literatures, in contrast, contain vast amounts of information, they extend globally over highly fragmented space, and they are timeless. They and people could hardly be more different. Yet people want to avail themselves of the powers and pleasures found in literatures, despite the mismatch at the point where they and literatures meet. One way of conveying this mismatch is to speak of “you versus the literature.” The phrase suggests overload the fact that, from childhood on, you have too many things to read or otherwise attend to. But it also suggests resistance the fact that you learn to filter even the good stuff and restrict what you take in. Beyond that, you can sometimes mean more than one person it can imply you the individual plus all the others who cut literatures down to size on your behalf. Sometimes they do this by singling out just those writings that address