Smart City Research and Library and Information Science. Preliminary Remarks

Abstract

PURPOSE/THESIS: The purpose of this paper is to analyze the smart city research field from the point of view of library and information science (LIS), based on available scholarly publications. APPROACH/METHODS: Based on the literature review, the following issues have been described: the smart city concept; the shift of smart cities from strictly technological orientation to that focused on the citizen, the role of smart governance, public libraries as a part of knowledge infrastructure and the current contribution of LIS to this research field.RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Smart cities are still an emerging research domain. Not only the number of research publications is limited, but also their scope. LIS has been very little involved in a “smart city” research domain so far, and at the same time general literature on “smart cities” refers to public libraries in a very limited way. In general, there have been few attempts to relate information science and smart cities so far, and in each case researchers had problems with finding relevant literature. The most important LIS contribution to the field so far comes from the research project done by the team of experts from the Department of Information Science at Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf (Germany).ORIGINALITY/VALUE: The value of this research results from the fact, that there is very little in-depth, holistic research done in this domain by LIS researchers; hence there is almost no recognition of the role of public libraries in so-called smart cities, not only as knowledge hubs for explicit and tacit knowledge, but also as community building institutions. This paper offers first such attempt in the field.