Information Science (IS), as defined by Soergel (1998, p. 10), is:
concerned with both research and design. It conducts
research into the nature of information, its creation,
organization, use and impact. It studies information
needs and the interaction between people and information.
It combines conceptual structures with appropriate
technology in the design of systems for information
sharing, retrieval and access, as well as information
assimilation, processing and learning.
Given this broad and sweeping definition of IS, the purpose of this brief analysis is to identify six of the most important or critical problems, issues, or concerns that are currently exerting most influence over the field. As Soergel (1998) suggests, IS knows few boundaries, overlaps many disparate fields and draws upon their unique ideas, methods and results. Included are mathematics and statistics, computer science and artificial intelligence, human-computer interactions, cognitive science with its constituents of cognitive psychology, linguistics, epistemology and philosophy of knowledge, communication, education, economics, political science and sociology, and administration and management (Soergel, 1998). Given the variety of disciplines which intersect within IS and the inherent complexity of those disciplines, selecting only six major concerns is a somewhat difficult task.
One of the most important tasks confronting IS professionals, regardless of their particular academic or professional field of specialization is capturing human intelligence in hardware and software applications. Kantor, Boros, Melamed, and Menkov (2000) have noted that one of the goals of IS is to introduce and facilitate a type of asynchronous collaborative activity to increase the speed and accuracy of finding information in IT systems and infrastructure such as that of the Internet of the World Wide Web. The underlying mathematics of ...