The concept of information as we use it in everyday English in the sense knowledge communicated plays a central role in today's society. The concept became particularly predominant since end of World War II with the widespread use of computer networks. The rise of information science in the middle fifties is a testimony of this. For a science like information science (IS) it is of course important how its fundamental terms are defined, and in IS as in other fields the problem of how to define information is often raised. This review is an attempt to overview the present status of the information concept in IS with a view also to interdisciplinary trends. In scientific discourses theoretical concepts are not true or false elements or pictures of some part of reality, but are constructions designed to do a job the best possible way. Different conceptions of fundamental terms like information are thus more or less fruitful depending on what theories (and in the end what practical actions) they are expected to support. In Chapter 1, we discuss the problems of defining terms in the light of the philosophy of science. The history of a word tells us mostly only anecdotes that are peripheral to the concept itself. But in our case the use of the word information points to a specific perspective under which the concept of knowledge communication was defined and designated. We explore this history in Chapter 2 and we believe that our results may help to better understand the complexity of this concept also with regard to its scientific definitions. The discussions about the information concept in other disciplines are also very important for Information Science because many theories and approaches in Information Science have their origins in other disciplines. This is surveyed in Chapter 3. The epistemological concept of information has lead also to a new perspective of non-human information processes particularly in physics and biology. And vice versa: processes of selection and interpretation may be considered when related to psychic and social phenomena with regard to objective parameters, leaving aside the semantic dimension or, more precisely, considering objective or situational parameters of interpretation. This can be illustrated also in physical terms with regard to release mechanisms as we suggest at the end of Chapter 3. Our overview of the concept of information in the natural sciences as well as in the humanities and social sciences does not aim at exploring different theories in depth. In most cases we can only refer to fragments of theories that the user may interpret within her own background or follow the hints of the bibliography. Readers mostly interested in information science may get more satisfied with Chapter 4 where we bring a more detailed explanation of diverse views and theories of information within our field, supplementing the ARIST article by Cornelius (2001). We show that the introduction of the concept of information about 1950 to what was formerly special librarianship and documentation in itself has had serious consequences for the kind of knowledge and theories developed in our field. The important question is not only what meaning we give to the term in Information Science, but also how it relates to other basic terms such as documents, texts and knowledge.

This paper explores the role of classification and other terminological subject systems in subject gateways showing the Czech experience. The potential of combining a top level classification such as Conspectus with the application of further classified sets of subject access points using UDC is explained. Some examples are given of special subject gateways developed under a general gateway, all interlinked and providing similar interfaces and functionalities. The potential of a common strategy of subject access tools is emphasized, to further improve subject retrieval across the different gateways in a consistent and transparent manner.

The purpose of this article is to contribute to our stock of knowledge about who uses networks, how they are used, and what contribution the networks make to advancing the scientific enterprise. Between 1985 and 1990, the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) ACCESS data facility at the University of Wisconsin-Madison provided social scientists in the United States and elsewhere with access through the electronic networks to complex and dynamic statistical data; the 1984 SIPP is a longitudinal panel survey designed to examine economic well-being in the United States. This article describes the conceptual framework and design of SIPP ACCESS; examines how network users communicated with the SIPP ACCESS project staff about the SIPP data; and evaluates one outcome derived from the communications, the improvement of the quality of the SIPP data. The direct and indirect benefits to social scientists of electronic networks are discussed. The author concludes with a series of policy recommendations that link the assessment of our inadequate knowledge base for evaluating how electronic networks advance the scientific enterprise and the SIPP ACCESS research network experience to the policy initiatives of the High Performance Computing Act of 1991 (P.L. 102-194) and the related extensive recommendations embodied in Grand Challenges 1993 High Performance Computing and Communications (The FY 1993 U.S. Research and Development Program).

The author began working by asking a question: how well are library schools preparing students for future participation in the library profession? She thought that one year is not long enough for students to gain what they need to become a library and information science professional. She suggested library schools to undertake a major restructuring of their programs and recommended a two-year M.L.S. program.

The paper highlights some aspects of the UDC management policy for 2007 and onwards. Following an overview of the long history of modernization of the classification, which started in the 1960s and has influenced the scheme's revision and development since 1990, major changes and policies from the recent history of the UDC revision are summarized. The perspective of the new editorial team, established in 2007, is presented. The new policy focuses on the improved organization and efficiency of editorial work and the improvement of UDC products.

Publishing research papers is an integral part of a researcher's professional life. Every research article will invariably provide large number of citations/bibliographic references of the papers that are being cited in that article. All such citations are to be rendered in the citation style specified by a publisher and they should be accurate. Researchers, over a period of time, accumulate a large number of bibliographic references that are relevant to their research and cite relevant references in their own publications. Efficient management of bibliographic references is therefore an important task for every researcher and it will save considerable amount of researchers' time in locating the required citations and in the correct rendering of citation details. In this paper, we are reporting the features of Aigaion, a web-based, open-source software for reference management.

The Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) is currently used in the National Library of Liechtenstein (NLL). Librarians have been using the 1978 German medium edition â Dezimalklassifikation: Internationale Mittlere Ausgabe: FID 550â published by the German Institute for Standardization (Deutsches Institut für Normung - DIN). Since DIN ceased its activity as UDC publisher, there has been no other interest in publishing a German edition of the classification. Hence, the NLL library lacks a suitable and up-to-date UDC edition in German to extend and modernize its content indexing. In order to update information access to its collection, the NLL is faced with two options: reclassifying books to the more recent edition of the UDC or reclassifying to DDC22(Dewey Decimal Classification), recently translated and published in German. In 2007-2008, as part of a graduate library & information science programme internship, research was conducted to assess the suitability of the two classification schemes in supporting collection management and information access in the NLL - with relation to costs, work expenditure and practical classification issues. This text is a brief summary from the final research report.

In the past, raw information was frequently destroyed because it could not be stored, thereby precluding effective scholarly use of the materials. Today's computer technology allows preservation and compact storage of enormous quantities of highly detailed information. Maintenance of information in conventional paper format often required severe access restrictions to protect anonymity of particular cases, a problem which can be alleviated by utilizing the computer to delete or mask the identity of the individuals involved. The value of any archival record is enhanced by the existence of other sources, which when used in tandem more completely describe the social, administrative, or economic process. This is especially true of the machine readable record, where source materials from one file can be more easily linked with other files to provide more complete documentation of particular events and transactions, thus augmenting the potential value and increasing the analytic or explanatory potential of the original records.

The authors describe a large-scale, longitudinal citation analysis of intellectual trading between information studies and cognate disciplines. The results of their investigation reveal the extent to which information studies draws on and, in turn, contributes to the ideational substrates of other academic domains. Their data show that the field has become a more successful exporter of ideas as well as less introverted than was previously the case. In the last decade, information studies has begun to contribute significantly to the literatures of such disciplines as computer science and engineering on the one hand and business and management on the other, while also drawing more heavily on those same literatures.

The UDC class 1 Philosophy. Psychology has remained unchanged for more than forty years. The most obvious problem with the class is an anachronistic intercalation of psychology in the middle of the class of philosophy (Task force for UDC system development, 1990), one of the still uncorrected remainders of structural problems inherited from Dewey Decimal Classification. We are now pleased to announce that the project of the revision of UDC class 1 Philosophy will take place in 2009-2010.