New grounds for ontic trust: Information objects and LIS

Future uncertainties for preserving tweets: Peoples’ perceptions in Japan

Social media content includes an unprecedented number of personal documents reflecting our time. Few countries or regions have established legal grounds for securing long-term access to these documents, while paper-based publications have been exhaustively accumulated under legal deposit systems. However, archiving social media through national libraries, as a sort of state intervention, could bring about chilling effects on free speech in unexpected ways. The article aims to present empirical data of public concerns concerning social media content, focusing on Twitter’s public tweets archived by third parties, through two questionnaire surveys involving university students (Research I) and the public (Research II). The surveys were designed based on three settings: researchers, organisations to which the respondents belong and the National Diet Library in Japan. Consequently, approximately 30% and 47% of the respondents in Research I ( n = 197) and II ( n = 728), respectively, disagreed with any hypothetical scenario. An ordered logistic analysis to reveal the inter-relations of variables suggests the existence of other factors; thus, neither variables related to Twitter/Internet use nor demographic variables influenced people’s perceptions of the archival issue. While protecting privacy rights and copyrights was the primary reason for disagreements regarding third-party archival of tweets, many respondents intuitively displayed a negative reaction without any specific reason. Those who question its value and feel uncomfortable with an authoritative intervention were also identified. To nurture acceptant attitudes, advocating the archival of personal documents and adopting more restrictive archival procedures like taking down posts and anonymisation, public debates on the intervention of public bodies and demonstration of archival values should be considered.

The expanding circles of information behavior and human–computer interaction

This article examines the historical expansion and convergence of the fields of information behavior and human–computer interaction, primarily in terms of the philosophy underlying each field. Information behavior grew out of research in library service provision in the early 1900s, and human–computer interaction grew out of computer science and human factors engineering in the 1960s. While these two fields have had different origins, purposes, and discourses, in recent decades, they have begun to converge. In this article, we map this convergence and consider implications for the future of the information field. We conceptualize their scholarly paradigms as expanding circles, and we show that the circles of information behavior and human–computer interaction are expanding in terms of ontology, epistemology, and axiology—and moreover, they are beginning to overlap substantially. While the two fields continue to be largely separate in terms of scholarly discourses, we suggest that much could be gained by explicitly acknowledging their shared components. Some suggestions for this are discussed, and these are connected to the ongoing iSchool Movement.

Still Minding the Gap? Reflecting on Transitions between Concepts of Information in Varied Domains

This conceptual paper, a contribution to the tenth anniversary Special Issue of Information, gives a cross-disciplinary review of general and unified theories of information. A selective literature review is used to update a 2013 article on bridging the gaps between conceptions of information in different domains, including material from the physical and biological sciences, from the humanities and social sciences including library and information science, and from philosophy. A variety of approaches and theories are reviewed, including those of Brenner, Brier, Burgin and Wu, Capurro, Cárdenas-García and Ireland, Hidalgo, Hofkirchner, Kolchinsky and Wolpert, Floridi, Mingers and Standing, Popper, and Stonier. The gaps between disciplinary views of information remain, although there has been progress, and increasing interest, in bridging them. The solution is likely to be either a general theory of sufficient flexibility to cope with multiple meanings of information, or multiple and distinct theories for different domains, but with a complementary nature, and ideally boundary spanning concepts.

Curating the infosphere

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the proposal that Luciano Floridi’s philosphy of information (PI) may be an appropriate conceptual foundation for the discipline of library and information science (LIS).

Design/methodology/approach

A selective literature review and analysis are carried out.

Findings

It is concluded that LIS is in need of a new conceptual framework, and that PI is appropriate for this purpose.

Originality/value

Floridi proposed a close relationship between PI and LIS more than a decade ago. Although various authors have addressed the aspects of this relationship since then, this is the first proposal from an LIS perspective that PI be adopted as a basis for LIS.