Bulletin February/march 2015 / quote 3 of 5
Information science is much older than the information technology boom in the 1990s
One only has to open a book such as Walker’s 1971 edited volume [15] documenting one of the first workshops about interactive information retrieval, Interactive Bibliographic Search: The User/Computer Interface, which contains citations to hundreds of studies, to appreciate the depth of our field and one’s place in it. Many people come to this field with the ill-formed notion that information science is somehow related to the information technology boom of the 1990s and that search interfaces and retrieval systems are contemporary inventions. Today, information science means different things to different people and does many different things for many different people. As educators, we have a responsibility to make sure students at all levels, and people more generally, understand the history of information science and importantly, the central role libraries and librarians have played in its development.