User:KYPark/2008

Some developments in the information science discipline over a period of 30 years are discussed, by selecting topics covered in the early issues of Journal of Information Science, and tracing their influence on subsequent developments, largely though by no means exclusively through JIS papers. Five main themes are covered: the information discipline per se; the foundations of that discipline; the nature of information; relations between discipline and profession; and education for information science. The continuing resonance of the writings of Farradane and Brookes is noted.

• Introduction: European modernism and the information society : conceptual interdependence / W. Boyd Rayward
• Understanding the information domain : the uneasy relations between sociology and cultural studies and the peculiar absence of history / Frank Webster
• On the cultural and intellectual context of European documentation in the early twentieth century / Michael Buckland
• A tale of two narratives : prolegomena to an alternative history of library and information science / Steve Fuller
• The role of facts in Paul Otlet's modernist project of documentation / Bernd Frohmann
• Ferdinand Vander Haeghen's shadow on Otlet : European resistance to the Americanized modernism of the Office international de bibliographie / Pieter Uyttenhove and Sylvia Van Peteghem
• Towers and globes : architectural and epistemological differences between Patrick Geddes's Outlook towers and Paul Otlet's Mundaneums / Pierre Chabard
• Building society, constructing knowledge, weaving the web : Otlet's visualizations of a global information society and his concept of a universal civilization / Charles van den Heuvel
• Networking knowledge before the information society : the Manchester Central Library (1934) and the metaphysical-professional philosophy of L.S. Jast / Alistair Black
• Documentation and utopia : Fabian anticipations of the information society / Alistair S. Duff
• Public science in Britain and the origins of documentation and information science, 1890-1950 / Dave Muddiman
• The march of the modern and the reconstitution of the world's knowledge apparatus : H.G. Wells, encyclopedism, and the world brain / W. Boyd Rayward
• The modern museum in the age of its mechanical reproducibility : Otto Neurath and the Museum of Society and Economy in Vienna / Nader Vossoughian
• Gesellschaft und wirtschaft : an encyclopedia in Otto Neurath's pictorial statistics from 1930 / Sybilla Nikolow
• Visualizing social facts : Otto Neurath's isotype project / Frank Hartmann
• Paper parasite : F.M. Feldhaus and the historiography of technology / Markus Krajewski
• Roots of mediating information : aspects of the German information movement / Thomas Hapke

[...] It arose from a small invitational conference at the University of Illinois, 'European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the Past', held 6-8 May 2005. This conference itself followed a small informal meeting of a group of scholars interested in Paul Otlet and the figures surrounding him [...].

In previous work, we have shown that using terms from around citations in citing papers to index the cited paper, in addition to the cited paper's own terms, can improve retrieval effectiveness. Now, we investigate how to select text from around the citations in order to extract good index terms. We compare the retrieval effectiveness that results from a range of contexts around the citations, including no context, the entire citing paper, some fixed windows and several variations with linguistic motivations. We conclude with an analysis of the benefits of more complex, linguistically motivated methods for extracting citation index terms, over using a fixed window of terms. We speculate that there might be some advantage to using computational linguistic techniques for this task.