University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Introduction: Design in the Philosophy of Information

Ken, Herold

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/133028

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Title
Introduction: Design in the Philosophy of Information
Author(s)
Ken, Herold
Issue Date
2024-08
Keyword(s)
Philosophy of Information
Date of Ingest
2026-04-07T09:20:44-05:00
Abstract
At the turn of the millennium, Library Trends Editor in Chief Wilf Lancaster approved the initial 2004 issue on the philosophy of information with the proviso that the substance of the contributions be philosophical. The journal has long had a focus on practicing librarians and information scientists and only secondarily educators and students. As an experienced practitioner in library information systems and management myself, I had as a goal the production of a collection of philosophy papers relevant to our basic purposes in library and information science (LIS). How I went about the task, generating controversy by promoting Luciano Floridi’s (2002) new vision of information and suggesting LIS as an applied philosophy of information (Gorichanaz et al. 2020, 596; Herold 2001), is another matter. More on that later in this introduction. Critical reception of the issue (Van der Veer Martens 2015, 328) was reportedly mixed, and given that the bar set by Lancaster was high, I felt that we had delivered on the relevance factor for a general audience. Some controversy was generated, yet we seem to have struck while the proverbial iron was hot.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
Series/Report Name or Number
Volume 73, Issue 1-2, August & November 2024
Type of Resource
text
Genre of Resource
article
Language
eng
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2025 University of Illinois Board of Trustees

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Library Trends 73 (1-2) August & November 2024: Design and the Philosophy of Information [Restricted] PRIMARY
This 2024 special issue of Library Trends was inspired by the contributions of Marcia Bates to our field and discipline. We are very fortunate to have her selected works gathered into three volumes (Bates 2018a, 2018b, 2018c). Thus, the vision for this issue was to treat Bates’s research “protoparadigm” as derived from Thomas Kuhn as a design sounding board, and I invited authors to freely explore these parameters. Additionally, I called for scholarship deriving from the emergence of Chinese information philosophy as another metatheory for LIS. I intentionally left the term “design” as open as possible, with some influence of Floridi’s (2019) definition of philosophy as conceptual design as a directive. Also, Bates (2002) has long called for good design for elements making up retrieval system interfaces and criticized models that do not actually improve information sources for users.