Information Studies and Other Provocations

What is information studies? And why does it matter? UCLA professor Jonathan Furner takes a sideways look at some of the perennial questions facing the field in this selection of talks given at conferences, workshops, and other meetings over a two-decade period. Topics covered include the disciplinary nature of library and information science; the philosophy of information; the ontology of works, documents, and records; bibliographic classification and knowledge organization; vocabulary control and collaborative indexing; and information retrieval and scholarly communication.

Jonathan Furner (M.A. Cambridge 1990, Ph.D. Sheffield 1994) is a Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He studies the history and philosophy of cultural stewardship, and teaches classes on the representation and organization of archival records, library resources, and museum objects. He has published over fifty papers on these and related topics, frequently using conceptual analysis to evaluate the theoretical frameworks, data models, and metadata standards on which information access systems rely. He served for six years (2014–2019) as chair of the Dewey Decimal Classification’s editorial policy committee. He is co-editor of book series for the MIT Press and Facet Publishing, and is a regular reviewer of contributions to journals and conferences in the fields of philosophy of information, knowledge organization, and bibliometrics.