Lizzie Davenport

Profiling the professors

Citation and publication data on six UK chair holders in Information and Library Science are compared. The data paint a picture of a fragmented discipline. The six professors lead independent publishing lives, focussing on their particular areas of interest and addressing their particular constituencies. The lack of consensus as to what constitutes the field is in part explained by the extensive importation of ideas from other disciplines and the vaned disciplinary backgrounds of the chair holders themselves.

What does hypertext offer the information scientist

Hypertext should transform the work of information scien tists, who describe, model and interpret information entities and events. Traditional reporting relies on static, finite presen tation in the form of files or finished texts and many models fail to capture volatile environments: hypertext presents docu ments as aggregates of textual fragments, which can be assem bled and replaced as required, and can reflect fluctuations in real-time (the principle of dynamic instantiation). It also offers new approaches to information retrieval (maps of browsers will complement metonyms), and evaluation, as value-in-use (re vealed in links to texts) can replace current quantitative instru ments like citation indexing. Hypertext provides intimate in sight into individual textual habits, which makes it an im portant tool for collaborative work and research into cognitive style.