ZIN. Issues in Information Science. Information Studies, No.1A (2020)

Thanks to the financial support which the Ministry of Science and Higher Education provided in 2020 under the program “Działalność upowszechniająca naukę: działalność wydawnicza (DUN)” (Actions to Promote Science: Publishing) to increase the national and international circulation of ZIN. Issues in Information Science. Information Studies, the editorial committee is releasing in 2020 two additional thematic issues devoted to the newest topics in information science. We publish them entirely in English, hoping that it will make their contents more accessible to the international audience.

No. 1A - Interdisciplinarity of Information Science Research

Preface

This issue of Zagadnienia Informacji Naukowej – Studia Informacyjne presents eight articles submitted in response to Call for Papers, in which our Editorial Board announced the plan to prepare a special issue devoted to different aspects of interdisciplinarity in information studies. The intention of the Editorial Board was to present the diversity of interdisciplinary connections of modern information science and to examine the various approaches to the potential of interdisciplinary approach in research on information phenomena, information processes, and information problems. We invited research and review articles discussing the interdisciplinary nature of information science and demonstrating examples of research on various information problems conducted using an interdisciplinary approach.

The  opening  article,  entitled  Interdisciplinarity  of  Information  Science  Research:  In-troduction, is of my authorship. It provides an introduction to the subject. In this article, I  present  the  concept  of  interdisciplinarity,  various  types  of  this  research  approach  in  science, and the attempt to characterize the features specific to the interdisciplinarity of information research.

In  the  article  entitled  Information  Science  in  Dialogue  with  Archival  Science,  Library  Science,  and  Museum  Studies:  The  Recent  Brazilian  Experience,  Carlos  Alberto  Ávila  Araújo explores the connections between the theoretical and epistemological foundations of information science and other disciplines focused on the problems of preserving and sharing knowledge resources and cultural heritage recorded in various formats. Araújo’s text highlights the possibility of diffusion of concepts developed in information science to other disciplines investigating similar activities.

The next four articles employ various theories and methods of other disciplines in in-formation research with the purpose of developing theoretical foundations of information science.

The article by Tibor Koltay and Enikő Szőke-Milinte – Complex Interdisciplinary Ap-proach  to  Modeling  Information  Literacy  Education  –  demonstrates  the  possibilities  of  a cross-disciplinary approach based on pedagogy and information science in shaping the theoretical foundations of teaching information literacy.

The article by Marek Nahotko – Application of Interdisciplinary Theory of Genres in LIS – presents the interdisciplinary connections between information science and linguistics, rhetoric, as well as several other disciplines. The author discusses the use of the theory of genres which has been developed in linguistics, literary studies, and rhetoric, and then in sociology, psychology, cultural studies, and communication science. The use of this theory in LIS allows for a better understanding of the characteristics of communication carried out with the use of specialized tools in bibliographic and library information systems.

In the next article – Affective Factors in Human Information Behavior: A Conceptual Analysis  of  Interdisciplinary  Research  on  Information  Behavior  –  Monika  Krakowska  considers the interdisciplinary nature of research into human information behavior. She illustrates  it  with  an  analysis  of  the  use  of  theories  and  research  methods  of  emotional  psychology in the study of affective aspects of information behavior.

In the sixth article, entitled Theoretical Bases of Critical Data Studies, Łukasz Iwasiński, reviews  theoretical  literature  and  empirical  studies  from  diverse  fields  to  examine  the  application  of  the  critical  theory  derived  from  constructivist  sociology  of  knowledge  in  multidisciplinary data studies, which are a subject for information science research.

The last two articles discuss the use of information science research methods and prod-ucts in other scientific disciplines.

Piotr Nowak and Piotr Wierzchoń’s article Digital Libraries and a Breakthrough in Lin-guistic Chronologization. Digitization of Collections in the Service of Linguistics presents a method used by linguists to study the chronologization of vocabulary, based on computer analysis of large collections of digitized texts. The authors discuss the use of the resources of the Federation of Digital Libraries – aggregating the collections of Polish digital librar-ies – in linguistic research on neologisms.

The issue ends with an article by Kamila Augustyn – The Global Book Publishing Market as an Interdisciplinary Research Field – which uses bibliometric methods to determine the degree of interdisciplinarity of research on the global book market. Although it is rooted in literary studies and book studies, it builds on the findings of information science and computer science, borrowing methods from sociology, culture studies and economics.

The interdisciplinarity of information science research is usually believed to be an in-herent feature of this discipline. However, in the information science literature, the term “interdisciplinary” is used as a general concept covering different types of co-operation between information science and other disciplines. In order to highlight the characteris-tics of the multidimensional interdisciplinarity of information science, this issue collects articles presenting both various interdisciplinary approaches to information research and discussions of the relationships between information science and various other disciplines. We hope that our readers will be interested in the articles both as individual studies, and as parts of a deliberate compilation.

Barbara Sosińska-Kalata
Editor-in-Chief

Warsaw, 21 September, 2020

   
ZIN. Issues in Information Science. Information Studies, No.1A*

* (The publication of this issue was funded by the grant “Publishing of ZIN. Issues in Information Science. Information Studies journal – increasing the national and international circulation” – an action financed under agreement 921/P-DUN/2019, supported by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education program “Actions to Promote Science: Publishing” (DUN))