Centre for Information Science (CIS)

Description

The Centre for Information Science (CIS) continues the tradition of information science as an academic discipline, which has been present at City, University of London since the teaching of this subject was established in 1961.

As the contemporary world faces unprecedented changes in its information and knowledge environment, the Centre's research studies the impact of technology, economics, and socio-cultural values on the processes of information communication to understand how people, organisations and communities can benefit from access to, and understanding of information, to support fair and prosperous societies.

CIS studies the processes of information communication in the context of different domains, and as influenced by developing technologies. Specific interests are: documents and documentation, information literacy, information behaviour; information organisation and retrieval; information history and philosophy; scholarly communication, dissemination and publishing; digital ethics.

Information science is a broad, interdisciplinary field of study, which has relevance to all disciplines, and to any organisation that creates, stores, manages, and uses information.

Members of CIS come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, bringing a wide range of experience, methods and perspectives to teaching, research and outreach. Research is carried out through funded projects, personal research and scholarship, and through supervision of doctoral students registered for the Library and Information Science PhD/MPhil.

Great emphasis is placed on the integration of research with the masters-level education programme, and CIS has numerous publications based on masters dissertations. The Centre has an internationally recognised leading role in curriculum development and in research/practice integration for the library/information sector.

CIS's work falls into three main areas:

• Foundations of the information sciences: the nature of information, links between physical, biological and social conceptions of information; library and information history; philosophy of information.
• Questions of documents and documentation: changes in the processes of documentation, the way information is organised and communicated within the infosphere; the changing nature of documents and information resources; changes in scholarly communication and dissemination, and the consequences for information specialists; description, organization, discovery and retrieval of information.
• Information behaviour - of individuals and groups, and within society: models and concepts of information behaviour; information behaviour associated with emerging technologies and new media; behaviour associated with non-traditional realms exemplified by leisure and virtual communities; information/digital literacy; information ethics.

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

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University affiliation(s)

City, University of London
London