Information Research on Interdisciplinarity

Carole L. Palmer

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

 

The field of library and information science (LIS) is concerned with managing and

providing access to information in all its forms for all kinds of users and purposes. As

such, research in LIS strives to understand information phenomena at a fundamental level

and applies this knowledge to the development of information systems and services and

the training of information professionals. Because information is so pervasive and its uses

so diverse, the field itself is necessarily interdisciplinary in how it develops its base of

knowledge and expertise (Smith, 1992). At the same time, interdisciplinarity is an

important object of inquiry in LIS, since it presents two core problems in providing

information for scientists and scholars: 1) the representation and organization of

interdisciplinary intellectual content and 2) supporting access and use of information for

interdisciplinary inquiry and problem solving. This chapter will trace the body of

information research on interdisciplinarity, concentrating on studies of information

seeking and use by interdisciplinary scholars and scientists, to show how it advances our

understanding of how to develop information technologies to support interdisciplinary

research.

The interdisciplinary nature of science emerged as a theme decades ago as scholars began

drawing attention to the exponential growth of scientific information and the dynamics of

intellectual exchange among scientific communities (Crane, 1972; Price, 1963). The

practical implications of these trends have long been a concern for research libraries,

especially in terms of classifying interdisciplinary literature, allocating budgets for

interdisciplinary materials, and providing services to researchers in interdisciplinary

fields as well as interdisciplinary researchers working from within more conventional

fields. In recent years, the problems of supporting the information needs of

interdisciplinary research communities have also received attention from a range of

cognate fields involved in the development of information technologies for scientists and

scholars. Nevertheless, most questions about how information can best be selected,

collected, organized, accessed, retrieved, disseminated, and evaluated for

interdisciplinary research remain largely unanswered. At the same time, digital

information technologies are seen as having great potential for providing solutions to

these problems.

Bibliometric methods have been a standard approach for mapping the dynamics of

intellectual domains, beginning with statistical measures of how disciplines grow, divide,

and merge (Hulme, 1923) and later focusing more on the transfer of information across

disciplines (Borgman & Furner, 2002). But interdisciplinary researchers are also studied

as a significant and distinct class of scholar (Bates, 1996), primarily through quantitative

and qualitative investigations of their information needs, searching activities, and source

preferences. However, examinations of the complex environment of interdisciplinary

work and information practices have become more common and include analyses of

factors related to disciplinary cultures, modes of collaboration and knowledge