Background: information professionals, who are we?

According to Greer, Grover, and Fowler in their book, Introduction to the Library and Information Professions, the information professions include "those professions which are engaged in the creation, organization, diffusion, and preservation of information and knowledge" (p. 12). Professionals in these fields might be librarians, archivists, records managers, information scientists, information entrepreneurs, information resources managers, or information systems specialists (Greer, Grover, & Fowler, 2007). There are many jobs which fall under these broad categories, but my purpose here is not a lengthy examination of the information professions.

Although the jobs of professionals in this field may vary dramatically-- a children's librarian's work is vastly different from that of a corporate records manager, for example--Greer, Grover, and Fowler (2007) assert that there are several characteristics that all information professionals share. These include the fact that all work with a specific population with specific information needs, that all manage an organization, staff, budget, etc. which serves as the link between information and the client, and that all are responsible for "the design and management of an information system encompassing a database" (p. 11).

The purpose of this blog

The purpose of this blog is to discuss the ways in which information professionals organize information, both today and historically.

How information is organized depends upon who is organizing it, the type of information, the purpose of preserving the information, who will be accessing the information and the manner in which it will be retrieved. Each of these areas must be taken into account when thinking about organization.

This blog is being created in partial fulfillment of the course requirements for LIS 6260, Information Science in Librarianship. I am a graduate student in the MLIS program at the University of South Florida.