We began the FanLIS project in 2020, as a basis from which to study, understand and progress information communication as it relates to fan works. Most of us are fans of something, and thus we all have the potential to appreciate and enjoy the fiction, artwork, music, poetry, plays, games and interactive experiences crafted by creative fans within our area of interest, in both analogue and digital formats. Fandom is perhaps the ultimate inclusive discipline. Library and information science (LIS) theory and practice consider authorship, publication, distribution, indexing, access, storage, preservation, document and management related policies, use, reception and understanding of fan works; these categories, applicable to any discipline, embody the expertise of information professionals, and collectively comprise the information communication chain.

Purpose: To give a review of the significance of Open Science for libraries in the context of the wider Open movement, with international perspectives and examples from national, academic, and public libraries. Methodology/approach: A qualitative synthesis of recent literature and web materials is presented. Results: Particular consideration is given to the need for open library infrastructures, support for Citizen Science, Open Science communication, and libraries as demonstrators of open technologies. It is suggested that libraries are well placed to support and promote the Open movement, but that practical issues of policy and resources, as well as philosophical aspects of Open movement, must be considered. Research limitations: The literature review is selective rather than comprehensive, and most material comes from Europe and North America. Originality/practical implications: The review should help librarians find a realistic appreciation of the opportunities offered by the Open Science movement.

PurposeThe paper reports on developments in the Information Seeking and Communication Model (ISCM) since it was first presented in 2013, focussing on how the model, derived by explicitly drawing on previous models, frameworks, and concepts, has been applied, adapted and extended. This paper summarises the reception of the ISCM, and describes two new applications in different contexts.Design/methodology/approachA literature review details applications of, comments on and critiques of, the ISCM since its introduction. Two exploratory studies of health information seeking behaviour show the application of the ISCM in novel contexts.FindingsThe literature cited here, and the two studies outlined show the applicability and extendibility of the ISCM, as well as its value in helping to capture the holistic context of information seeking, the interplay between providers and seekers of information, including fluidity of provider/seeker roles, and emotional dimensions of information seeking and use.Originality/valueThe paper responds to the call by Case and Given (2016) for further empirical testing of the ISCM and similar conceptual models. It shows the range of applicability of this model, and models drawn from it, and makes recommendations for further development.

Editorial introduction to the proceedings

A two-round Delphi study was conducted to explore priorities for addressing online risk to individuals. A corpus of literature was created based on 69 peer-reviewed articles about privacy risk and the privacy calculus published between 2014 and 2019. A cluster analysis of the resulting text-base using Pearson’s correlation coefficient resulted in seven broad topics. After two rounds of the Delphi survey with experts in information security and information literacy, the following topics were identified as priorities for further investigation: personalisation versus privacy, responsibility for privacy on social networks, measuring privacy risk, and perceptions of powerlessness and the resulting apathy. The Delphi approach provided clear conclusions about research topics and has potential as a tool for prioritising future research areas.

This editorial gives background and context on FanLIS, a symposium series and research project run by CityLIS, Department of Library and Information Science at City, University of London, which seeks to explore the liminal spaces between fandom, fan studies, and Library and Information Science (LIS). It also introduces papers from the inaugural FanLIS symposium, which took place online on May 20, 2021.

The second edition of this definitive text gives a comprehensive overview of all aspects of the subject, bringing it up to date with analysis of the changes in the information environment, now largely digital, and their implication for the discipline and professions. Its approach is rooted in the philosophical, theoretical, and conceptual foundations of the subject and, in particular, in Floridi's ideas of the fourth revolution, hyperhistory, and onlife. The theory-practice relationship is strongly emphasised throughout, and the extensive literature coverage makes this a valuable sourcebook. This second edition is extensively revised, with largely new text, illustrations, and resources, and offers a global perspective. The main topics covered include: foundations: philosophies, theories, concepts, ethics, and historical perspectives organising, retrieving, and analysing information and data information behaviour, domain analysis, and digital literacies digital technologies, information systems, and information management information research methods and informetrics changing modes of information communication, and information society the nature and future of the information disciplines and professions.This book will be a standard text for students of library and information disciplines, including information science, librarianship, information and knowledge management, archives and records management, and digital humanities. It will also serve as an introduction for those beginning research in these areas, and as a resource for thoughtful and reflective practitioners.

Following the first successful FanLIS symposium (Price & Robinson, 2022), our aim in 2022 was to continue to build bridges between the two fields, doing this through two streams held over the two-day event—the first stream being ‘Beyond the Archive’, and the second ‘Fan Futures’. ‘Beyond the Archive’ focused on the ways in which fans move beyond traditional relationships with the archive to subvert, use and perhaps even abuse the archive to create and innovate. ‘Fan Futures’ then zoomed out from the archive to consider different aspects of the information communication chain—creation, organisation, dissemination, discovery, management, preservation, analysis, use and understanding—traditional domains of concern to LIS—and how fan practice is changing and innovating in those areas.

The classification of Western art music is a complex area of knowledge organization, yet the reasons for those complexities have not been fully studied. This research dissects the concept of orthogonality, in particular regard to music classification. Orthogonality (antonym: dependency) means that one facet acts independently from another facet. Although orthogonality is an assumed quality of facets, it has attracted relatively little attention in knowledge organization discourse. This research utilizes bibliographic classification schemes, musicological writings, and musical works to analyze orthogonality in music classification. The relationships between the medium, form/genre, and function facets are unpicked and a strong dependency is found between these facets. Whether this orthogonality exists as a construct of faceted classification or stems from the domain knowledge is explored. Furthermore, the analysis initiates new thinking about the general concept of orthogonality. The idea of a spectrum of dependency is proposed. In addition, novel, orthogonality-derived phenomena are discussed—“dynamic facets” and “meta-dependency”—where the boundary between what is and is not a facet is blurred. The concluding model visualizes the chain of dependencies between music facets, ultimately showing how the lack of orthogonality plays a key role in the complexity and issues found in music classification.

The classification of Western art music is a complex area of knowledge organization, yet the reasons for those complexities have not been fully studied. This research dissects the concept of orthogonality, in particular regard to music classification. Orthogonality (antonym: dependency) means that one facet acts independently from another facet. Although orthogonality is an assumed quality of facets, it has attracted relatively little attention in knowledge organization discourse. This research utilizes bibliographic classification schemes, musicological writings, and musical works to analyze orthogonality in music classification. The relationships between the medium, form/genre, and function facets are unpicked and a strong dependency is found between these facets. Whether this orthogonality exists as a construct of faceted classification or stems from the domain knowledge is explored. Furthermore, the analysis initiates new thinking about the general concept of orthogonality. The idea of a spectrum of dependency is proposed. In addition, novel, orthogonality‐derived phenomena are discussed—“dynamic facets” and “meta‐dependency”—where the boundary between what is and is not a facet is blurred. The concluding model visualizes the chain of dependencies between music facets, ultimately showing how the lack of orthogonality plays a key role in the complexity and issues found in music classification.

Open Access in Theory and Practice investigates the theory-practice relationship in the domain of open access publication and dissemination of research outputs.Drawing on detailed analysis of the literature and current practice in OA, as well as data collected in detailed interviews with practitioners, policymakers, and researchers, the book discusses what constitutes "theory", and how the role of theory is perceived by both theorists and practitioners.Exploring the ways theory and practice have interacted in the development of OA, the authors discuss what this reveals about the nature of the OA phenomenon itself and the theory-practice relationship.Open Access in Theory and Practice contributes to a better understanding of OA and, as such, should be of great interest to academics, researchers, and students working in the fields of information science, publishing studies, science communication, higher education policy, business, and economics.The book also makes an important contribution to the debate of the relationship between theory and practice in information science, and more widely across different fields of the social sciences and humanities.

This paper follows up from a previous study on this topic and outlines the second part of a wider, two-part study on the information seeking behaviour (ISB) of law students. Exploratory work was outlined in a previous publication(17) and there we found that although mobile technologies offered benefits to law students seeking information for their academic studies, there was concern from law librarians that the use of electronic resources via both non-mobile and mobile interfaces resulted in a loss of skills required for information retrieval due to the increasing capabilities of electronic resources' search interfaces. To gain more insight into how law students were using mobile information resources, and better understand the advantages and disadvantages of such, we extended our study to a wider cohort and employed more research techniques including a focus group. This final phase of our study was conducted between 2015 to 2017. Here our cohort included another set of law librarians (13) and a further 54 law students. We expanded our research tools to include 2 thematic questionnaires and a focus group exercise. Our findings discovered that law librarians were concerned with the intangibility of digital formats. Law students remained indifferent to this aspect and valued the speed, multi-tasking and near-ubiquitous accessibility attributes that electronic format use via mobile technologies provided. These learnings and more, with conclusions, are reported in the course of this paper written by Zaki Abbas, Andrew MacFarlane and Lyn Robinson.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the rationale, technical framework, content creation workflow and evaluation for a multilingual massive open online course (MOOC) to facilitate information literacy (IL) considering cultural aspects.Design/methodology/approachA good practice analysis built the basis for the technical and content framework. The evaluation approach consisted of three phases: first, the students were asked to fill out a short self-assessment questionnaire and a shortened adapted version of a standardized IL test. Second, they completed the full version of the IL MOOC. Third, they were asked to fill out the full version of a standardized IL test and a user experience questionnaire.FindingsThe results show that first the designed workflow was suitable in practice and led to the implementation of a full-grown MOOC. Second, the implementation itself provides implications for future projects developing multilingual educational resources. Third, the evaluation results show that participants achieved significantly higher results in a standardized IL test after attending the MOOC as mandatory coursework. Variations between the different student groups in the participating countries were observed. Fourth, self-motivation to complete the MOOC showed to be a challenge for students asked to attend the MOOC as nonmandatory out-of-classroom task. It seems that multilingual facilitation alone is not sufficient to increase active MOOC participation.Originality/valueThis paper presents an innovative approach of developing multilingual IL teaching resources and is one of the first works to evaluate the impact of an IL MOOC on learners' experience and learning outcomes in an international evaluation study.

PurposeThis article describes the third part of a three-stage study investigating the information behaviour of fans and fan communities, the first stage of which is described in the study by Price and Robinson (2017).Design/methodology/approachUsing tag analysis as a method, a comparative case study was undertaken to explore three aspects of fan information behaviour: information gatekeeping; classifying and tagging and entrepreneurship and economic activity. The case studies took place on three sites used by fans–Tumblr, Archive of Our Own (AO3) and Etsy. Supplementary semi-structured interviews with site users were used to augment the findings with qualitative data.FindingsThese showed that fans used tags in a variety of ways quite apart from classification purposes. These included tags being used on Tumblr as meta-commentary and a means of dialogue between users, as well as expressors of emotion and affect towards posts. On AO3 in particular, fans had developed a practice called “tag wrangling” to mitigate the inherent “messiness” of tagging. Evidence was also found of a “hybrid market economy” on Etsy fan stores. From the study findings, a taxonomy of fan-related tags was developed.Research limitations/implicationsFindings are limited to the tagging practices on only three sites used by fans during Spring 2016, and further research on other similar sites are recommended. Longitudinal studies of these sites would be beneficial in understanding how or whether tagging practices change over time. Testing of the fan-tag taxonomy developed in this paper is also recommended.Originality/valueThis research develops a method for using tag analysis to describe information behaviour. It also develops a fan-tag taxonomy, which may be used in future research on the tagging practices of fans, which heretofore have been a little-studied section of serious leisure information users.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review and discuss Luciano Floridi’s 2019 book The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design, the latest instalment in his philosophy of information (PI) tetralogy, particularly with respect to its implications for library and information studies (LIS). Design/methodology/approach Nine scholars with research interests in philosophy and LIS read and responded to the book, raising critical and heuristic questions in the spirit of scholarly dialogue. Floridi responded to these questions. Findings Floridi’s PI, including this latest publication, is of interest to LIS scholars, and much insight can be gained by exploring this connection. It seems also that LIS has the potential to contribute to PI’s further development in some respects. Research limitations/implications Floridi’s PI work is technical philosophy for which many LIS scholars do not have the training or patience to engage with, yet doing so is rewarding. This suggests a role for translational work between philosophy and LIS. Originality/value The book symposium format, not yet seen in LIS, provides forum for sustained, multifaceted and generative dialogue around ideas.