Crossing the boundaries in information science: Perspectives on interdisciplinarity

Information science has often been recognized as an interdisciplinary field. The marriage between librarianship/documentation and computer science was a natural development in the United States in the post-War period (Farkas-Conn, 1991; Hahn and Barlow, 2012), while the development of information science in Europe has largely stayed close to the humanities and the social sciences, in particular, in relation to communication and media (Ibekwe-SanJuan, et al., 2010). For many years, the interdisciplinary nature of information science has been applauded; until recently, we are warned that interdisciplinarinity may be harmful to the identity of the field. Buckland (2012) states that the claim of being interdisciplinary is to choose a position of weakness because in times of economic crisis political power tends to reside in well-established disciplines. Cronin (2012) comments that the field's sense of identity, arguably fragile at the best of times, is likely to be further weakened for its epistemic promiscuity.