Coalescing at CoLIS

The 6th Conference on Conceptions of LIS was held in Boras, Sweden last week, hosted by the Swedish School of Library and Information Science. A more intimate affair than many such events, CoLIS had just over 100 attendees from Europe, North America and Australia and was marked by a relaxed, interactive style that maximized the sharing of perspectives. I found the conference particularly interesting in that theoretical discussions dominated and there was a comfort level with ideas, even opposing ideas, that never caused people to overheat or ignore each other. I was somewhat surprised at the amount of critical theory on display, one not terribly driven by Foucaultean concerns might have felt in a minority here, but there were enough good papers here to make the trip more productive than many other LIS conferences. I particularly enjoyed a presentation by David Bawden of City University in London who argued for a unified framework for information that broached physical, biological and human domains. Oddly, I had just raised a similar topic in my address when I pushed for the field to aim higher and ask significant, ‘big questions’ in its research (with a side-comment that we should declare a moratorium on new information seeking models). The audience responded to David’s talk enough to suggest this idea is not too worn out to be worth discussion, and indeed David made a strong case for this being an important issue for the field to address. The CoLIS papers will all find their way into a special issue of Information Research and I’ll post a link in due course. My own cleaned-up paper is in PDF form here. Next CoLIS is in London in Spring 2010 – we wouldn’t want to have too much of a good thing now would we?