The ODAPCOSRIU definition:

• Is derived from various sources.

• Accommodates both Podunk and cyberspace.

• Is simultaneously simple and complex.

• Asks key questions within a flexible framework.

It is fashionable in some circles of librarianship to proclaim that because our profession's subject disciplines and occupational categories change so rapidly and radically, a science aimed at bibliographically controlling and accessing our collections is doomed. The neat lines that once separated the sciences blur and bleed too promiscuously. Storage and delivery possibilities vary too dramatically, changing with each new sunrise. Not only do we librarians play no part in contributing to the knowledge explosion, but we cannot even keep up with describing and organizing the output.

It is impossible, therefore, to really "define" library or information science. Better that we absolve ourselves from trying. Instead, embrace this failure, take nourishment from the admission, and move on. And, hey, isn't that filtering, thing a stitch? What will those-zany censors think of next?

Add this to the stew: The chronically self-conscious and introspective among us are often moved to declare that library science has no theoretical basis. Some LIS educators from the low-self-esteem community declare that instead of a substantial underpinning, there is only a soft assortment of routines and vague codes at the basis of the craft. A gaggle of these educators have built lecture notes and tenure files upon the claim that librarianship is not a profession and that research in the field is absent, flabby, or shoddy. These critics sup at our trough, however, and we librarians give them places of honor in academia and at podiums. There are librarians who can not digest a communal meal at our conferences unless and until an invited speaker has reminded them what pitiful creatures they are and what a zero occupation they pursue. Some from the spiked-collar-and-leather-restraint school can not achieve a peptic climax until a guest doominatrix has reminded them that things are going to get worse.

How out of fashion wearing conceptual hair shirts ought to be! How dangerous it is in the age of information to mutter that we do not know what we are about. How foolhardy it is in the era of electronic communication, virtual libraries, and cyberhighways to suggest that we have no theoretical basis to guide us. How preposterous it is in this climate of accountability, outsourcing, and downsizing for academics or pundits to suggest that we can not define library science or information science.

George Carlin once did a routine about "expressions you will never hear." One of those expressions was: "Hand me that piano." Here's another expression you will never hear: "What a great definition of library science!"

Let's fix this.

What is library and information science?

Library and information science (LIS) is what people hired to create, sort, manage, and transfer information do. The definition that follows borrows liberally from thoughts expressed 30 years ago in Tefko Saracevic's venerable Introduction to Information Science ( New York: R. R. Bowker, 1970), from definitions subsequently announced at conferences and in textbooks, and from the musings and teachings of many laborers in LIS vineyards. It accommodates Podunk and cyberspace. It snaps together smartly and its parts may be disassembled and claimed by specialists. It is simple and complex at the same time. It is both an invitation to clarity and an antidote for ambiguity. It asks key questions within a framework that can absorb and make operational as-yet-undreamed-of possibilities. It requires no one to march in definitional lockstep, nor does it confine LIS to a conceptual cage. It is a definition composed by many. And it is a great definition.

Library and information science is the science concerned with the following aspects of information:

ORIGIN

What is information? Where and how does information come to be? Who originates it? How does an information agency plug into information at its earliest stages of development? Who controls what "becomes" information? What people, tools, and clearinghouses monitor information's beginnings--whether those origins are in the minds of poets, the vials of chemists, contributions to the Internet, or the utterances of congressional committees? Do information workers in information agencies sometimes originate information? Do knowledge managers make decisions about information, massage and combine it, and add value in the process?

DISSEMINATION

Once originated, how does information spread? As it flows, do people shape and change it? Does information behave, or is behavior but a useful metaphor for how we act upon it? Does the Internet make creators and distributors of all who own a PC and a modem? Who are the other agents involved in diffusion? What do publishers, vendors, and jobbers do? How do information agencies participate in all this?

ACQUISITION

How do information places get the information they need from originators, publishers, vendors, and jobbers? How do information workers systematically develop and manage collections? Is it as important to weed collections as it is to feed them? Who does the selecting, the ordering, and the receiving?

Is not the current manner of acquisition as much virtual as it is actual? Will non-lawyer LIS workers soon drown in a licensing morass? Will they have to retain Philadelphia lawyers just to read the fine print?

PROPERTIES

What are the characteristics of acquired or accessed information? What manners of expression, words, languages, parts of speech, levels of difficulty, subject contents, styles, forms (prose or verse), and formats (electronic, film, or print) apply?

CLASSIFICATION

Based upon those properties, how do LIS workers describe and categorize this information so information places can keep track of it and clients can locate it? Are Organizations of all types--business, industry, nonprofit--fully aware that librarians possess mighty sorting skills? Do librarians recognize and broadcast this?

ORGANIZATION

What is the best way to present this information for client access? What facilities arrangement best accomplishes delivery? How shall workers in the information place--the four-wall kind or the virtual kind--organize to deliver products and services?

STORAGE

What are the best alternatives for formatting, housing, caring for, and preserving print, microform, and electronic information? If the agency's prime mission is historical/ archival, how and where shall information workers store and preserve it?

RETRIEVAL

After it is organized and stored, how do information workers best get it back? How do clients retrieve it? What document-delivery systems work best? How do retrievers communicate necessary recall and relevancy data to the classifiers and builders of retrieval systems? How do the sometimes antithetical, sometimes complementary, concepts of ownership and access apply?

INTERPRETATION

What does the information mean? Whose job is it to say so? Who delivers this interpretation? When does an information worker diagnose and prescribe? When does an information worker practice dynamic neutrality? Are there information workers whose job it is to pursue, generate, and distribute information? Whose job is it to teach information/ media literacy? How should policy guide decisions in the area of interpretation? What message does an information agency send to clients when its agents decline to interpret? What message does an information agency send to clients when its agents analyze, package, and provide value-added services and products?

USE

Who uses information? Why? Who does not use "our" . information? Why? Is access a problem? In what settings is information asked for and used? How do those settings-institutional for example--influence the way we think about and manage information? Are there voracious consumers of information who choose to bypass some information places in favor of other libraries, bookstores, or media? What about "invisible colleges"?

What do people do with information? Which information is used, unused? How come? Are people who do not use our information subject to any of life's penalties? Are nonusers the disenfranchised and unpowerful among us? How does information transfer work? What happens to information? When information is consumed, is it really consumed? Do its users help to produce new information, to originate it?

What policies shall we establish at global, national, and local levels to govern the life cycle of information and the access to it? How do we manage information in an era of pounding technological and social change and the continuous flood of interdisciplinary data and knowledge? Is information powerful? Does information empower the way some claim it does, or is it more accurate to claim that powerful information--not just any information--in the hands of clever users empowers those users?

All together now

So, what do librarians and information scientists do? All together now: They ODAPCOSRIU. Librarians and information scientists make their living knowing about and managing the life cycle of information--from invention through use, and back.

In addition to the performance of ODAPCOSRIU, LIS workers administer and manage the agencies and people who do it. They plan, fundraise, develop, budget, coordinate, hire, supervise, evaluate, reward and fire, communicate, promote, and represent, largely using skills borrowed from the business community.

Let us pay no more homage to those who complain that "we do not know anything" about ODAPCOSRIU, that no science lies at its foundations. Bullfeathers! Information workers and their clients work with reliable classification theory every day. Ample empirical research evidence describes and predicts both the behavior of information and the behavior of people toward information. Some of it is rigorous and widely applicable; some of it is seat-of-the-pants and substantially environment-specific. We discover relationships, derive principles, and apply method.

Some of us do ODAPCOSRIU in one or two of its related categories. Some of us are concerned mostly with machine applications. Some deal primarily with theoretical aspects; others are practice-oriented.

What is library science? What is information science? ODAPCOSRIU. You can pronounce it: O-DAP-COS-RI-U. It rhymes with "What librarians and information scientists do."

Where do LIS workers do ODAPCOSRIU? They do it in the I&OE. The Inner and Outer Environment Model (I&OEM) provides graphic representation for the philosophical underpinnings--the reason for being--for all information places.

Within the "I"--the information place--are administrative services that involve planning, executing, and evaluating; technical and public services that deliver acquisition, description, retrieval, and interpretation; and systems that oversee the coordination of electronic information functions.

Drawn and labeled, the I&OEM looks like this:

The Inner and Outer Environmental Model

The "L" stands for library or information place. "L" is the name we give to the inner environment. The "L" may be a building with walls, an electronic switching station, a repository of information stored in a variety of formats, or some combination thereof.

The "C" stands for community. "C" is the name we give to the outer environment. Community has some geographical properties, but it is defined conceptually. The community consists of all those persons who have rightful access to the materials and services of a given information place. It is drawn with a broken line to show that people may gain access to information agency materials and services in several ways: by living within certain boundaries, by studying at or being employed by a given agency, by purchasing their way in, or through permissions. Sometimes an entire community of Library A may gain rightful access to Library B when A and B join forces.

The function of the information place or library is to create, acquire, store, and provide information materials and services for its community. The provision function includes ownership and access roles. Each information agency defines its mission in accordance with community need. The information place must serve one major purpose: to discover and address the information needs of its outer environment, its community. All other purposes are subsidiary,

The arrow extending from the information place to the, community represents the materials and services provided. The arrow extending from the community to the information place represents feedback about the materials and services. The dotted line joins materials and services (M&S) with feedback to form a communication loop. This acknowledges two requirements:

1. Feedback must be engineered, not left to happenstance;

2. Sometimes the community comes to the information place to occupy meeting rooms, hear stories, or request, use, and borrow materials. Sometimes the library takes its wares and surveys to the community. Sometimes the visits are cybervisits.

This I&OEM displays one X, one target of opportunity; small-business operators, single parents, or students, for example. Most information places, brick and mortar or cybercraft, discover multiple targets of opportunity.

The power of the I&OEM

The I&OEM is an abstraction capable of demonstrating one essential message: the basic purpose of all information places. The I&OEM is applicable in electronic switching stations, IRM (information resource management) agencies, special libraries, school library media centers, traditional book-oriented libraries, entrepreneurial operations, and any combination thereof. Every information place has a community of persons, however broadly or narrowly defined, who possess degrees of rightful access. Providing and delivering that access are the information place's major purposes. The I&OEM can also teach that librarians and information scientists must actively seek feedback, that sometimes they have to mine the community, and sometimes they have to manage the information place and turn it open for visits by the community.

While the I&OEM provides a graphic and generic representation of purpose, the I&OEM does not demonstrate how to accomplish this purpose. Planning, which includes community analysis, needs assessment, goals and objectives, programming, and evaluation procedures, gives operational expression to the I&OEM abstraction.

The I&OEM anchors our core values. The I&OEM answers the important Why question. ODAPCOSRIU provides the What. It is the definition of our craft and the keystone that can hold practice and theory together. ODAPCOSRIU can guide designers of curricula. LIS workers and teachers who know ODAPCOSRIU and commit to the lesson of the I&OEM can perform their way into prominence in the information-reliant 21st century.

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By Charles Curran

CHARLES CURRAN is a professor at the College of Library and Information Science, University of South Carolina in Columbia.