Some European Contributions to Information Science

EDITOR'S SUMMARY

European contributions to the field of information science are often overlooked or forgotten in the popularity and prominence of the Association for Information Science and Technology, previously known as the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Areas covered include information science theory, bibliographical descriptions, documentation theory, library science, classification, information retrieval, bibliometrics and standards. One noteworthy contributor to the field of information science as a whole is Karl Marx, who is credited as a “herald of the information society. Two international conferences, the International Conference on Scientific Information in Washington D.C. in 1958 and the Royal Society Scientific Information Conference in London in 1948, are cited as recognizing the importance of the field. Another conference series highlighted here is the Conceptions of Library and Information Science, which promotes innovations from the European community and is maintained primarily by Europeans.