Laws (in information science)
In Library and Information Science (LIS) have the concepts of "law" and "regularity" been used in different connections. The most concrete application have been in bibliometrics, e.g., Bradford's law of scattering, Lotka's law and Zipf's law.
The concept of law has also been used by Ranganathan
in his "five laws of
librarianship" (1957):
"Books are for use;
every reader his book;
every book its reader
save the time of the reader, and of the staff;
a library is a growing organism"
This use of the concept "law" is not reflecting empirical regularities but
rather normative proposals and should be regarded as a
metaphorical use of the
concept.
Other examples of the use of the term in LIS include: "law of obsolesence", "Price's law", "the law of the inverse relation between "recall" and "precision"", "Garfield's law of concentration" and "Leimkuhler's law".
The status of the concept of "law" in Library and Information Science is related to the philosophical debate concerning "nomothetic" versus "ideographic" research.
Literature:
O'Connor, D. & Voos, H. (1981). Empirical laws, theory construction and bibliometrics.
Library Trends, 30(1), 9-20.
Ranganathan, S. R. (1931/1957). The Five Laws of Library Science. 1st edition: Madras Library Association, 1931. 2ed. edition. London: Blunt & Sons.
See also: 80/20 rule; Information science, Theory; Lotka's law; Mooers' law; Principles; Scattering (Bradford's law); Zipf's law.
Birger Hjørland
Last edited: 04-04-2006