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Buckland Wins Book Award

The Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) is delighted to announce that Information and Society, written by Professor Michael Buckland and published by MIT Press is the recipient of the ASIS&T Best Information Science Book Award for 2018. The award’s purpose is to recognize the outstanding book in information science published during the preceding calendar year. The award is given to the author(s) whose book is judged to have made the most outstanding contribution in the field of information science during the year.

Information and Society was selected as the winner from among a pool of outstanding submissions that were judged based on these criteria: social or practical importance of key questions or issues; relevance to information science and technology; validity of claims; originality of ideas or methods; significance of research; readability of the book as an integral work of scientific literature; and scholarship.

The awards jury provided the following citation: “Michael Buckland’s Information and Society is a concise and easy-to-understand introduction to the central topics of information science. It shows how information plays a fundamental role in society, mainly in the form of documents. In its exploration of the influence of information on our daily lives and on our society, it touches upon many central questions, like what a document is, how information can be organized effectively, and how it can be discovered and selected from large collections.

This book not only brings together the central aspects of the field in a consistent manner but also conveys the importance of information science content and approaches to a broader audience. It, therefore, puts information science research into a wider context and shows how related fields can benefit from it.

This is a book addressing a general audience not yet familiar with information science topics. It is a great book for students or people in other disciplines to understand information and the relationship between information and society. On the other hand, there is much to retrieve in this volume as a food for thought for future work in the information science field itself.

In summary, the book is a very valuable publication by a respected author with a wealth of experience.”

The nomination of the book provides the following description: “We live in an information society, or so we are often told. But what does that mean? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a concise, informal account of the ways in which information and society are related and of our ever-increasing dependence on a complex multiplicity of messages, records, documents, and data. Using information in its everyday, nonspecialized sense, Michael Buckland explores the influence of information on what we know, the role of communication and recorded information in our daily lives, and the difficulty (or ease) of finding information. He shows that all this involves human perception, social behavior, changing technologies, and issues of trust.”

Upon learning of his book’s selection as the 2018 Best Information Science Book winner, Professor Buckland said, ” The book sought to show the fundamental unity of ASIST’s varied interests, so this award is particularly appreciated.  I hope it will encourage others to interpret our field to the wider world.”

Professor Buckland will accept the award at the 2018 meeting of the Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) which will be held in Vancouver, Canada, November 10-14, 2018.

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Founded at the beginning of the information age in 1937, ASIS&T has promoted the development and understanding of information science and documentation. Through its 80 decades it has reflected a rapidly changing landscape, embracing and promoting new advances in technology to improve all aspects of information collection, management, storage, use and communications. ASIS&T members are at the forefront of research and practice within Information Science. Leading discoveries on how we organize, relate, learn, and access information, our members are changing the face of information utilization. From fine arts to health informatics, ASIS&T is a synergistic organization that allows the exchange of ideas to flourish for the benefit of the whole international field.