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Welcome to this special ‘conference edition’ of Education for Information – or to be more accurate, ‘symposium edition’. I will try to defend the pedantry later. But first the subject matter needs to be justified and the several contributions introduced. The work presented below is entirely predicated on an unambiguous and ambitious claim, namely that there exists, at least in nascent form, a research specialism – if not a field – devoted to the study of information in society. This specialism (as I will call it here) goes by various names, including straightforwardly ‘information in society’ and, rather more tendentiously, ‘information society studies’. It is interested in that mighty, epoch-defining concept, information, and its complex and perhaps partially deterministic relationship with the large-scale communities we call societies. Much more detailed characterisations are offered below in the papers by Alistair Black and myself, but enough has already been said to show that the specialism in question extends very much beyond the conventional borders of librarianship and information science. It is about (among others) sociology, economics, political philosophy, social policy, the disciplines which help us both to understand the social world and to articulate the rules which should govern the social world – or in the words of the philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume, both the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’. But the angle is strictlyinformation in society, the roles information plays and ought in a fairer world to play, an angle that has been somehow neglected by the major disciplines. And therein lies the interest, and hopefully also the special intellectual contribution, of the information scientist and the information professional. For as information seekers, information collectors, information defenders, information purveyors, even the humblest of librarians are – and always have been (note Black’s stress below on what he calls ‘information history’) – at the forefront of the ‘informationisation’ of society. We may not like the term ‘informationisation’ or its arguably even uglier alternatives such as ‘informatisation’ or ‘informisation’, but we can hardly deny that we are all professionally involved with the positioning of information in society. ‘Information society studies’ (as I prefer to call it) is, from this point of view, simply the theorisation of the socio-political role of the information professional. Thus even those librarians who are such poor citizens as to be otherwise totally unconcerned with the great issues of politics and society are obliged to enter what Black calls ‘the information society debate’. The next question becomes: how then should we teach this subject? And the short answer is: try every method in the world. For the brutal truth is that information

Teaching the Information Society: A One-day Symposium, hosted by the School of Communication Arts, Napier University, Edinburgh, 18th May 2001