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The concept of information need is a core concept in library and information science (LIS) that describes the state of uncertainty or anomalous knowledge state that precedes a user’s information seeking behavior. Information need is, however, an intricate concept, and is only addressed in the LIS literature as some kind of elusive cognitive state. The present paper argues that the concept of information need may profit from a pragmatic and semeiotic perspective. The paper thus discusses the concept of information need through four premises that is formulated based in Peirce’s pragmatic semiotic. Introduction The general conception of knowledge organization means bringing knowledge into some kind of order or structure. However the knowledge considered for organization is that which is materialized in different kinds of media, and therefore knowledge organization is more precisely defined as the research area within information science that has a particular interest in the organization of recorded knowledge, which in principle is the same as information. Even more precisely, though, knowledge organization is really focused on types of systems, modes of representation, purpose of information architecture, interaction design etc., in fact knowledge organization despite its terminology is very little concerned with knowledge as phenomenon, how it is communicated and interpreted within communities, but mostly concerned with general and nomothetic features of information systems in order to accommodate users in their information seeking process. Consequently, evaluation of KOS tends to be more concerned with how well objects of knowledge are represented within a particular semantic structure, than with how the KOS in principle acts as sender in a communication process. As such, the basic function and purpose of KOS can be summarized as: 1) facilitating information retrieval (IR-function), 2) providing information about documents (document information function document surrogate (representation)), and 3) providing shelf arrangements (ordering function) (Broughton et al., 2005). In the terms of Buckland (1991), these aspects of KOS all relate to the ‘information as thing’ paradigm. Following this line of thought, information is related to physical items, or immanent qualities of objects. Information in relation to knowledge or knowing, however, changes the perception of information, because knowledge or knowing implicates intelligible conduct. Intelligent conduct, use, consumption, interaction, communication and meaning adds complexity to information, and the object as such becomes secondary. Consequently, investigating KOS disregarding the implications of knowledge, and the processes of becoming knowing through interaction, where the actor’s level of knowledge intentionally and purposefully is reflected, and altered by how representations are offered in KOS architecture, tells only one side of the story 1 Martin Thellefsen is Associate Professor at the Royal School of Library and Information Science, Aalborg, Denmark.

A Pragmatic Semeiotic Perspective on the Concept of Information Need and Its Relevance for Knowledge Organization