Abstract
Information Services and Use has been published continuously since 1981—45 years! During that time, a lot has changed in our information landscape. New technologies have come to dominate: first, home computers, then the Internet, search engines, social media, and now generative artificial intelligence. Multi-trillion-dollar companies have been born and come to dominate nearly every facet of our daily lives. “Data,” “analytics,” and “algorithms” have become central to our lexicon. Our economy is powered by innovations that were nothing more than nascent ideas when the first issue of this journal was published.
With all of these massive technological changes, we might assume that information services and information use have radically transformed as well. While in some senses that is true (for instance, digital libraries change how we retrieve information and misinformation changes how we perceive it), there is much that has remained relatively the same even nearly half a century later. Information services remain user centered. The tools change but the mission, connecting people with reliable information to address their needs, persists. Information use behavior, the why that motivates the how, is consistent. We seek information for health and comfort, entertainment and education. Library catalog or large language model, our needs and preferences remain part of our human nature.
With Information Services and Use, technology is a context that frames patterns of behavior. It is a lens that places the user within a specific place and time. But our focus is on information. Information—its role in society and how it can impact us, elicit emotions, and spark discoveries—is fundamentally unchanged. The enduring value of information across time, technology, and cultural shifts remains at the heart of this journal.
As the incoming editor of this journal, my own background gives me insight into the dynamic between emerging technologies, users, and information. From a master’s degree in library science and work in libraries and archives, I understand that people fundamentally seek information. Information technologies are just that: technologies that enable us to access information. The technologies that people favor over time have to do with how they enable new ways of accessing and interacting with information. The Internet made information more widely available. Social media made it much easier to share information with friends and family. That is why these tools became favored and why Apple, Microsoft, and Meta became the major economic bellwethers that they are today.
Generative artificial intelligence is the next class of technology that promises this kind of paradigm shift. Not because it is “more fun” or “cheaper” than other technologies, but because of the means through which information is provided: generation of direct answers to any query a user enters. This differs greatly from our search engines or encyclopedias, which required selective picking and choosing of bits of information from a variety of sources. It increases information relevance and saves users time in addressing information needs.
Yet, I also know from my background as an information science researcher that these systems have deep, systematic issues that we ignore at our own peril. Large language models do not operate like a librarian—nor even like a search engine. They do not seek out the most relevant sources to address an information need and then allow the user to evaluate them. Instead, they provide a single answer to any query and that answer. This is a fundamental shift in how information is provided which, in turn, may result in significant shifts in how users interact with information. This creates new challenges for the information professional: promoting AI literacy, advocating for transparency and explainability, and vetting data quality. Nonetheless, the reasons why we seek information and what we do with that information remain foundational to our work. While we must understand the role of new information technologies in our society, we must not do so at the sake of our central focus as professionals: the information itself.
As we embark in a new stage in the life of Information Services and Use, I hope authors and readers will find it to be a journal that embraces both traditional and cutting-edge topics and technologies in information science. I wish for the journal to be an international forum for discourse on role of information in our society and culture, one that is accessible to any researcher whose work is dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge creation and sharing within the discipline of library and information science.
I am fortunate to have a dedicated group of editorial board members whose invaluable contributions will support the continued growth and impact of our journal. To each of them: thank you for your service to the journal and to our discipline. I am thrilled to have such renowned scholars to collaborate with in leading this journal!
To prospective authors, please consider Information Services and Use as a home for your manuscripts. Our open access, Scopus-indexed publication affords a high level of visibility for your work, complemented with a supportive peer review process. As we work to increase the prominence of this journal within our discipline, your contributions and support are key. The more high-quality contributions that we receive, the more the prominence of our journal, and your contributions to it, will grow!
Finally, to the readers, thank you for your continued support. By reading this journal and encouraging your library to support its publication through continued subscription, you are ensuring that each accepted paper is made available open access to emerging scholars worldwide. I consider it a great honor to be able to lead a journal with such diverse readership of Information Services and Use. Going forward, I hope the readership will only increase in overall readership and reader diversity—a great strength of our discipline!
Best of wishes!
