Research centres
Information Science

Centre for Information Science

The Centre for Information Science (CIS) is our vehicle for research and scholarship. CIS continues the tradition of information science as an academic discipline, which has been present at City, University of London since the teaching of this subject was established in 1961.

As the contemporary world faces unprecedented changes in our information and knowledge environment, our research studies the impact of technology, economics, and socio-cultural values on the processes of information communication, so that we can understand how people, organisations and communities can benefit from access to, and understanding of information, to support fair and prosperous societies.

We study the processes of information communication in the context of different domains, and as influenced by developing technologies. Specific interests are: documents and documentation, information literacy, information behaviour; information organisation and retrieval; information history and philosophy; scholarly communication, dissemination and publishing; digital ethics.

Information science is a broad, interdisciplinary field of study, which has relevance to all disciplines, and to any organisation that creates, stores, manages, and uses information.

Members of our research team come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, bringing a wide range of experience, methods and perspectives to our teaching, research and outreach. Research is carried out through funded projects, personal research and scholarship, and through supervision of doctoral students registered for the Library and Information Science PhD/MPhil.

Great emphasis is placed on the integration of research with our masters-level education programme, and we have numerous publications based on masters dissertations. We have an internationally recognised leading role in curriculum development and in research/practice integration for the library/information sector.

Our work falls into three main areas:

  • Foundations of the information sciences: the nature of information, links between physical, biological and social conceptions of information; library and information history; philosophy of information.
  • Questions of documents and documentation: changes in the processes of documentation, the way information is organised and communicated within the infosphere; the changing nature of documents and information resources; changes in scholarly communication and dissemination, and the consequences for information specialists; description, organization, discovery and retrieval of information.
  • Information behaviour - of individuals and groups, and within society: models and concepts of information behaviour; information behaviour associated with emerging technologies and new media; behaviour associated with non-traditional realms exemplified by leisure and virtual communities; information/digital literacy; information ethics.

Research Ethics

Current projects

Current research students

  • Owen Ablett: Building documents: the built environment as document
  • Jerald Cavanagh: Impact Evaluation of Information Literacy Initiatives: Case study of EU Erasmus+ projects in the Western Balkans
  • Rachel Cummings: Documenting, Archiving, and Preserving Fashion Based Multimedia Collections in the Age of the Digital
  • Dominic Dixon: The Philosophy of Information and LIS.
  • Petra Killoran: Traversing the Ethical Badlands of Social Media
  • Ian Rodwell: Liminal stories: a comparative exploration of how storytelling is used to make sense of liminal states in two contrasting, high performance environments

Successfully completed research students