Eugene Garfield has provided a basis for the development and growth of scientometrics and promotion of sociology of science with his Current Contents and in particular with the Science Citation Index.
Intellectual capital refers to the knowledge accumulated in an organisation in the course of its operation, having a significant impact on the corporate value. As knowledge constitutes both assets and a competitive advantage of a company, it has to be managed.
The new revolution in science is based on a shift from computational science supporting research towards an integration of concepts, tools and computer science theorems into the very structure of all other sciences. The milestones in the development of scientific computing are indicated.
The paper highlights the importance of the role libraries and librarians play in contemporary information society. Since the status of librarianship is underrated, the library legislation can provide ways of improving the image of libraries. Moreover, it is crucial for the legislation to ensure public funding of libraries. Professional issues should be dealt with by library associations, which is the case in the countries with highly developed library services. In the countries, however, where library culture is at a low level, the legislation also deals with this segment.
Accreditation, described as a “Licence to Kill”, is arousing fear across Europe, since this American practice is unusual in the European context. The problem is the degree of autonomy of European universities, which are under the control of their governments, appropriating the authority for granting accreditations.
Every 20 years, the development of IT has multiplied by 1000, and yet we are still at the beginning. The development entails great risks and we need to be constantly aware that high technology requires high ethics.
The electronic interchange of business documents is a well-known procedure, which has been used for a long time; the EDIFACT standard, which defined it, was created some time ago. In recent years this standard has been increasingly used for the acquisition of library materials.
In philosophy of information (PI), an appropriate theoretical framework has been provided for library and information science (LIS). The main advocate of PI is Luciano Floridi, who points out that in a digital age PI is an imperative of philosophy itself. LIS, on the other hand, is applied PI. There are few opposing views to Floridi’s statement that LIS is applied PI, but there are a lot of those who agree with it.
Metadata has been used in libraries since the days of card catalogues. With the automation of libraries and the development of MARC formats, metadata schemes have gained an important role in the implementation of different functions, common to library practice. In the 1960s, the technology of magnetic tapes influenced the development of MARC records and the ISO 2709 standard.
This article pleads for the term “digitheca” to be used instead of the less suitable term “digital library”. It introduces functional and non-functional requirements for the assessment and selection of software in the global software market, which supports the creation, maintenance and preservation of a “digitheca”.
