This study reviews the surprisingly long history of ecological concepts like the “ecosystem” in library and information sciences, as well as the potential difficulties of uncritically carrying over ecological terms into the information age. I then discuss three current areas where more thorough work has been done to define what information ecosystems (or similar concepts) are: in organizational management, in civil society, and in medical research. Each of these fields defines information ecosystems differently according to their own needs. Taken together they provide clues for how best to understand this concept within library instruction and scholarly research.

These fields also demonstrate the flexibility of the ecosystem concept. Internews, for instance, is an organization that produces Information Ecosystem Assessments (IEAs) of communities around the world in order to assess the health of local media and democratic institutions. In health science fields, evidence synthesis has expanded rapidly in response to the volume of new research, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. The idea of “living evidence ecosystems” has been proposed in order to encourage scientific collaboration.

Drawing from all these sources and taking into account the specific interests of scholarly research, this study defines the information ecosystem as “all structures, entities, and agents related to the flow of semantic information relevant to a research domain, as well as the information itself.” This definition is unique because it clarifies that we are interested in semantic information (that is, information that is meaningful to people), and that we are only interested in ecosystems that are as big as a specific research domain (rather than an ill-defined comprehensive ecosystem of, e.g., all things digital).

The goal of this definition is to be able to talk about information ecosystems in a way that is useful for librarians and researchers. The definition isolates core components of an information ecosystem, like “structures” and “agents,” which can then potentially be identified, described, and assessed. This approach is preferable to more impressionistic uses of the ecosystem concept that refer to our digital and globalized age in broad strokes, but do not contribute to how our understanding of information and knowledge production function (or fail to function properly).

References

American Library Association. (2015). Framework for information literacy for higher education. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework