Text, Co-text, Context and the Documentary Continuum

Abstract

The paper is concerned with ways in which we understand context. In mainstream LIS, context is construed as environment or situation, a place where work gets done, supported more or less by information objects that are retrieved from a different space. The resulting separation of object and agent underlies two significant lines of work in the LIS domain: the search for optimal access to objects and the description of human information behaviour. Performance measurement dominates the former; the latter has led to elaborate and universalist models that have little discriminatory power and whose validity is difficult to establish. Both groups are pre-occupied, in their own way, with matching agent and object, or with relevance, though the question of ’relevant to what?’ has many different answers – tasks, life mastery, leisure interests and so on. A recent ’call to order’ here suggests that ’tasks and technology’ should be the focus of LIS efforts, as these can at least support the validation of empirical work.