An operational definition of the information disciplines

The author and Mary Niles Maack set out to develop the content for an up-to-date edition of an encyclopedia intended to cover all the major information disciplines in an integrated fashion. This effort arose from the belief that all the i-disciplines have core interests in common, and that the commonality needs to be brought out in the structure, organization, and content of the encyclopedia??? without denying the inherent differences between the fields as well. This plan led to four years of effort in designing the encyclopedia, recruiting authors for its entries, and organizing the resulting array of entries in a classification that reflects the major topical areas of the information disciplines. The resulting design of the encyclopedia can be seen as an operational definition of the i-disciplines. The design effort and its results are described