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ABSTRACT
This introduction to Luciano Floridi's philosophy of information (PI) provides a short over view of Floridi's work and its reception by the librar y and information studies (LIS) community, brief definitions of some important PI concepts, and illustrations of Floridi's three suggested applications of PI to library and information studies. It suggests that LIS may just be as important to PI as PI is to LIS in terms of deepening our mutual understanding of information ontologies, the dynamics of informational domains, and the variety of evolving relationships among information organisms and information objects.
Introduction
As the "librar y of the future" invents and reinvents itself over time, its collection also rearranges itself according to our changing notions of relevance. For instance, back in 1995, a year that saw such technologically important events as the release of DEC's AltaVista search engine, Microsoft's Windows 95 operating system, and Netscape's Navigator browser, as well as the release of such provocatively topical book titles as Life on the Screen (Turkle, 1995) and Future Libraries (Crawford & Gorman, 1995), it is hardly surprising that a short piece by an academic philosopher, based on an invited talk at a distant meeting, would have gone largely unnoticed by the librar y and information studies (LIS) community.
In fact, this particular piece by Oxford University's Luciano Floridi, based on his remarks on "What We Do Not Know" at the fiftieth-anniversar y conference in Paris commemorating the founding of UNESCO, did not appear especially striking in the context of the times and seems even less startling today:
Not only has the Internet already enlarged our notion of illiteracy, and produced new forms of cultural isolation and discrimination, but, because it intensifies and amplifies the effects of the digital revolution, the Internet is also transforming some of our most radical conceptions and habits. Take our conception of a text, for example. The enormous importance of the new model of "spineless textuality" represented by the hypertext, the virtual ubiquity of documents, the appearance of online services and electronic sources that need to be catalogued, have all changed a discipline like librarianship in the most radical way. Even the library itself may disappear, as we move from the holding and lending library, which stores knowledge...