A Semiotic View of Information: Semiotics as a Foundation of LIS Research in Information Behavior

Traditional information behavior studies in library and information science (LIS) research have focused on primarily two trends: one is to provide physical access to material objects and the other is to direct users to certain thoughts and ideas. Both focuses are two sides of the same problem that LIS researchers have worked to address: how to provide a better system or service to accommodate people’s need for information. Among the domains of users, material objects, and meaningful ideas, applying the concept of information as sign with semiotics not only joins these two trends in the analysis of the pragmatic-syntactic relationship and the pragmatic-semantic relationship, but it also gives an additional focus on the syntactic-semantic relationship. It is this additional focus that helps LIS professionals/researchers understand an individual’s states of knowing and ways of obtaining knowledge through physical and mental interactions with informative objects. The author conducts a review of information studies, the epistemological concerns and pragmatic traditions in LIS, and semiotics in an attempt to seek a holistic principle that will incorporate both the traditional trends of LIS research and provide an additional awareness in assisting users to make connections between material objects and ideas in information behavior studies. By applying a semiotic view of information and the concept of information as sign, LIS researchers of information behavior will find semiotics a useful epistemological framework.