Domain analysis in information science: Eleven approaches - traditional as well as innovative

What kind of knowledge is needed by information specialists working in a specific subject field like medicine, sociology or music? What approaches have been used in information science to produce kinds of domain-specific knowledge? This article presents 11 approaches to domain analysis. Together these approaches make a unique competence for information specialists. The approaches are: producing literature guides and subject gateways; producing special classifications and thesauri; research on indexing and retrieving specialities; empirical user studies; bibliometrical studies; historical studies; document and genre studies; epistemological and critical studies; terminological studies, LSP (languages for special purposes), discourse studies; studies of structures and institutions in scientific communication; and domain analysis in professional cognition and artificial intelligence. Specific examples and selective reviews of literature are provided, and the strengths and drawbacks of each of these approaches are discussed. Introduction: the role of domain studies in IS Information science developed out of special librarianship and documentation, and special librarianship has an approach that has often lacked understanding from general librarianship (see Williams, 1997). I think it is important to understand this tension. Special librarians are, in my opinion, not``special'', but represent a valuable and fruitful general approach to library and information science (LIS). It is not the purpose of this article to present or discuss the relation between general librarianship and special librarianship. The core idea of the specialist library approach may be that information resources should be identified, described, organised and communicated to serve specific goals. Obviously, medical librarianship (documentation or information science) should serve people dealing with health problems. The criterion of the success of doctors is the cure of the patients. The criterion of the success of information systems is that they identify and communicate the knowledge needed for the doctors to cure the patients. I think that this view has been an implicit philosophy in documentation and information science. In my opinion even general librarianship has to cope with different domains and may well benefit from considering the domain analytic view. One cannot treat all domains as if they are fundamentally similar, and a theoretical approach to LIS should consider different discourse communities.