The popularization of information science to society and potential information professionals

Abstract

It consists of a research that addresses the importance of the popularization of Information Science as a way to contribute to the evolution of the scientific field. Concomitantly, it approaches the opinion of students of the Department of Information Science of a Brazilian university, especially in the courses of Librarianship and Archivology, on what they understand by Information Science currently. The research starts from the following questions: what does society mean by Information Science? How can the popularization of Information Science be important for the growth of the field? Can outreach practices help in the process of disseminating information science to society? The objective is to seek popular opinions about what is Information Science in order to analyze the level of popularization and interference of the area in society and to analyze what the field students understand the area in order to compare if the information professionals are managing to effectively pass the area’s panoramas to the population. For that, a research of qualitative nature, of the exploratory type and of practical and theoretical character was carried out. The results showed that there is a notable disagreement about what Information Science is about among future information professionals and society. We conclude that outreach practices are not being sufficiently developed, since a considerable part of the sample stated that they did not know what Information Science is.