What is information studies? And why does it matter? UCLA professor Jonathan Furner takes a sideways look at some of the perennial questions facing the field in this selection of talks given at conferences, workshops, and other meetings over a two-decade period. Topics covered include the disciplinary nature of library and information science, the philosophy of information, the ontology of works, documents, and records, bibliographic classification and knowledge organization, vocabulary control and collaborative indexing, and information retrieval and scholarly communication.