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The utility of conceptual analysis for archival science is assessed by means of an exploratory evaluation in which the concept of evidence is analyzed. Usage of the term ''evidence'' in the philosophies of science, law, and history is briefly reviewed; candidates for necessary conditions of evidentiariness are identified and examined; and taxonomies are built of evidentiariness and of archival inference. Correspondences are shown to exist between the concepts of evidentiariness and relevance, and between the domains of archival science and social epistemology, thereby pointing in promising directions for further research. The tentative conclusion is reached that conceptual analysis may profitably be used to improve understanding of archival concepts.

IntroductionSeveral scholarly activities and practices coalesce at the intersection of, on one hand, the interdisciplinary field that is sometimes known as information studies, and on the other, the discipline of philosophy. This chapter aims to distinguish among some of these practices, to identify and review some of the most interesting products of those practices, and to point to ways of assessing the significance of those products-for information studies, for philosophy, and for our general understanding of the world.In the first section following this introduction, an attempt is made to characterize, in a few paragraphs, the subject matter, methods, and goals of philosophy. Suffice it to say, any such attempt runs the risk of gross oversimplification as well as of inappropriate prioritization. That such an attempt be made is nevertheless a necessary adjunct to the short statement of scope that concludes this introduction. In succeeding sections, a distinction is drawn between philosophical questions asked about information studies and philosophical questions asked in information studies (cf. Floridi, 2002c, pp. 136-137) and the goals and subject matter of philosophy of information studies and philosophy of information are respectively described. This distinction is made in the spirit of conceptual clarity, rather than to reflect a division that is rigorously respected in actual scholarly practice: people interested in philosophy (or, indeed, in information studies) are likely to be interested in questions of both of these kinds. A concluding section poses questions about the reciprocal impact of each field.Notwithstanding the publication in recent ARIST volumes of reviews of specific areas of philosophical interest (e.g., M. M. Smith [1997] on information ethics; Cornelius [2002] and Capurro & Hjørland [2003] on conceptions of information; Blair [2003] on information retrieval and the philosophy of language; Day [2005] on poststructuralism and information studies; and Fallis [2006] on social epistemology and information science), the present chapter is the first general review of its kind to appear in these pages. Consequently, its scope is not deliberately limited to a review of the work done in any particular time period; but an emphasis is nevertheless placed on contributions to the literature of the twenty-first century. No attempt has been made to be comprehensive in coverage; the bibliography is rather a selective one that represents the author's personal judgments as to which are some of the more interesting, illuminating, or insightful contributions. The bias is toward CHAPTER 4 161 work that is informed by what is often characterized as the "analytic" tradition in western philosophy-with the caveat that it has become increasingly difficult and (some would say) in any case misguided and unhelpful to distinguish between "analytic" and "continental" philosophy as currently practiced (cf. Moran, 2008b, pp. 13-16). Otherwise, some additional care has been taken to avoid covering too much of the s...

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The rate of regional growth of new knowledge in the field of nanotechnology, as measured by counts of articles and patents in the open-access digital library NanoBank, is shown to be positively affected both by the size of existing regional stocks of recorded knowledge in all scientific fields, and the extent to which tacit knowledge in all fields flows between institutions of different organizational types. The level of federal funding has a large, robust impact on both publication and patenting. The data provide further support for the cumulative advantage model of knowledge production, and for ongoing efforts to institutionalize channels through which cross-organizational collaboration may be achieved.