To establish our leadership in research and its application, we must ensure that the world knows what we are doing. Since 1952, we have curated and promoted the best of library and information sciences research and innovation in practice in Library Trends. We need to continue this work and expand it to other fields of information science. We need to explain what we do to different audiences in appropriate and innovative ways. Through our interdisciplinary approach, we will use our strengths in explaining and storytelling—as well as data visualization and the creation and communication of digital scholarship—to help people understand how issues of information use (and misuse) pervade all of science, the economy, health, politics, and all of life.
The general applicability of our theories and methods is apparent in the sheer range of settings where we can use them to help ourselves and others gain insight. Outsiders may need help in seeing these recurrent themes unless we help them. We will benefit from a broader range of venues and media for communicating our work and the value of its application.
The iSchool, and higher education in general, needs to examine its definition of "impact." Conventionally understood scholarly outputs are critical. At the same time, we must also work with those whom we hope benefit from our research to define meaningful impact. We are human centered and sociotechnical, and our definitions of impact reflect those qualities and values. As experts in bibliometrics, we also recognize how certain metrics can be misused, and we should not be afraid to explain the nature of such misuse—and what to do instead.
