Last week was a tough one but, at the same time, a very successful one. I was organising two conference with my colleagues in Uppsala, the 9th international conference in the Conceptions of Library and Information Science on methods, theories, concepts and conceptions of and in information studies, and the Archaeological Information in the Digital Society 2016, 3rd Centre for Digital Heritage conference organised by the ARKDIS research project.
CoLIS conference has traditionally focussed on discussions on the methods, theories, concepts and conceptions of and in information studies i.e. what LIS is all about and what theories, methods, models and approaches are useful in information research. As previously, the conference provides a certain kind of perspective to what is going on theory-wise in the information studies field even if it is important to emphasise that not everyone participates the conference, especially this time the participation of information retrieval scholars was very limited. The keywords of the current research are very much circulating around concepts of practices, literacies, phenomenology and context even if it was clear that there is a considerable breadth of approaches.
Even if the two conferences, CoLIS and ARKDIS were not directly related, it was interesting to see how theory development and discussions in the two areas of interest have significant similarities. Practices or how things are done and making of knowledge and information, both explicitly and implicitly, form a basis for understanding and theorising both information research and digital heritage studies. As professor Pam McKenzie suggested in her keynote at the CoLIS conference a more relevant question than "what is information", is "how is information", a remark that is of significance in the both fields.
