Many scientific fields share common interests for research and education. Yet, very often, these fields do not communicate to each other and are unaware of the work in other fields. Understanding the commonalities and differences among related fields can broaden our understanding of the interested phenomena from various perspectives, better utilize resources, enhance collaboration, and eventually move the related fields forward together. In this article, we present a conceptual framework, namely the Information-Model or I-model, to describe various aspects of information related fields. We consider this a timely effort in light of the evolutions of several information related fields and a set of questions related to the identities of these fields. It is especially timely in defining the newly formed Information Field from a community of twenty some information schools. We posit that the information related fields are built on a number of other fields but with their own unique foci and concerns. That is, core components from other fundamental fields interact and integrate with each other to form dynamic and interesting information related fields that all have to do with information, technology, people, and organization/society. The conceptual framework can have a number of uses. Besides providing a unified view of these related fields, it can be used to examine old case studies, recent research projects, educational programs and curricula concerns, as well as to illustrate the commonalities and differences with the information related fields.

The information profession has changed drastically in the last few years. The core requirements for information workers have also changed because the workplace needs specific qualities and skills. The necessity of continuing to teach cataloguing and classification is questioned, and many library schools have discontinued teaching these subjects. Many experts, however, believe that cataloguing and classification are still among the basics of information work. The subject still forms part of the curriculum at the University of Pre-

Tagging-based communities allowing users to share, organize, and explore resources such as photos and bookmarks have pioneered the combination of social networking and resource sharing. Formerly rather tiresome activities such as annotating information sources have been transformed to ways of connecting and interacting with other people. Resource sharing in a community environment allows contributors to engage in conversation, play, and challenges. However, most resource-sharing communities have architectural and institutional shortcomings due to their usually centralized, restricted, and profit-driven nature. Users do not have control over the community’s policies, functionality, or appearance. The social aspects created between contributors are locked within a community, while it is usually not possible to interact with users from other communities. In this report, a decentralized approach towards photo sharing is introduced allowing for community and conversation while fostering access to shared photos and empowerment of users. This concept draws insight from a diverse set of disciplines including information retrieval, databases, distributed computing, interaction design, and psychology. A web-based photo repository is conceptualized employing tagging as a classification scheme. Established standards and protocols of the blogosphere are used to provide for decentralized photo sharing in groups. A prototype photo repository allowing for decentralized photo sharing was implemented. An overview of this software and its functionality is given, and challenges throughout the implementation phase are presented, including considerations regarding presentation, interaction, uploading, syndication, and photo sharing groups. The document ends with a summary and a discussion of the results including an outlook to potential future work.