Purpose: The narrow purpose of this article is to review de Fremery’s (2024) book about the bibliographic foundations of information science. The broader purpose is to consider the actual as well as the potential relevance of the field(s) of bibliography for information science besides the book under review.
Design/methodology/approach: This review essay examines the arguments put forward by de Fremery’s (2024), and introduces concepts and tradition from the study of bibliography, and presents internal conflicts or paradigms in the field of bibliography. It relates this information to foundational issues in information science.
Findings: de Fremery’s basic ambition of basing information science in bibliography is important, and so is the attempt to consider bibliography in relation to contemporary information technologies such as machine learning and data science. The book under review fails, however, to describe the relations between bibliography and information science properly. It also tends to make unsupported generalizations and the argumentation throughout the book seems unclear. Nonetheless, the book is a serious attempt to consider the field of bibliography, and thereby support the focus on documents in information science.
Originality: The information provided and analyzed in this review indicates that mainstream information science often suffers because ambiguities in the concept of information. When information science is understood as the study of literature-based answering, much else falls into place, and the field of bibliography is a core concept for this understanding and re-orientation of information science.