Does the Center Hold?

Infophilia, A Positive Psychology of Information | August 8, 2026 | Vol. 4, Issue 40 |

Information Stories | Information Styles | Toolbox

✨ Welcome to Infophilia, a weekly serial and a living lab exploring how our love of information and connections can help us thrive, individually and collectively. This is avant-garde research in how we engage with knowledge, meaning, and each other. If this is your first time here, I’m glad to have you. To learn more, browse the links above, the Archive or About. Or simply discover your infostyle by taking an anonymous, private, 10 question assessment.

📌 Access & Attribution: This serial offers free previews always and occasional open access essays to keep scholarship accessible. Students and those facing financial barriers can request complimentary access. If you find value here, please cite the original work and consider supporting the public scholarship through subscription. Proper attribution sustains this work and models healthy information engagement.

Cite as: Coleman, A. S. (2026, August 8). Does the center hold? Distributed coherence and the ALISE Research Taxonomy revision. Infophilia, A Positive Psychology of Information, 4(40)

Sean Burns’s 2026 ALISE conference theme, ‘The Good Questions,’ and its provocation to the membership, and career strategist and educator Kim Dority’s more personal question to me earlier this week, “how did you come up with Infophilia and how do you choose what you write every week?” made me realize that this issue is timely. And two recent far broader conversations confirmed it and explain why this matters.

Before sharing today’s essay, I want to formally re-introduce the research that shapes this publication: Infophilia is the human love of information and connections — and the name of the interdisciplinary research program I established in 2023 to study it. At its center is adaptive infophilia, a framework for understanding human information relationships in the age of AI — the era of intelligent systems — developed through public scholarship (this serial) and peer-reviewed research: articles like the one introducing a positive psychology of information and information styles in SRELS Journal of Information and Knowledge, and tools for teaching, research, and practice such as the privacy respecting Discover Your Infostyle quiz in my Codeberg repo.

David Lankes and and a recent SemiAnalysis essay describe the same transition from opposite ends. Lankes, from inside the field, argues that generative AI is dissolving the document itself — the unit information science was built around. SemiAnalysis, from the infrastructure end, argues that as Google’s Gemini falls off the model frontier, the leverage in AI is migrating to whoever owns the layer where systems are built and run — Google Cloud renting compute even to Gemini’s rivals. The object at the center is dissolving; the infrastructure layer beneath it is where control now concentrates.

Both arguments point toward the same underlying transition: information is no longer only something we collect, store, and retrieve. It is something that moves through complex human, technological, and social ecosystems.

Longtime readers of Infophilia know this is where the idea of infophilia enters. Nardi and O’Day already moved research away from isolated information objects towards relationships, but infophilia just goes one layer deeper: what is the human disposition that makes those ecologies alive?

That’s why the Infophilia research program began with a different set of questions: before information becomes a problem, a resource, a commodity, or a technology, what is the human relationship with information itself? How do we cultivate healthy information relationships? How do people handle information overload and misinformation? From this, I developed the Information Styles inventory — to showcase the different styles that the same person can have under different information conditions and environments; I developed Information Stories, as a specific genre and method for researching and teaching infrastructure literacy — which I’ve argued is the new information literacy needed by all of us for this era of intelligent systems (including artificial intelligence, i.e. AI). Information Stories isn’t just public scholarship but a specific way and tool for teaching people to think like information professionals (not just librarians but the complete GLAM — cultural heritage professions composed of art galleries, libraries, archives, and museums).

To recap, the Infophilia research program, established in 2023, explores information not only as an object or infrastructure, but as a human capacity and relationship — bringing together insights from library and information science (LIS), human behavior, human-computer interaction, creativity, learning sciences, and the emerging AI environment. Established as the serial, Infophilia, A Positive Psychology of Information it functions as a living lab, with a different review approach and translation of this research program to an audience beyond LIS. The connected lenses include Information Styles, Information Stories, Information Histories, Information Futures, and Civic Infophilia.

The Infophilia Book Club and Office Hours conversations explore these and other related questions from different perspectives. In August, we will chat with Tim Blackwell, a self-confessed infophile, a former military man, and a federal contractor, about Gil Scott-Heron’s book, jazz, cultural influences, and impact. In September, Kim Dority will shed light on alternative career pathways for LIS students. She is a leading advocate for an expansive, labor-market-aware view of LIS professional identity—one that includes work in vendors, publishing, nonprofits, government, consulting, UX, digital asset management, data, and independent information practice, alongside conventional librarianship. All are welcome to these virtual meetups; just email me for the link. These conversations are reminders that information relationships are not abstract: they are lived through curiosity, creativity, careers, communities, and culture.

All are invited — contact me for the Zoom link. The exact details for your calendars:

• Wednesday, August 19 (12 noon to 1 pm Pacific time) – Tim Blackwell on Gil Scott-Heron

• Wednesday, September 9 (12 noon to 1 pm Pacific time) – Kim Dority on Alternative LIS Careers

Now, for today’s essay, which is part reporting, part philosophical reflection, and part literary exploration — but it is 100% LIS.

My broader research over the long term – from building a proof of concept hypermedia journal to dLIST, a commons infrastructure for LIS, and the anti-racism digital library and thesaurus has repeatedly returned to a related question: how do information systems shape what communities can know about themselves?

Taxonomies are one example of such systems.

Revising a LIS taxonomy therefore raises a question larger than whether a particular descriptor belongs under Information Technologies or Sociocultural and Ethical Dimensions. A taxonomy does not merely organize a field’s vocabulary. It makes a claim about what the field recognizes as knowledge worth naming.

And that makes taxonomy revision unexpectedly consequential. What disappears? What becomes visible? What gets treated as central, peripheral, emerging, or outside the field altogether?

In other words: when we revise the map, are we merely updating the map—or discovering that the territory itself has changed?

As our field moves from a document-centered world toward increasingly complex information ecologies and infrastructures, what continues to hold LIS together? What concepts, values, and practices allow us to recognize ourselves as one field while embracing new realities?

The revision is not simply about adding new descriptors. It is about asking what kinds of information work, information practices, and information relationships belong in the future of LIS.

In The Second Coming (1919), Yeats wrote “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” He wasn’t writing about libraries or disciplines but responding to a historical crisis shaped by the aftermath of the First World War, revolution, and political violence in Ireland. Yeats’s cyclical theory of history is represented by widening “gyres”: as one historical order loses coherence, another emerges. Its center may be read as the civilizational authority that holds a society together; its collapse ushers in chaos and anticipates a darker age to come.

Chinua Achebe’s genius was to shift the question. He took the first half of that line — Things Fall Apart — for his title, but his novel transformed its meaning. The center whose collapse Yeats lamented was never the only center. Achebe’s Igbo society already has governance, law, religion, trade, memory, ritual, and dispute resolution — it has coherence. Colonialism did not enter an empty space; it disrupted an already coherent system. Things do not fall apart because they lack order. They fall apart because one system destroys another’s capacity to reproduce itself. The collapse is historical and political, not inevitable.

For most of my career I’ve been asking some version of one question — what holds a discipline together? I’ve asked it about whether library schools can hold their identity while iSchools absorb them, about whether library and information science (LIS) scholarship can hold together while computational fields claim adjacent ground, about whether the things I’ve built could hold their footing against institutions that consistently prioritized convenience over care and continuity. Revising the ALISE Research Taxonomy — the controlled vocabulary ALISE researchers use every year to describe their work and submit conference proposals — I found I could finally answer the question.

In practice, a taxonomy is a theory of what holds a field together — a claim, made in the form of a filing system, about what sits at the center and what merely orbits it. Classification is one of the few places where a discipline publicly reveals how it understands itself.