Smart City Research and Library and Information Science. Preliminary Remarks

Purpose/Thesis: The purpose of this paper is to analyze the smart city research field from the point of view of library and information science (LIS), based on available scholarly publications. Approach/Methods: Based on the literature review, we have described the smart city concept; how smart cities have shifted from strictly technological orientation to putting the citizen in the center, the role of smart governance, public libraries as a part of knowledge infrastructure and what is the input of LIS in this research field. Results and conclusions: Smart Cities, as a research domain, is still emerging. Not only the number of research publications is limited, but also their scope. LIS has been very little involved in a “smart city” research domain so far, and at the same time general literature on “smart cities” refers to public libraries in a very limited way. In general, there have been few attempts to connect information science and smart cities so far, and in each case researchers had problems with finding relevant literature. The most important LIS input to the field so far comes from the research project done by the team of experts from the Department of Information Science at Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf (Germany). Originality/Value: The value of this research comes from the fact, that there is very little in-depth, holistic research done in this domain by LIS researchers; hence there is almost no recognition of the role of public libraries in the so-called smart cities, not only as knowledge hubs for explicit and tacit knowledge, but also as community building institutions. This paper is the first such attempt.