Opening the black box of “relevance work”: A domain analysis

In response to Hjørlandʹs recent call for a reconceptualization of the foundations of relevance, we suggest that the sociocognitive aspects of intermediation by information agencies, such as archives and libraries, are a necessary and unexplored part of the infrastructure of the subject knowledge domains central to his recommended “view of relevance informed by a social paradigm” (2010, p. 217). From a comparative analysis of documents from 39 graduate-level introductory courses in archives, reference, and strategic/competitive intelligence taught in 13 American Library Association-accredited library and information science (LIS) programs, we identify four defining sociocognitive dimensions of “relevance work” in information agencies within Hjørlandʹs proposed framework for relevance: tasks, time, systems, and assessors. This study is intended to supply sociocognitive content from within the relevance work domain to support further domain analytic research, and to emphasize the importance of intermediary relevance work for all subject knowledge domains.