The very recent emergence of the 'information society' has created new situations that political and economic disciplines have never previously considered. There is a new complexity and many open questions for both individuals and societal macro-structures, which have to maintain, despite this revolution, a satisfactory level of activity and at the same time have to build a new state of stability.

With regard to problems identified by many researchers relating to the storage and processing of (semi-)structured digital data, accessibility and sharing, intellectual property, digital documents, information retrieval, information literacy, relevance of information, information profiles of users, etc., the policies envisaged by some for the 'information society' may cause concern and embarrassment from a scientific point of view.

This book gathers together 13 contributions from leading information science researchers and presents some of the scientific challenges for these areas, which are also the greatest challenges facing us in the current digital age.

Fabrice Papy is Associate Professor of Information Science at the University of Paris 8 in France. He founded the 'Digital Document and Uses" Lab where multidisciplinary researchers study the impact of digital technologies on social behavior.