Contemporary discussions about the knowledge society often neglect spatial aspects of accessibility to information, even though it has been long recognized that access is not assured solely by technical connectivity. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, this volume explores the contribution to information access made byinstitutional information providers, such as libraries and archives.

Relevance drives our actions, it channels our attention and shapes the way we construe the world around us and communicate with others. Irrelevance spreads a twilight in which it is often hard to distinguish between information we do not wish or need to access and information we cannot access. Relevance has been researched as a central problem in a broad range of areas such as the sociology of knowledge, phenomenology, information science, linguistics, or cognitive science. This book is the first to bring the often unrelated traditions together in an interdisciplinary discussion. Relevance...