the Institute of Medicine had released a landmark report on patientsafety, To Err Is Human. The report found that as many as 98,000 Americanswere dying each year as a result of preventable medical errors occurring inhospitals—more people than succumbed to car accidents, workplace injuries, orbreast cancer. And some significant portion of these deaths involved mistakes inthe dispensing of drugs.

Musk revealed the company’s planned next-generation rocket will make it possible to build a moon base — and the name he picked is just his latest homage to beloved science fiction, in this case, the British cult classic Space: 1999.

Year One

people able to laugh atthemselves

one must be at least comfortable with both sides of this dualtradition

hree Big Questions can be identified within the aboveframework: (1) the physical question: What are the featuresand laws of the recorded-information universe? (2) Thesocial question: How do people relate to, seek, and useinformation? (3) The design question: How can access torecorded information be made most rapid and effective?

We ask what kinds of information people pre-fer to communicate through this or that new channel ofinformation technology. We always follow the information.

Information science has a distinct universe that it studiesalso—the world of recorded information produced by hu-man agency. We can imagine all the human activities instudying the above natural, social, and artistic universesthemselves producing information entities— books, articles,databases, data files, etc.—thus creating a fourth universe,that of recorded information.

We are interested in information as a social and psycho-logical phenomenon. The information we study generallyoriginates from human agency in some way, whether it isthe data beamed down from a satellite or the text of a bookon Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. Our primary, but not solefocus, is onrecordedinformation and people’s relationshipto it.

Llewellyn C. Puppybreath

In my 1980 study of citations in informationscience, Chomsky was the single most cited individual.

form and structure

Other fields with which informationscience might have been thought originally to have much incommon, such as computer science, cognitive science, com-putational linguistics, or artificial intelligence, did not, infact, prove to be good matches.

It is what thenewcomer or outsider does not understand

My litmus test for the newcomers who are now interestedin information work is whether I can observe evidence thatthey have gone through the transformation of becoming aninformation expert.

f you want to portray a doctor, you have to be agood actor, not a doctor; if you want to work with infor-mation organization and retrieval, you have to be a goodinformation person, not a subject specialist without infor-mation training.

features that matter to the organization and retrievalof it

as good a job

Creating databases and catalogs in-volves creating representations of forms of information. Theskill a reference librarian or information specialist developsalso involves representation—figuring out how to concep-tualize and represent a user’s query, then in turn, translatingthe query (representing it) into a form an information sys-tem uses, which in turn arises from the representations ofdocuments in the information system.

A talented actor, without a day’s experi-ence in medical school, can do a much better job.

The answer here is that although the physicians know themost about medicine,portrayinga physician is differentfrombeinga physician. Portraying a physician requires adifferent body of talents than being a physician does. Oc-casionally, some people have both types of talent, but usu-ally not. Actors, with little or no medical knowledge, butwith experience portraying a variety of characters

The Ph.D. arthistorian who gets a job working with art history informa-tion out of a love of the subject matter eventually finds him-or herself working with the core questions of informationscience, not of art history.

The average person,whether Ph.D. scholar or high school graduate, never no-tices the structure that organizes their information, becausethey are so caught up in absorbing and relating to thecontent. And, in fairness to them, they are not interested inthe structure.Weare interested in the structure

rhetorical character in the broadest sense, that is, by theirselection, design, and objectives

professional activities involving the manipulation andtransmission of knowledge

retrieval

Borko, 1968, p. 3

behavior of information

At this historicaljuncture, information scientists need to become more con-scious of the thought world we are operating out of, so thatwe can communicate it more rapidly and effectively to largenumbers of new people, and so that we can continue toinfluence the future of information in the 21st century.

Currently, the wheel is being reinvented every day onthe information superhighway

The success or failure of any interactive system and technologyis contingent on the extent to which user issues, the humanfactors, are addressed right from the beginning to the very end,right from theory, conceptualization, and design process on todevelopment, evaluation, and to provision of services.

The strength of Salton’s model is that it: a)starts from a base of a firm grounding in formal mathematicaland other methods, and in algorithms, and b) relates directly toresearch. The weakness is in that it: a) ignores the broaderaspects of information science, as well as any other disciplinesand approaches dealing with the human aspects that have greatrelevance to both the outcomes of IR research and the researchitself, and b) does not incorporate professional practice wherethese systems are realized and used.

Thestrength of the Shera model is that it posits education withina service framework, connects the education to professionalpractice and to a broader and user-oriented frame of anumber of other information services, and relates it to agreat diversity of information resources

human-computer interac-tion (which is also a strong area in cognitive science)

Interestingly, research on OPACs, now thatthey are incorporating more and more IR features, is bring-ing the two fields in closer relation. Probably, so will theresearch in digital libraries, but at this time (1998), it is tooearly to tell.

Uncertainty (as in informationtheory and decision-making theory) was one choice sug-gested by a number of theorists

The connectionto the information science community is tenuous, and al-most nonexistent. The flow of knowledge, if any, is one-sided, from IR research results into proprietary engines.

design

The acceleration of the growth of the Web is an infor-mation explosion of the like never before seen in history.Not surprisingly then, the Web is a mess. No wonder thateverybody is interested in some form of IR as a solution tofix it.

users, use, situations, context, andinteraction with systems

Text Retrieval Conference (TREC)

Thus, the field doesnotdeal with great many other information systems, such aspayroll, inventory, decision support systems, data process-ing, airline schedules, and a zillion others, nor does it dealwith direct communication among and between persons.Information science is about a specific manifestation or typeof information that defines its scope and its systems.

valued surrogates for persons

The key orientation here is the problemof need for and useof information, as involving knowledge records.To providefor that need, information science deals with specificallyoriented information techniques, procedures, and systems.

big science

The two clusters are not equally populated. The retrievalcluster has significantly more authors, not to mention totalnumber of works. As in many other fields, more effort isexpanded on the applied side than on the basic side. In part,this is due to availability of funds for given topics—notsurprisingly, research goes after moneyed topics.

I dare to venture a prediction: fameawaits the researcher(s) who devise a formal theoreticalwork, bolstered by experimental evidence, that connects thetwo largely separated clusters, i.e., connecting basic phe-nomena with their realization in the retrieval world.

information is usedin a context and in relation to some reasons

In cases of information services, information is mostoften conveyed through the medium of a text, document, orrecord, e.g., what a reader may understands from a text ordocument

Tague-Sutcliff

Stonier, 1997

While we do not know what information is, or whatsome of its derivative notions, such as relevance, may be,over the years we have learned a lot about their variousmanifestations, behaviors, and effects

message-sense

Thereis gold in information. Information science has many com-petitors—it may be even swamped by them.

[K]nowledge provesitself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is infor-mation effective in action, information focused on re-sults

Their effortsshould indeed go into reading and organizingexistingclaims, ratherthan gathering new data

In the U.S.,information science developed and began flourishing on itsown in a large part due to government support by a host ofagencies, as did many other fields.

Bush addressed the problem of information explo-sion. The problem is still with us. His solution was to usethe emerging computing and other information technologyto combat the problem.

Debates over the “proper” definition of informa-tion science, as of any field, are fruitless, and in expectationsnaive. Information science, as a science and as a profession,is defined by the problems it has addressed and the methodsit has used for their solutions over time.