27 January 2005 Lecture

• Buckland, M. (1991). Information and Information Systems. New York: Praeger. Chapter 1, Information, 3-13.
  
• Buckland, M. (1991). Information and Information Systems. New York: Praeger. Chapter 5, Information-as-Thing., 43-54.
• Buckland, M. (1997). What is a document? Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 48(9), 804-809.
  
• Meadow, C. (1992). Text Information Retrieval Systems. San Diego: Academic Press, Inc. Chapter 2, Data, Information, Knowledge.
  

So what? It matters only so far as role & use

Old-fashioned philosophical approach to creating something: creating the text to set limits, to set a law seems antiquated, when chaos, or, more importantly, a symbiosis & feedback between user tool task concepts & context seems to be of utmost relevance.

One can show the following: given any rule, however fundamental or necessary for science, there are always circumstances when it is advisable not only to ignore the rule, but to adopt its opposite. (Paul Feyerabend)

We need to be careful with the distinction between prescription and description: are we defining "information" by prescribing limits, or defining "information" by describing the limits?

David Bohm's active information: all the world is made of matter, energy, and information

information:
what it is
what it is relative to a person
what it is relative to one person being observed by another person doing the observing
(what it is relative to a zoologist being observed by an information scientist
verus
what it is relative to a zoologist being observed be the zoologist's neighbor who isn't an information scientist)

use and the user
and the hall of mirrors

terms are in fact highly dynamic defined by user which is in turn defined by use which is modified by need

creating structure

distilling information to highlight it


What are planned & unplanned collections?
Collection implied decision as to what's in and what's out
Web isn't a collection
Solitary chooser

Can you have a collection without ruleS?

Colletions that succeed: it isn't that you shouldn't have rules, it's that the rules don't cover it
the platypus

categorizations/representation scheme

getting stuff
information is stuff: information is intangible

ask users what they want, what do they want to do
what sorts of things do you want to accomplish

manual/intellectual


motivation: task...goal oriented or not, exploratory,

task: tasker does something with something in/at something to something

example: pool maintenance: wants to know chlorine levels, because wants to keep at safe levels
the solution is necessarily an information system