Information Transfer and
Information Science
LIS510
What is Information?
• There is no “correct” definition
• The act of informing or being informed.
(American Heritage Dictionary, 1991)
• The action of informing; communication of the knowledge; news of
some fact or occurrence.
(Oxford English Dictionary, 1989)
• Knowledge or intelligence unknown to the receiver before its receipt.
(Longman-Tsinghau English-Chinese Science and Technology
Dictionary, 1996)
• Something told; news or knowledge given.
(Oxford English-Chinese Reader’s Dictionary)
• Information informs: it provides something unknown to the receiver.
This can be viewed as creating knowledge. So, becoming informed
is becoming knowledgeable.
What is Information?
• There are various ways of thinking about
information, e.g. information as code, data,
document, speech, gesture, image, thing,
and so on.
• What definition do you think is most
useful?
• How do you think about information?
What is Information?
• Information as a meaningful message from
an informant that may influence the
recipient in considerations, decisions and
actions.
What is Information?
• Information must
– Be something, although the exact nature
(substance, energy, or abstract concept) is not
clear;
– Be “new”: repetition of previously received
messages is not informative
– Be “true”: false or counterfactual information
is “mis-information”
– Be “about” something
What is Information?
• Everyone must feel that they know what information
is. No life form … could function if it was not
continually receiving and processing information,
and it has always been thus. Despite the fact that
information is so essential to the functioning of any
organism, and that people have put a lot of effort
into the development of ‘Information Science’,
‘Information Systems’, ‘Information Management’,
‘Information Theory’, and the like, it may surprise
you to know that there is no commonly agreed
definition for the concept of information.
•
PG Diploma: Computers in Education. (nd).
What is Information?
• “...progress is bedeviled by the frequently
contradictory nature of existing definitions,
and by the absence of any consensus on the
nature and characteristics of information.
Hence, even the information science
profession, whose interest lies in the study
of information and related phenomena, is
unable to agree upon an operational
definition.”
• Martin, W.J. (1988). “The Information
Society” Aslib.
What is Information?
• Information as thing
• Buckland is thinking about the fundamental
nature of information and claims that it has
been ambiguous
• He attempts to clarify the concept, arguing
that it can be seen as “process,”
“knowledge,” and “thing”
• In what sense can we consider information a
thing?
What is Information?
• Assumes that information includes becoming
informed, with the reduction of ignorance and of
uncertainty
• He looks at the ways in which the term is used in the
field
• As process:
– When we are informed what we know is changed It is the act
of informing...; communication of the knowledge or “news”
of some fact or occurrence
• As knowledge
– That which is perceived in “information-as-process;” the
“knowledge communicated concerning some fact, subject
or event”
What is Information?
As thing
• Is also used attributively for objects, such as
data and documents, referred to as
“information” because they are regarded as
being informative; as “having the quality of
imparting knowledge or communicating
information”
• This has been controversial
– Information has no materiality or energy
– It is all contained in the context of communication
• How does Buckland respond to these
criticisms?
Information infrastructure
• The amount of information grows over
time.
• We live in the information age.
• Is there a sense of unease.
– information explosion
– flood of information
– bombarded by information
– information overload (most widely used)
• Is that true?
Information infrastructure
• We can talk about an overload of data.
– WWW
– advertising, esp. spam
– traffic signs
– background music in shopping malls
• These things become information when
they are relevant to you.
• Are you well-informed?
Access to information
• First there has to be data that encodes the
information.
• There there has to be some way that the person
with the information need finds the data if they
need it.
• And has be some way a person is made aware
of the data if there is reason to believe that it will
be information to her/him.
• All of these are jobs of and for information
professionals.
Access to information
• Librarians as information professionals have
been devoted to the collection, organization, and
dissemination of information on demand by its
users. As information professionals, we are
specially interested and involved in two major
activities: information transfer and information
services.
• Libraries are a part of the information
infrastructure that connect people with
data/information.
How is information transferred?
• Creator  Disseminator 
• information cycle
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Receiver
information (knowledge) is created
it is distributed
it is disseminated
it is used
• end-use
• intermediate use
– new information (knowledge) is created from old
– two ways to look at it
• actors
• channels
Actors: Creators of information
authors
artists/musicians
database producers
archivists
educators
financial industry
other?
Products
books
magazines
databases
web pages
music files
records of any kind
services where information is key
other?
Product/service
• digital technology detaches the information
from its physical container
• information becomes a service, rather than
a product.
• this is a tax-relevant distinction
– in Europe, there is a low VAT rate for
books/journals
– but electronic journals are a considered a
service and get full VAT.
“Servicification" of information
• Information is moving from product to
service.
• To update a book
– you have to print all copies anew
– replace all old copies
• To update a web site is much easier but
the web site is expected to be up-to-date.
• This has great potential for the information
professional.
Distributors
publishers
vendors
Internet service providers
really only arrange for transport, like pizza
delivery man
at most as disseminator
Other?
Disseminators
– educational institutions
– libraries
– museums
– business
– government
– other?
Users
• This is all the rest of the community.
• Users may be end-consumers.
• Users may be authors.
Disintermediation
• The web has brought about a possibility to
dis-intermediate.
• Authors can directly bring content to users
without the use of distributors or
disseminators.
• However this is potential and has not been
widely adopted.
• Good example: academic author.
• Bad example: real estate sales.
Channels in an information
infrastructure: Networks
• Internet
• Telephone network
• Public data network
• Cellular networks
• Satellite networks
• Radio networks
• Cable TV network
• Direct Broadcast
satellite
• Financial networks
• Online services
• Power networks
• Broadcast TV
• Power networks
• Transportation
• Public Safety networks
Use of information "outlets"
• Trends
– Television viewing is up
• broadcast television is going down
• cable television is going up
– Video watching up
– Internet usage is up strongly
– Usage of print media is declining
– Internet use mainly comes at cost of television
viewing
Print (contents?) industry
• Book and e-book market is growing, but
reading time remains constant.
• Periodicals remains steady.
• Printed newspaper reading is declining
Databases
• Database numbers are growing
• There is a tendency to disintermediation
• There is tendency away from metadata
only databases towards full-text databases
• This implies a fuzzy border with the "print"
industry
• If you count database purely as
abstracting services they are probably
declining
The role of libraries in the
information infrastructure
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Dissemination of information
Provision of services
Advocate for literacy
Development of electronic information
networks
• Introduction of information technologies to
the users
Libraries: Statistics
94,345 school libraries and media centers
10,452 special libraries
9,445 public libraries
3,480 academic libraries
1,326 government libraries
Number of non-school libraries are falling.
Internet email and WWW
• They have been fastest growing media
• There are digital divides by race, age, income.
• Email has the biggest individual share, the rest
are various uses of the WWW. IP phone is small
but growing.
• Internet use is 44% from home,20% from work,
12% from school, 5% from libraries.
• Libraries play an important role to reduce the
digital divide.
Telephone system
• It has a dual role as
– end medium
– carrier of computer network traffic
• Cell phone usage is still growing strongly
in the US.
• The industry as a whole still suffers from
an overexpansion in the 90s
What is Information Science?
• The study on:
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Use of information
Information sources
Information development
Handling and disseminating of information in libraries and information
units
• (Harrods’ Librarians’ Glossary, 1995)
• The discipline investigates:
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Characteristics of information
Nature of information transfer process
Aspects of collecting, collating and evaluating information
Use of technology for organizing and disseminating information
• (International Encyclopaedia of Information and Library Science,
1997)
Information Science and Library
Science
• Library Science:
• A generic term for the study of libraries and
information units, the role they play in society,
their various component routines and processes,
and their history and future development.
• (Harrods’ Librarians’ Glossary, 1995)
• Information Science Compared to Library
Science:
• Closely related and largely overlapping
• Different emphases and different approaches
Library and Information Science
• Library and Information Science is the science
concerned with the following aspects of information:
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Origin
Dissemination
Acquisition
Properties
Classification
Organization
Storage
Retrieval
Interpretation
Use
Major Issues in Information Science Directly
Affecting Libraries
• User-oriented Information Systems
• Information needs vs. Information wants
• Information seeking vs. Information
gathering
• Information use and Information users
Factors that Impair/Prevent
Information Seeking
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Physical aspects
Policy and procedural aspects
Economic and financial aspects
Legal aspects
Social aspects
Cultural aspects
Linguistic aspects
Technological aspects
Information storage & retrieval
• this area is now more know as information
retrieval
• Ideally, one needs to know the retrieval needs
before designing the organization of the
information
• has to do with anything of how the user gets to
the information out of an information system.
• it is different from data retrieval since the
retrieved data has to be “relevant” to the user.
• it is very difficult to say what “relevance” is,
objectively.
information retrieval performance
• the traditional methods are
– precision = number of relevant documents
retrieved divided by total number of retrieved
documents
– recall = number of relevant documents
retrieved divided by total number of relevant
document.
• they only evaluate a search!
Recall and Precision
Recall--response to query
Relevance--materials in system relevant to query
Precision--proportion of materials retrieved that are
relevant to query.
Recall=
number of relevant documents retrieved
total number of relevant documents in the file
Precision= number of relevant documents retrieved____
total number of documents retrieved in the file
Inverse relation between recall and precision.
RECALL AND PRECISION
EXAMPLE
Total number of relevant items in the system 50
Total of retrieved items
20
Total of relevant items retrieved
12
Total of irrelevant items retrieved
8
Recall =
12/50 = .24
Precision = 12/20 = .60
IMPROVING RECALL AND
PRECISION
• Improving recall
– to get more relevant items
– to relax search terms and to make query
broader
• Improving precision
– to get less irrelevant items
– to narrow search terms and make query
narrower
Information storage
• can mean the preparation of information
before searching
– which fields are searchable
– can there be a variety of means to rank
searches?
– is there use of a controlled vocabulary
• difficult to make general conclusions but to
say that advanced search features are not
much used.
Human-computer interface
• tries to understand how users work with
computer systems
• the idea is to build “user-friendly” systems
• but don’t leave that to a “computer
designer”
• note that information systems go way
beyond computers.
• Web usability is a big topic.
Human-computer interface
• natural language processing is still in its
infancy
• speech recognition is the best developed
part
• others are working on connecting
computers to the brain
Artificial intelligence
• This has been around for a while.
• The field has developed a number of
theoretical tools
• Some of them are being used in practice
now. Things like RDF, the Resource
Description Framework, are based on
artificial intelligence theory. It is a tool to
aggregate knowledge from web resource.
Defining information & its value
• There is debate on the nature of
– data (things that can be processed in the
information system)
– knowledge (stuff that is in people’s head)
– information (something between data and
knowledge; meaning given to data)
• Wisdom: “knowledge applied for the
benefit of humanity”
Scientific view of information
• usually information is modeled as something
that reduces uncertainty
• people have a rough idea about something, say
tomorrow’s temperature
• the information is the fact that this something will
actually take a precise value, when we know
what the temperature is or when we have less
uncertainty.
• usually this uses probability theory.
Value of information
• economists can value information
precisely but their definition is useless for
practical purposes
• much of the work then involves some
cost/benefit analysis. in such analysis one
can reach almost any result one wants.
Elements of value-added in
libraries
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access to resources
accuracy (for example of bibliographic data)
browsing (like in library stacks)
currency (things are up-to-date)
flexibility (through human interaction)
formatting (laying out the collection, signs)
interfacing (probably close to flexibility)
ordering (buy access to things)
access to means to get to resources
Bibliometrics and Citation Analysis
• Bibliometrics: the application of quantitative
methods to the study of information
• Citation analysis: frequency and pattern of
citations (e.g. references cited in articles and
books)
– Two important concepts
• bibliographic coupling means two documents share some
reference
• co-citation means two documents are cited by the same
documents
Management and Administrative
Issues
• This is an expanding area in libraries.
• Rather than collecting physical books,
libraries have to negotiate on-line access.
• Area covers all of information policy.
Example problems are
– copyright
– censorship
• Measuring performance is part of user
studies
Management and Administrative
Issues
• Identifying and selecting information
technologies
• Dealing with human factors in technology
• Developing management information
systems/information resources
management/records management
• Measurement and evaluation of library and
information services
Information architecture
• art and science of organizing information
and its interfaces so that seekers find what
they want quickly
• mainly used with respect to large web
sites. it looks at the contents rather than
technical factors or the look-and-feel
• A related idea is usability
Knowledge Management
• this comes from the business environment
• Knowledge assets of an organization
Discussion
• Where do libraries and librarians fit in the
developing information infrastructure?
• Is Information Science part of Library Science?
Is Library Science part of Information Science?
Are they just two different names for the same
thing? Just how do the two fit together any way?
Or do they?
• In what ways are libraries proactive shapers of
society and in what ways are they reactive
mirrors of society?
• What does it mean that we’re an information
society?