Literature/1991/Buckland


 * http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/thing.html

Author

 * Buckland was 1998 President of ASIS&T.

Excerpts

 * Summary : Numerous definitions have been proposed for "information". One important use of "information" is to denote knowledge imparted; another is the denote the process of informing. Some leading theorists have dismissed the attributive use of "information" to refer to things that are informative. However, "information-as-thing" deserves careful examination, partly because it is the only form of information with which information systems can deal directly. People are informed not only by intentional communications, but by a wide variety of objects and events. Being "informative" is situational and it would be rash to state of any thing that it might not be informative, hence information, in some conceivable situation. Varieties of "information-as-thing" vary in their physical characteristics and so are not equally suited for storage and retrieval. There is, however, considerable scope for using representations instead.
 * Whatever information storage and retrieval systems store and retrieve is necessarily "information-as-thing".