School of Information Management & Systems   Fall 1999.   Michael Buckland.
290-3 Concepts of Information Management.

Examples of Concepts: Initial List.

General: Documentation; Information Science; Information Resource(s) Management; LIS; Informatics; Bibliography.
Access: Censorship, privacy, freedom of information.
Behavior/use: Conceptual models; Cognitive models; Information literacy.
Categorization: Classification. Taxonomy. Cladistics. Vocabulary. Indexicality. Notation. Specificity. Fineness. Metadata.
Communication: Scholarly communication. Invisible college. (Dis)intermediation.
Document: Document life-cycle. Provenance, fonds. Work, text, text-bearing object, instance, copy, performance. Data, document, knowledge. Hypertext. Genre. Authenticity.
Economics: Value in use, exchange value. Value added. Economies of scale and of scope. Externalities; network externalities. Information industry / sector. Knowledge economy.
Events: Cranfield Studies. IID/FID.
Knowledge: (Social) Epistemology. Knowledge. Belief. Cognitive authority.
- Recorded knowledge, Public knowledge; World Brain.
- Realism, Idealism, Transcendentalism, other "-isms".
Meaning: Sign, signal, symbol. Semiotics: Semantics, syntax, pragmatics. Denotation, Connotation. Aboutness, subject, topic. Construction of meaning. Sense-making.
Memory: External memory. Social memory.
Metrics: Informetrics. Bibliometrics. Dispersion: Obsolescence, Scattering, Lotka's Law.
Organization of collections: Sets, ordering (filing, sorting, ranking, alphabetizing).
Processing: Data models.
Property: Information as commodity; Intellectual Property, Author; Cultural property.
Representation: Abstracts.
Selection: Search, Browsing, Filtering, Retrieval. Selection. Relevance, Pertinence, Utility: Recall, Precision, Generality. Vector space, document space.
Society: The "Information Society." Sociology of knowledge. Information professional. Knowledge worker. Information profession.

From neighboring fields:
Physics of Information: Shannon's Information Theory; entropy; negentropy.
Systems: Feedback, cybernetics, dissipative and autopoietic systems.
Management: Efficiency. Effectiveness. Benefit.

Additional examples of problematic concepts, recommended readings, and comments welcomed buckland@sims.berkeley.edu.