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

Why take this course?

Why is Information Management important? Because it matters a great deal both for the individual and for society who knows what. Information Management is concerned with ensuring that people get to know what they need to know. For that reason Information Management is concerned with people, with society, and with knowledge and so it must necessarily deal with concepts that are complex and unclear.

The challenge is two-fold:

1. To enable students to become fluent in discussing the central ideas, assumptions, and vocabulary of the field in an inclusive, historically-informed way, aware of ambiguities, nuances, disputes, and intellectual issues; and

2. To advance the development of the field, internally and internationally, by addressing, systematizing, and questioning the ideas, concepts, and terminology of Information Management in a critical yet constructive way.

Publications and curricula in Information Management are, quite properly, oriented to technique and practice. This course is designed to complement and enrich that emphasis.

Some terms are genuinely difficult to define (e.g. "knowledge"), others terms are used with varied meanings (e.g. "information," "epistemology"), others are unstable over time (e.g. "document"). Metaphorical use of terms is widespread and often unconscious (e.g. calling keywords "concepts"). Some concepts are inspiring (e.g. "Information society", "Knowledge economy") but become less clear when examined. Related fields sometimes use different terminology. There are frequent examples of intellectual discontinuity and reinvention, especially when related fields investigate information issues but disregard existing work (e.g. "hypertext" as reinvention of the "monographic principle").

There are a few key writers and works that examine selected concepts (e.g. Fritz Machlup's "Semantic Quirks in Studies of Information" in Machlup & Mansfield: The Study of Information, 1984; Patrick Wilson's Two Kinds of Power for "Relevance" and for "Work," "Text." and "Copy"; and writings by Robert Fairthorne). There are some good examples of historically informed explanatory essays on specific concepts in Information Management (e.g. Hertzel on "Bibliometrics" Encycl. of LIS 42:144-214; Historical Studies of Information Science has biographies of "Document," "Relevance," and "Scatter (Bibliometric dispersion)."). There are also some publications which illustrate aspects of the field in an exemplary way (e.g. White, Howard D. & Katharine W. McCain. 1998. Visualizing a discipline: An author co-citation analysis of Information Science, 1972-1995. JASIS 49, no 4 (1998):327-355.) But this material has not been brought together in a convenient way.

Raymond Williams' Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Rev. ed 1983) provides an interesting model: Short historically-informed essays on the origins, evolution, ambiguities, and intellectual and semantic trends for 150+ terms.