A short, informal account of our ever-increasing dependence on a
complex multiplicity of messages, records, documents, and data.
We live in an information society, or so we are often told. But what
does that mean? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series
offers a concise, informal account of the ways in which information and
society are related and of our ever-increasing dependence on a complex
multiplicity of messages, records, documents, and data. Using
information in its everyday, nonspecialized sense, Michael Buckland
explores the influence of information on what we know, the role of
communication and recorded information in our daily lives, and the
difficulty (or ease) of finding information. He shows that all this
involves human perception, social behavior, changing technologies, and
issues of trust.
Buckland argues that every society is an "information society"; a
"non-information society" would be a contradiction in terms. But the
shift from oral and gestural communication to documents, and the wider
use of documents facilitated by new technologies, have made our society
particularly information intensive. Buckland describes the rising flood
of data, documents, and records, outlines the dramatic long-term growth
of documents, and traces the rise of techniques to cope with them. He
examines the physical manifestation of information as documents, the
emergence of data sets, and how documents and data are discovered and
used. He explores what individuals and societies do with information;
offers a basic summary of how collected documents are arranged and
described; considers the nature of naming; explains the uses of
metadata; and evaluates selection methods, considering relevance,
recall, and precision.
