In August 1978, one hundred or so scholars from several countries around
the world met in Crete, Greece to discuss the progress made in designing
information systems and the relation of information science to this
activity. This was the Third Advanced Study Institute supported by the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Brussels, Belgium. The first
Institute was conducted in 1972 and held in Seven Springs, Pennsylvania.
The results of this Institute were published by Marcel Dekker and titled
Information Sc. ience: Search for Identity. The'second Institute was
held at the College of Librarianship, Aberystwyth, Wales in the summer
of 1974. The proceedings were published by Noordhoff International
Publishing, Leyden, The Netherlands, entitled Perspectives of
Information Science edited by A. Debons and Hilliam Cameron. The three
institutes that were conducted shared a common purpose, namely, to
assess the state of affairs of information science and to share this
assessment with inter- national community. Information science can be
said to have emerged during the past two, three decades in response to
the significant increase in data-knowledge processing technology, the
growth of knowledge as the result of these trends and the increase in
problem solving, decision making complexity that faced all institutions
at all levels throughout the world. Information systems, for many
reasons, remain as an abstraction. Nevertheless, considerable funds and
human efforts are being expended on them. Thus, such systems are of
vital concerns to both scientists and technologists who are involved in
them.
