The Concept of Information-Again and Again

摘要

Information science developed out of documentation, and the documentation movement developed a theoretically motivated concept document as a basic term (or fundamental sign) for the field: A document is "any concrete or symbolic indication, preserved or recorded, for reconstructing or for proving a phenomenon, whether physical or mental" (Briet, 1951, p. 7; quoted in Buckland, 1991b, p. 47). The shift from document to information took place without a proper scholarly argumentation of limits in the concept of document. It may partly have been motivated by the dream that Shannon's information theory (which, by the way, is also misnamed) could form a theoretical basis for the field (this idea was common around 1950, as exemplified by Blegvad, Elberling, Johnsen & Rode, 1957). But over the years it has been increasingly clear that Shannon's theory may not be a proper theoretical foundation for the field and it has been losing influence (Fugmann, 2007, 2008; Wersig, 2003). Other kinds of theories such as semiotic, epistemological and sociological theories, seem better fit to be able to fulfill the needs and imply other basic concepts (such as sign, conception, document, and knowledge). The term information may also indicate a special focus on information technology (IT), for example understanding the field as being about automating libraries and documentation processes at the expense of intellectual issues such as how best to represent a document for search purposes, how to determine relevance, or how to evaluate the quality of documents and services. Finally, the use of the information concept in the field has probably also been motivated by an less intellectually serious attempt to provide more prestige to the fields of library science and documentation (Spang-Hanssen, 2001).