What is Information?

Before we can talk about the organization of knowledge and information, we need to know what they are. They're fairly abstract, ambiguous words. Michael K. Buckland, in Information as Thing, identified three core meanings of the word "information."

Information-as-process is simply the act of informing. When one person communicates a fact to another, this activity could be called information. Information-as-knowledge is the datum or data being imparted in the information-as-process. Both of these are interesting, but they're kind of hard to file away on a bookshelf.

This brings us to information-as-thing. Buckland identifies this as the physical embodiment of the informing process. These manifestations, especially in the form of books and recordings, are what we concern ourselves with as librarians. As with any useful definition, though, this inclusion of the written word under the umbrella of information is not without controversy. F. Machlup (1983, p. 642 as quoted in Buckland 1991, pp. 351-352) states that "any meanings other than (1) the telling of something or (2) that which is being told are either analogies and metaphors or concoctions resulting from the condoned appropriation of a word that had not been meant by earlier users." Were we to allow this objection, though, we would simply invent a new word for this excluded informative material and categorize that.

The real power and utility of information made manifest in the form of books, recordings, and other physical things is that these objects (or files, in the digital age) can be filed in and retrieved by information systems. It is here that the distinction of knowledge vs. thing comes into play. Knowledge cannot be checked out from the library. The book is merely a representation (information-as-thing), but it is a representation that can be used (information-as-process) to learn data (information-as-knowledge).

So what qualifies as information-as-thing? What is informative? Buckland states that we should judge information sources as we judge evidence. In other words, What does it teach us? How unique is it? How relevant is it? In this way, objects are only informative (and thus only qualify for our attention as librarians) if a) they have something to say, and b) we are aware of their having something to say. A book of gibberish has no reason to be in any library, unless, say, the book is revealed to have been the last mad writings of Friedrich Nietzsche before he fell to syphylitic fever. Only then does the book gain significance and warrant inclusion in a collection.

Objects other than books and documents can be considered information. Just as a book about a 17th-century sailing ship can inform a layman about the structure of its sails, so too can a model of said ship or a preserved bit of rigging. Indeed, one could say that the rigging is the primary source, and the book and model based upon it are merely secondary. Of course, such informative objects as the artifact and the model are more at home in a museum than a library, but this only serves to highlight the connections between the two institutions. The Great Library of Alexandria was, after all, only part of the Mouseion. Nevertheless, we can safely discard such things as models and skulls from our purview, though it is worthy to note that a book might be included in a library not only for the words on the page, but only for the significance of the book itself (as in the hypothetical case of the Nietzsche scribblings above).

So, ultimately, we end up at the commonsensical answer that we could have given before this lengthy sojourn into esoterica. What goes into libraries? Books. But defining just what we are dealing with in this rigorous manner not only serves to satisfy the Philosophy major in me, but will also serve us well in setting rules for dealing with objects existing on the hazy boundaries of books and information. In my next post (hopefully to come Thursday or Friday), I will complete my thoughts on information. Next week we'll finally get down to brass tacks and start examining some methods of organization.

Source: Buckland, M. (1991). Information as thing. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 42(5): 351-360.