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.
Author(s): Michael Buckland
Series: The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series
Publisher: MIT Press
Year: 2017
Language: English
Pages: 234
Tags: Information, Society
CONTENTS......Page 7
SERIES FOREWORD......Page 9
FOREWORD......Page 11
PREFACE......Page 15
1 INTRODUCTION......Page 17
Information......Page 18
My Passport......Page 22
The Division of Labor and the Need to Know......Page 26
Agendas of Others......Page 30
Information Society......Page 32
Truth, Trust, and Belief......Page 33
The Structure of This Book......Page 34
2 DOCUMENT AND EVIDENCE......Page 37
Information as Thing......Page 38
Documents and Document Anatomy......Page 41
The History of Information Technology......Page 43
The Rise of Data Sets......Page 49
Some Practical Initiatives......Page 54
Problems of Later Use......Page 57
Bibliography Reconsidered......Page 60
World Brain and Other Imagery......Page 63
Summary......Page 64
3 INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNITY......Page 67
What Individuals Do......Page 68
What Communities Know......Page 69
Culture......Page 72
Documents as the Activity of Others......Page 76
The Social and the Individual......Page 78
Physical, Mental, and Social Dimensions of Information......Page 79
Summary......Page 86
4 ORGANIZING: ARRANGEMENT AND DESCRIPTION......Page 87
Collections......Page 89
Arrangement and Lists......Page 92
Description......Page 93
Not So Easy!......Page 97
Generating Descriptions......Page 101
The Basic Mechanism......Page 103
Summary......Page 104
5 NAMING......Page 105
Topic Descriptions......Page 106
Documentary Languages for Naming Topics......Page 108
Time and Naming......Page 112
Mention and Meaning......Page 117
Naming Is Cultural......Page 120
Summary......Page 124
6 METADATA......Page 127
The First Purpose of Metadata: Description......Page 129
Creating Indexes......Page 130
Index Terms......Page 132
The Second Use of Metadata: Search......Page 134
What, Who, Where, and When......Page 141
Relationships among Index Terms......Page 143
Facets and Context......Page 146
Summary......Page 149
7 DISCOVERY AND SELECTION......Page 151
Retrieval and Selection......Page 152
The Anatomy of Selection Machinery......Page 154
Searching Text......Page 156
A Library Catalog......Page 158
Searching the Web......Page 161
Other Examples......Page 164
Summary......Page 166
8 EVALUATION OF SELECTION METHODS......Page 169
Relevance, Recall, and Precision......Page 171
Recall with Random, Perfect, and Realistic Retrieval......Page 172
Precision with Random, Perfect, and Realistic Retrieval......Page 174
Some Problems with Relevance......Page 175
Why Relevance Is Difficult......Page 177
Summary......Page 181
Summary......Page 183
The Past and the Future......Page 189
Coping: Orality, Literacy, and Documentality......Page 193
What Kind of a Field?......Page 196
APPENDIX A: ANATOMY OF SELECTION......Page 199
Recall Graphed......Page 205
Precision Graphed......Page 209
The Relationship between Precision and Recall......Page 211
Summary......Page 214
FURTHER READING......Page 215
GLOSSARY......Page 219
REFERENCES......Page 223
INDEX......Page 231
