Problems of Information Science
The principal problem pursued by information scientists for the past thirty-four years stems from a pervasive belief in the inadequacy and dearth of indexes. The year 1945 has been taken as a starting point for intensive research in information science (although much thought and effort have been invested in the improvement of information systems for centuries-- even millennia) because of Bush paper "As We May Think." Thirty-four years ago, Vannevar Bush in his classic article on the Memex ( Bush 1945), on the surface, seemed to indicate indexing to be the major problem. A closer examination of the article reveals the major problems to be scatter and a lack of organization of data. The false rationale behind the perceived problem became, in effect, "Since we can't find what we want and need in the literature, we need more and better indexes." This error became translated into the problem of how to design "in formation-retrieval systems." "Information" was defined, usually implicitly as conclusions, data, items, and the like, in printed matter. Overlooked were the fact that one man's "information" was another man's "irrelevant material," that information is a change in the central nervous system (CNS); and that professional people were drowning in relevant material that they had no time to read. Messages that changed the CNS were confused with the changes in the CNS. Information is not a mysterious essence that can be squeezed out of library
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