Three meanings of "information" are distinguished: "Information-as-process"; "information-as-knowledge"; and "information-as-thing," the attributive use of "information" to denote things regarded as informative. The nature and characteristics of "information-asthing" are discussed, using an indirect approach ("What things are informative?"). Varieties of "informationas-thing" include data, text, documents, objects, and events. On this view "information" includes but extends beyond communication. Whatever information storage and retrieval systems store and retrieve is necessarily "information-as-thing."These three meanings of "information," along with "information processing," offer a basis for classifying disparate information-related activities (e.g., rhetoric, bibliographic retrieval, statistical analysis) and, thereby, suggest a topography for "information science."

Empirical studies of retrieval performance have shown a tendency for Precision to decline as Recall increases. This article examines the nature of the relationship between Precision and Recall. The relationships between Recall and the number of documents retrieved, between Precision and the number of documents retrieved, and between Precision and Recall are described in the context of different assumptions about retrieval performance. It is demonstrated that a tradeoff between Recall and Precision is unavoidable whenever retrieval performance is consistently better than retrieval at random. More generally, for the Precision-Recall trade-off to be avoided as the total number of documents retrieved increases, retrieval performance must be equal to or better than overall retrieval performance up to that point. Examination of the mathematical relationship between Precision and Recall shows that a quadratic Recall curve can resemble empirical Recall-Precision behavior if transformed into a tangent parabola. With very large databases and/or systems with limited retrieval capabilities there can be advantages to retrieval in two stages: initial retrieval emphasizing high Recall, followed by more detailed searching of the initially retrieved set, can be used to improve both Recall and Precision simultaneously.Even so, a tradeoff between Precision and Recall remains.

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During the twentieth century there was a strong desire to develop an Information Science from librarianship, bibliography, and documentation and in 1968 the American Documentation Institute changed its name to American Society for Information Science. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, departments of (library and) information science had turned instead towards the social sciences. These programs address a variety of important topics, but they have been less successful in providing a coherent explanation of the nature and scope of the field. Progress can be made towards a coherent, unified view of the roles of archives, libraries, museums, online information services, and related organizations if they are treated as information-providing services. But such an approach seems significantly incomplete on ordinary understandings of the providing of information. Instead of asking what Information Science is or what we might wish it to become, we ask instead what kind of field it can be given our assumptions about it. We approach the question by examining some key words: science, information, knowledge and interdisciplinary. We conclude that if information science is concerned with what people know, then it is a form of cultural engagement and, at most, a science of the artificial. INTRODUCTIONDuring the twentieth century there was a strong desire for the provision of information services to become scientific, to move from librarianship, bibliography, and documentation to an Information Science. Accordingly, in 1968 the American Documentation Institute changed its name to American Society for Information Science. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, departments of (library and) information science had turned instead towards the social sciences. Leading programs have increased their size and visibility with skillful publicity liberally using the words "information," "society," and "technology." "Information school" is currently a name or nickname of choice. These programs address a variety of important topics, but they have been less successful in providing a coherent explanation of the nature and scope of the field. It is wise for organizations to be prospecting for new opportunities, but to be opportunistic without a coherent underlying rationale appears imprudent.A related problem concerns the analysis of information services. Some progress can be made towards a coherent, unified view of the roles of archives, libraries, museums, online information services, and related organizations if they are treated as information-providing services (e.g. Buckland, 1991a), but such an approach seems significantly incomplete on ordinary understandings of the providing of information. Public libraries, for example, do more than simply provide information. Here again a deeper or wider or different explanation is needed.

A short, informal account of our ever-increasing dependence on a complex multiplicity of messages, records, documents, and data. 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.