Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- Forewords: Information science and 21st century information practices: creatively engaging with information
- The emerging discipline of information
- The scope of information science
- A fascinating field and a pragmatic enterprise
- A slippery and ubiquitous concept
- The future of information science
- List of acronyms
- 1 What is information science? Disciplines and professions
- 2 History of information: the story of documents
- 3 Philosophies and paradigms of information science
- 4 Basic concepts of information science
- 5 Domain analysis
- 6 Information organization
- 7 Information technologies: creation, dissemination and retrieval
- 8 Informetrics
- 9 Information behaviour
- 10 Communicating information: changing contexts
- 11 Information society
- 12 Information management and policy
- 13 Digital literacy
- 14 Information science research: what and how?
- 15 The future of the information sciences
- Additional resources
- Index
12 - Information management and policy
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- Forewords: Information science and 21st century information practices: creatively engaging with information
- The emerging discipline of information
- The scope of information science
- A fascinating field and a pragmatic enterprise
- A slippery and ubiquitous concept
- The future of information science
- List of acronyms
- 1 What is information science? Disciplines and professions
- 2 History of information: the story of documents
- 3 Philosophies and paradigms of information science
- 4 Basic concepts of information science
- 5 Domain analysis
- 6 Information organization
- 7 Information technologies: creation, dissemination and retrieval
- 8 Informetrics
- 9 Information behaviour
- 10 Communicating information: changing contexts
- 11 Information society
- 12 Information management and policy
- 13 Digital literacy
- 14 Information science research: what and how?
- 15 The future of the information sciences
- Additional resources
- Index
Summary
The information that your institution creates and uses can either represent an asset or a liability. Into which of these camps it falls is largely dependent on how it is managed.
UK Joint Information Systems Committee, JISC (2007, 4)Knowledge and wisdom, far from being one
Have oft-times no connection. Knowledge dwells
In heads replete with thoughts of other men;
Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.
Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much,
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.
William Cowper (The winter walk at noon, Book 6 of The Task, 1785)If you try to improve the performance of a system of people, machines and procedures by setting numerical goals for the improvement of individual parts of the system, the system will defeat your efforts, and you will pay a price where you least expect it. [Tribus’ Perversity Principle.]
Myron Tribus (Quality First, Washington DC: National Society of Professional Engineers, 1992)Introduction
Information management is a complicated subject, and can be understood in different ways. Sometimes it is understood as a wide and all-embracing concept, including records management, knowledge management, library management and so on, and sometimes with a much narrower focus. It may, or may not, be taken to include the processes of ‘ordinary’ management – budgeting, managing people, and so on – which are as necessary in an information-providing institution or department as in any other. And it may be considered from a variety of perspectives, emphasizing information resources, technologies, organizational structures, and others; see Detlor (2010), Schlögl (2005), Bouthillier and Shearer (2002) and Rowley (1998) for examples.
In this chapter, we will take information management to include all the concepts, techniques and processes which underlie and enable information service provision. We take a wide view, including all the environments in which information, in all its guises, is managed. We focus on the ideas that recorded information, instantiated in documents, can be understood as a resource, though perhaps an unusual one in some respects; that information has a value, though this may be difficult to determine; and that information management processes can be related to the communication chains and information lifecycles mentioned in previous chapters.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Introduction to Information Science , pp. 251 - 286Publisher: FacetPrint publication year: 2012