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1. Introduction

The term information is a polysemic and vague word [1]. To neglect considering its meaning may be a bad choice, as Burgin (2010, vii) suggested:

[O]ur experience demonstrates that mundane understanding of the notion of information may be very misleading. For instance, many identify information and message. However, receiving a message that consists of a random sequence of letters, a person gets no information. Thus, there are messages without information. Another example that demonstrates that a message and information are distinct essences is a situation when one and same message gives different information to different people. So, as it often happens in science, to overcome limitations of the commonplace image of information, the main problem is to find or to build the right theory.

The claim in this quote that the same message may inform people differently seems not only to be valid, but to be intimately connected with the core purpose of the present article, although the first element of it has been questioned [2].

As Qvortrup (1993, 3; italics in original) wrote, information “seems to be innocent, because everybody talks about information, information technology and an information society. It is however significant because its definition implies a whole theory of knowledge” [3].

Much confusion arises from simple questions such as: “what is information?”, “what is information science about?” [4] and ”what is an information specialist a specialist in?” “Capurro’s trilemma” (Capurro, Fleissner and Hofkirchner 1999) suggests that we must understand the meaning of information in different domains in one of three ways:

1. Univocity: it has the same meaning in all contexts.
2. Analogy: it has one true meaning in a specific context but may be applied as an analogy in others.
3. Equivocity: it may have multiple, equally valid meanings in different contexts.

About these possibilities, Bawden and Robinson (2020, 8) found: “The first is plainly unhelpful, if not simply incorrect. The second lends itself to overly simple analogies, and the third makes any unified theory impossible, and any gap-bridging impossible”. The present article suggests a combination of these options: it is possible to define information as a universal phenomenon (e.g., as Bateson’s 1972, 453, “information is a difference which makes a difference”), however such definitions implies that what is information always depends on a specific organism or system and is therefore context specific. The term is also theory-dependent and may be considered a very good example of “semantic holism”, the view that the meaning of signs, including words, is relative to the theories and contexts in which they are used [5]. By implication the meaning of the term information should not be sought in the term itself nor in its etymology, but in the theoretical framework in which we wish it to play a role (or even broader: the meaning of terms comes from the forms of life with which they are interwoven) [6]. As Bogdan (1991, 394) wrote:

The notion of information is extremely versatile. It may mean a measure of physical organization (or decrease in entropy), a pattern of communication between sources and receivers, a form of control and feedback, the probability of a message being transmitted over a communication channel, the content of a cognitive state, the meaning of a linguistic form, or the reduction of some uncertainty. These senses of information are defined in appropriate theories, such as physics, communication theory, cybernetics, statistical information theory, psychology, semantics, inductive logic, and so on. There is no unique notion of information upon which the above senses converge and hence no proprietary theory of information.

This principle of semantic holism has decided to selection of theories about information presented in this article. It is not possible to do an exhaustive summarization of every definition written about information neither in general nor just for → library and information science (LIS). It seems a bad choice to delimit the coverage by formal criteria such as dates, disciplines, or regions because the most relevant views do not come from a particular time, discipline, or region, but transverse these formal settings. In the Appendix 1, however, a comprehensive chronological sample of definitions and brief statements of information is given (intended to be a dynamic document updated when new definitions/statements are discovered). This is intended as a tool for further research about the information concept (in line with the appendix in the article about → classification).

This article is especially concerned about the term information in relation to information science (or information studies or LIS, including → knowledge organization, KO), although with a perspective from the broader meanings of the term. We will examine the history of the term in these contexts and ask why the term was introduced in the first hand. We shall also consider whether it is needed at all, or whether other terms may better and more precisely replace it.

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2. Elements of a history of the term information

Capurro has done work tracing the epistemology of the term information from Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew Roots. Capurro (2019) is a short summary in English with references to more detailed studies (including Capurro 1978). In Capurro and Hjørland (2003, 352, italics in original) he wrote:

Several Greek words were translated with informatio or informo, such as hypotyposis (which means model, especially in a moral context) and prolepsis (representation), but most higher-level uses are explicitly related to eidos, idea, typos, and morphe; that is, to key concepts of Greek ontology and epistemology.

Capurro’s description of the history is very complex and difficult to summarize, and he concludes that the word is untranslatable, which is used as argument for the third possibility (equivocity) in Capurro’s trilemma. Here we will rely on a summary provided by Adriaans and van Benthem’s (2008, 4) “A very brief history of information” (first paragraph, Philosophy):

The term information is of Latin origin, and authors like Cicero and Augustine used it in the context of Plato's theory of ideas (or forms) and its successors. In particular, Cicero uses 'in-formare' to render the Epicurean notion of 'prolepsis', i.e., a representation implanted in the mind (Capurro and Hjørland, 2003). In the Middle Ages, a significant shift occurred. In the century, the French word 'information' emerges in colloquial language with a cluster of meanings: 'investigation', 'education', 'the act of informing or communicating knowledge' and 'intelligence'. The technical term 'information' then vanishes from philosophical discourse as though it had lost its appeal. Instead, when the English empiricists went back to the original Platonic inspiration, they coined the term 'idea' (derived from Platonic 'eidos'): "whatsoever is the object of understanding when a man thinks . . . whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is which the mind can be employed about when thinking" (Locke, 1961, Essay I,i,8). The philosophical adventures of this notion of 'idea' run from Hume, Kant, and the German idealists up to Husserl and beyond. But like famous Cats through history, 'information' has had many more lives than just one [presented in subsequent paragraphs].

Peters (1988) also describes the history of the term but used Wittgenstein’s theory of language games as the point of departure. He found:

The term developed through four main forms of life, traveling from the late medieval Schools through the essays of the British empiricists to the statistical data of state bureaucracies and today’s computer technology. The shifts in sense it undergoes are profound and dizzying, and yet in each case there is a sort of logic as to how one form of life, one cluster of senses, gives way to another.

In the environment fashioned by Aristotle's disciples in the late Middle Ages, informatio and information were used in a broad sense to account for the way that the universe is ordered. According to the interpretation of Aristotle matter is always the same four elements (earth, water, air, and fire) [7]. Therefore, all objects are primarily characterized by their form, they are brought into form, informed, and when an object perishes, only the form disappears, not the matter (a view known as hylomorphism from Aristotle’s hyle, or matter, and morphe, or form). The English term information in the Fourteenth century also carried the meanings instructing (from Latin informare), idea, instruction, concept, doctrine (from informatio) and, as still used: an item of new knowledge [8].

With empiricism the view of the universe as ordered by form fell into disrepute, and the context of the in-forming shifted from matter to the mind, a shift from metaphysical forms to the evidence of the senses, so objects in the world came to in-form the senses. But empiricism has a problem by explaining how valid knowledge can be derived from the uncertain light of the senses. The empiricist problematic was (and still is) how the mind is informed by sensations of the world. Peters (1988, 13, italics in original):

In any case, the empiricist problematic was how the mind is informed by sensations of the world. At first informed meant shaped by; later it came to mean received reports from. As its site of action drifted from cosmos to consciousness, the term’s sense shifted from unities (Aristotle’s forms) to units (of sensation). Information came less and less to refer to internal ordering or formation, since empiricism allowed for no preexisting intellectual forms outside of sensation itself. Instead, information came to refer to the fragmentary, fluctuating, haphazard stuff of sense. Information, like the early modern world view more generally, shifted from a divinely ordered cosmos to a system governed by the motion of corpuscles. Under the tutelage of empiricism, information gradually moved from structure to stuff, from form to substance, from intellectual order to sensory impulses.

Whereas classical empiricism was an individualistic philosophy, in which information was considered the experience of the individuals, Peters’ third main change is due to the statistical data of state bureaucracies. Individual empiricism is being replaced with “state empiricism”. Although bureaucracy is as old as civilization, “the scale and intensity of bureaucratic growth over the last two hundred years is quite unprecedented in human history. And the essence of bureaucracy is information: here we come to a sense of the term that is completely ours and requires neither mind-stretching nor italics”. And further (15): “The Oxford English Dictionary’s recent definition of information as facts or knowledge ‘separated from, or without implication or reference to a person informed’ is not an artifact of computers. Statistics long functioned as knowledge processed by an inanimate, unembodied knower” (corresponding to Buckland’s “information-as-thing”, presented below) [9].

Peters’ fourth stage relates to computer technology and especially with Shannon’s information theory. Although this theory was explicit about signals, and not about significance or meaning, this reservation was forgotten as the theory diffused through American intellectual life. One implication of this was that “the great chain of being” [10] was rewritten in informational terms, from the DNA code containing genetic information over the neural synapses as switchboards and nerves as telephone lines to the human brain as an information processor. In the social world we hear that marriages will work better if men and women “share information about their feelings”. (It can be added to Peters’ examples, that libraries became “information storage and retrieval systems”, see Hjørland 2015). Peters’ description seems to echo a claim made by Machlup (1983, 642), that information came to be used in a metaphorical sense, not in its denotative meaning [11]. Buckland (1991b) argued however, that Machlup’s understanding (as those of many other authors) is too narrow by restricting information to what is intentionally told. Thus, Buckland convincingly argued that something can be informative (or information) whether or not this was intended — or even of human or biological origin.

Shannon’s theory (Shannon 1948; Shannon and Weaver 1949) was a further development of ideas by Hartley (1928) and Nyquist (1924), who introduced fundamental ideas related to the transmission of information in the context of the telegraph as a communications system. This theory has had enormous influence on the discourses about information and on the formation of information science as a field of study (to be further discussed below). It defined information as a measurable quantity (e.g., number of bits on a disc drive), but without considering the meaning of the information. (According to this theory nothing can be misinformation [12].) This theory is often understood to define information in terms of entropy, which in popular terms can be understood as a measure of the disorder or randomness of a system [13]. Shannon’s theory lost much of its initial appeal in fields working with meanings (although today it plays a role in Floridi’s General Definition of Information (GDI), which, however, is not immune to the same kind of criticism as Shannon’s theory (see Section 3.5 in Hjørland 2018c, 322-323). It is an implication of this theory that the amount of information in a given code is proportional with the amount of information it contains [14] (Bremer and Cohnitz 2004 abandoned the measurement of amounts of information [15]).

However, as Burgin (2010, vi-vii) expressed, the term information continues to be broadly used without clear definitions:

During the last fifty years or so, the term information succeeded in pervading science, technology, humanities, economy, politics, as well as everyday life. Governments, companies and some individuals spend vast fortunes to acquire necessary information. However, there are many problems with this term. As Goguen writes (1997), “we live in an “Age of Information”, but it is an open scandal that there is no theory, nor even definition, of information that is both broad and precise enough to make such an assertion meaningful.

Buckland (1991a; 1991b; 1997; 2012; 2018) proposed a typology of categories of the word information:

• Information-as-knowledge for knowledge imparted, what was learned as a result of being informed
• Information-as-process for becoming informed, for learning
• Information-as-thing for bits, bytes, books, sounds, images, and anything physical perceived as signifying. The word → document, which was not historically limited to textual media, can be used as a technical term for information-as-thing.[16]

As he points out, the only thing that can be stored and retrieved in any kind of information system, is information-as-thing (which of theoretical reasons may better be termed documents). We have seen Peters’ explanation for how the term information developed to refer to things. Haigh and Haigh (2013) also addressed this question.

Information has also been understood as an economic resource and commodity. Two important contributors to this conception are Porat (1977 [17]) and Machlup (1962 [18]; 1980). It became influential, for example, by the term information resource management (see Eaton and Bawden 1991).

If we consider information-as thing, which things are then information, and which are not? When we ask what a thing informs about, we need to realize that this depends on the questions put to it. We must also realize that what questions one is able to put to a thing, depends on one’s knowledge and resources. Today, for example, we can put new questions to specimens in zoological museums because of DNA techniques, and such analyses inform us about biological taxonomy. Any specific thing may always be reinterpreted and answer new questions. Therefore, we may say with Buckland (1991a, 50, italics in original) “We conclude that we are unable to say confidently of anything that it could not be information”. In other words, anything can be informative and thus information for a given question/situation and provide new kinds of information for new questions/situations. If anything is information, is it then an empty word? How can information then be studied? To cope with this problem, it is necessary to understand that a given thing is only informative in relation to a specific perspective.

Bateson (1972, 453) provided an important definition: “information is a difference which makes a difference” [19]. This means, for example, that an animal that is adapted to an organic niche has developed senses and brain mechanisms which, for this species, are designed to identify differences in the environment, that is of importance for it, and inform the animal. Other differences in the environment may be ignored and are not information for the animal [20]. For human beings, it is not primarily the characteristics of the species, that determines which differences are informing the individuals, as it is the cultural and social learning, including the social division of labor and the scholarly traditions in which the individuals have been trained. An expert with a specialization within history of books, for example, may be informed by differences in books, that are not informative for laypersons, and a chemist may perform analyses of the paper which may answer questions that neither the book historian nor the layperson can answer. Theoretically, as already said, any difference may be informative for somebody. It follows that the communication of information in relation to given objects cannot be done objectively but must always be a selection of possible answers done to facilitate certain actions for which the object becomes a tool.

The number of views about information is overwhelming, and so are the attempts to provide overviews and taxonomies of information concepts, such as McKinney and Yoos (2010) who concluded that the lack of a unifying philosophical outlook has produced a preparadigmatic state of flux [21]. But here we find that Bateson’s definition is a very fruitful point of departure.

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3. Relations between information and other concepts

In this section we consider the relations between the term information and the following other terms: matter and energy, data, sign and meaning, knowledge, and communication. Other terms might also have been included, but the chosen terms seem especially important to delimit the meaning of information (e.g., explore if information is used as a synonym for some of these terms). Matter and energy are discussed because it seems important to consider whether information is a fundamental category in the universe on par with these concepts. The most frequently associated terms are those in the so-called DIK pyramid: data, information, and knowledge (sometimes wisdom [21a] is added: DIKW pyramid). This pyramid is therefore discussed, and it is argued that sign and meaning should not be neglected. Finally, communication has been added on the suggestion of a peer-reviewer.

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3.1 Matter and energy

Karpatschof (2000, 129-32) defined information as a quality of a given physical signal relative to a certain release mechanism. The release mechanism is sensitive to a specific signal as a lock to a key, and it has a store of energy and is “designed” [22] to let this energy out in specific ways whenever trigged by a signal fulfilling the specifications of the release mechanism. The signal has a low energy compared with the energy that the release mechanism lets out. The release mechanism may be understood (my interpretation) as a sign processing unit, and it has a double function: (1) it reinforces the weak signal and (2) it directs the reaction by defining the functional value of a signal in the pre-designed system of the release mechanism (“information processing” mechanism or unit). Karpatschof’s view thus corresponds with that of Wiener (1948, 155): “Information is information, not matter or energy” (or the other way round: matter and energy is not information, a view that seems to have been challenged; Chaitin (1999), for example, suggested that information is primary in relation to matter [23-24]).

It is always possible to build a mechanism, that is sensitive to a given signal (or to any given difference to use Bateson’s term) because anything might be information. Information is therefore not some specified elements or parts of the world, again: anything can be information, and it is not possible to say what is information (and what is not information) unless in relation to a specified release mechanism. This agrees with the formerly quote from Buckland (1991a, 50, italics in original), which said that anything might in some imaginable circumstances be informative: “We conclude that we are unable to say confidently of anything that it could not be information”.

Karpatschof thus defines information in physical terms as signals fulfilling certain requirements. However, the mechanisms relative to which information is defined, probably first evolved in living organisms. As we shall see in Section 3.3, instead of “signal” we may speak of “sign” and instead of “release mechanism” we may use “interpretant”, whereby we use a terminology that better fits both the physical, the cognitive and the cultural sphere, although still maintaining the idea of a causal relation between “objects” and “information”.

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3.2 Data

Information is sometimes defined as processed → data. ISO 5127:2017, definition 3.1.1.16, for example reads:

Information: data (3.1.1.15) that are processed, organized and correlated to produce meaning (3.1.8.03).

This definition is part of the so-called → knowledge pyramid (Frické 2019). But although this pyramid is rather popular in the literature of more information sciences, it is nonetheless deeply problematic [25]. Information cannot be defined as processed data just as knowledge cannot be defined as processed information. These three terms are all defined by the ISO 5127 standard, but the definitions are circular and therefore unhelpful (ISO 5127 defines data as “reinterpretable representation of information […]” so, we have not learned what information is because it is defined by a term (data), that presupposes that we know what the term information means).

An alternative definition was provided by Kaase (2015, 830):

Data are information on units of analysis or observation.

For example, the mass of a thing is measured in kilograms according to the International System of Units, so, the information that a given object has the mass of 2 kg can be given as a datum, but it is also informative, it is also information. Information is the broader term, since data represent only the kinds of information which provide “information on units of analysis or observation”. (Other examples, which does not refer to international standards could also be used.) See further about data in Hjørland (2018a) and Schöpfel et al. (2021).

We conclude with Buckland (1991b) that a datum — if recorded — is a kind of information-as-thing or in another word: a kind of document [26].

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3.3 Sign and meaning

Already the 1950s, some authors found Shannon’s (1948) information theory is too narrow, failing to provide a semantic understanding of information. Bar-Hillel and Carnap (1953) attempted to develop a theory that included the semantic dimension. Later MacKay (1969) stated that the concept of information is inseparable from the concept of meaning. Since then, there has been a growing, but scattered interest for the concept of meaning in the study of information.

Signs and meanings are studied by semiotics, and although that study has a long history, Charles Sanders Peirce's view is here taken as the most important one. According to Peirce, there is a basic triadic relation between signs (or “sign-vehicles” [27]), objects and interpretants. Among Peirce’s many definitions, is the one suggested in Peirce 1897 (CP 2, §228):

A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen.

Or shorter: a sign “is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity” [28]. It should be mentioned that Peirce’s concept of sign included thoughts, but still Karpatschof’s explanation is relevant because for both him and Peirce it is the causal connection between signs and what it signifies that is important.

Hjørland (2013, 229) suggested that the general development in information science can be characterized by a movement from information theory (Shannon and Weaver 1949) towards semiotic theories, as also argued by, for example, Gorn (1968), Pearson and Slamecka (1983), Wersig (2003) and Brier (2008). In other words, it has developed towards theories of signs, languages, and meaning in a social perspective[29]. What Wersig (2003, 312) wrote was:

The very notion of SEMIOTICS, which in fact became one of the most important critiques of too simple an application of information theory to human communication, led to the insight that Shannon's mathematical theory was only a theory on the syntactical level (relation of signs to signs), but with no reference to the semantic (relation of signs to meanings) and pragmatic (relation of signs to humans) levels. In consequence, some attempts were made to develop out of Shannon's theory a semantic (e.g. Bar-Hillel and Carnap 1953) or pragmatic (e.g. Yovits 1975) information theory, but these remained in the literature with no great success. [30]

Hjørland (2021) found that Kuhn’s theory of paradigms agrees with the semiotic view, and it illuminates how the meaning of signs (e.g., scientific terms) depends on the paradigm of which they form parts. It should also be repeated here that Peters (1988) considered the meaning of signs in the perspective of Wittgenstein’s philosophy as relative to forms of life.

It should be mentioned that the term document also has been defined semiotically (Buckland 2018, 427) and document theory can be seen as an important part of the change of information science from Shannon’s information theory to semiotics.

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3.4 Knowledge

ISO 5127:2017 defines knowledge in definition 3.1.1.17: “Maintained, processed, and interpreted information (3.1.1.16)”, but we have already considered the problem with these circular definitions in the DIKW hierarchy. In philosophy there are different views about the meaning of the term knowledge. Most influential is Plato’s definition: “knowledge is justified, true belief” (in the dialogue Theaetetus, written circa 369 BCE). However, according to the principle of fallibilism, no scientific theory or statement can ever be considered fully verified. By implication we should never consider something “knowledge” (in Plato’s sense) but just “a knowledge claim”. The study of knowledge is done, in, among other fields, epistemology, sociology of knowledge, semiotics, psychology and cognitive sciences. Important discussions are about issues of objectivity and neutrality of knowledge (claims), which are highly important for all fields involved with the production, management, mediating and use of knowledge and information, and therefore depends on the implicit or explicit view of knowledge on which they are based [31].

Can knowledge be understood as the contents of books and articles in, for example, the scientific and scholarly literature? We speak of knowledge production at universities, and in the philosophy and sociology of knowledge, the term knowledge is often used about content of a scientific document. In → information retrieval, however, we mostly use the term information about the documents being retrieved. The claim supported in the present article is, however, that the field of information retrieval would benefit by considering the knowledge developed by disciplines such as epistemology, sociology of (scientific) knowledge and history of (scientific) knowledge. Therefore, the focus on the term information and its associated disciplines have brought too narrow a focus in the information sciences. What is retrieved in an information retrieval system are documents, which contains potential information or knowledge claims. To examine the status and relevance of the retrieved documents, and thereby to establish criteria for their retrieval, we need to attend to the disciplines studying knowledge. As argued in Section 4.1 this is an argument for preferring the term knowledge organization rather than information organization. (Some authors have replaced the term information with the term knowledge — or discussed to replace it — in relation to information retrieval and information science, e.g., Kemp 1988 and Zins 2006; 2007).

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3.5 Communication

Communication is often understood as the process of transmitting information. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), for example, wrote:

Sense 5b: spec. The transmission or exchange of information, knowledge, or ideas, by means of speech, writing, mechanical or electronic media, etc.; (occasionally) an instance of this.

As the transmission of knowledge and ideas are also about transmission of information, this definition in reality states that communication (sense 5b) is the transmission of information, which is supported by

Sense 5c: plural. The science, practice, or system of transmitting or imparting information, esp. of doing so over a distance by electronic or digital media. See also telecommunication n.

Communication is, however, sometimes understood in a broader sense about transmitting of physical objects. In this broader sense, railways and postal services understood as parts of the communication infrastructures of society. OED:

5a. The action of communicating something (as heat, feeling, motion, etc.), or of giving something to be shared; an instance of this. Cf. communicate v. 1. Now rare with reference to material objects, except as the vehicles of information (letters, papers to learned societies, magazine articles, etc.).

As stated by OED, except as the vehicles of information, this meaning of communication (transmitting physical objects) it today rare and will here be ignored.

It follows, that if we look at the meaning of the terms information and communication they are closely related, and we should therefore expect information science and communication studies to be synonyms or near-synonyms. This also often seems to be the case. There are many indications that information science is about communication and uses this term as a synonym. Shannon’s (1948) paper, known as a founding paper for information theory, was titled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”. The field of scientific and scholarly communication is, despite the name, more related to information science than to communication studies (Fjordback Søndergaard, Andersen and Hjørland 2003 is an example). The final example is the most important one. White (2009, 59) considered literature searching and reading as a form of communication: “Communication with the literature”, this means, that, among other core fields of information science, information retrieval and bibliometrics are here interpreted as communication studies (focusing on documents). However, organizationally these two fields are separated. In Web of Science, for example, there is one field with one group of journals termed “information science & library science” and another field termed “communication”. Information science and communication studies tend to have separate journals, conferences, university departments etc.

Borgman and Rice (1992) examined by means of bibliometric methods whether the disciplines of information science and communication were converging in the period 1977 to 1987. They found that the cross-disciplinary citing between the two fields was mainly done by a few journals, few journals are mainly responsible and overall found very little convergence between these disciplines. One should consider, however, that neither information science nor communication studies (or other fields such as information systems) are coherent disciplines but consists of distinct subsets of journals with little mutual overlapping (e.g., bibliometrics, information retrieval and knowledge organization in information science and media studies, management/organizational studies, and interpersonal communication in communication studies). It would be more informative if such substructures were considered. Some subfields (such as, for example, human-computer communication, medical informatics, and Internet studies) may be more connected to both information science and to communication studies, compared to, for example, interpersonal communication. So, we should not assume that categories as those used in Web of Science cover integrated fields of study.

The understanding of (1) information science (2) communication studies and (3) the interaction between 1 and 2 should be studied from the perspective of the history and theory of those fields, as described, for example, by Hjørland (2018b; 2018c) about information science, Dervin and Reinhard (2017) and Meyen (2015) about communication studies and Ruben (2017) about relations between information and communication. Dervin (1977) argued for a paradigm shift in information science based on communication studies.

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4. The term information in information studies

There are useful overviews of conceptions of information in information science (e.g., Belkin 1975; 1978 and Ingwersen and Järvelin 2005), but in this section the point of departure is the development of the field, considering alternatives to the information concepts. In librarianship, the focus of practice and study was originally books [32], whereas documentation from the late 1800s developed a broader focus, which additionally included journal articles among other kinds of items and their representations in bibliographies and later in bibliographical databases. For this purpose, they introduced the generic term document [33]. The idea was that this term should be used for whichever kind of object could serve to document something, and thus the kinds of object of interest to classify, index and represent in repositories or databases (as well as in → libraries, archives, museums etc.) This term became also subsequently influential in librarianship as the generic term with the same meaning. Thus, core issues in librarianship and documentation can be said to be about the selection, description, indexing, classification and searching of documents. Many people still think this is the most fruitful and best considered concept for this purpose (e.g., Frohmann 2004; Hjørland 2000; Ørom 2007 [34]; Spang-Hanssen 2001), but from about the 1950s the term information largely began to supplant the term document in this field.

Shapiro (1995, 384, italics in original) described the use of the term information in this field prior to the 1950s:

Information desk appeared as an alternate to reference desk by 1891. Information bureau was in use by 1909 to denote an office where reference service was provided; in 1924 the Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux (Aslib) was founded in Britain. In the Aslib Proceedings for 1932, information work was introduced to describe reference assistance.
Use of information as an equivalent of reference began to give way, under the influence of developments in computing, to more sophisticated usage. In 1950, Calvin N. Mooers introduced information retrieval. This term became extremely popular in the 1950s and 1960.

What is the reason for the supplanting of document with information in librarianship and documentation? Does the last term contain more kinds of objects of interest to these fields? Or are there other well considered arguments for it? The immediate impression may be that the answer is “yes” (information is broader), but this impression is challenged by the broad concept of document developed in the documentation movement as well as by other considerations. An influential definition by Suzanne Briet (1951, 7; here cited from Buckland 1991a, 47) is: a document is “any concrete or symbolic indication, preserved or recorded, for reconstructing or for proving a phenomenon, whether physical or mental”.

Perhaps some people would argue that a fact such as “Napoleon was born in 1769” is information, but not a document, or that a sentence in a document is information, but not itself a document. Concerning the first objection, facts can only be represented in databases or information systems if they are what Buckland (1991b) called “information as thing”, but information as thing (or informative objects) corresponds to the broad understanding of document developed by the documentation movement and also advocated by Buckland himself [35]. Concerning the second objection, a short subsection of a document has been termed a microdocument (e.g., by Ranganathan 1963, 29), and in information retrieval the term passage retrieval is often used (cf. Kaszkiel and Zobel 1997). Although there have been many arguments against supplanting the term document with information, there has as far as we know only been one serious defense for the term information (information retrieval rather than document retrieval), but this defense is not convicting [36].

But why, then, did the term information supplant the term document? The two most important reasons may be (1) the influence of Shannon’s so-called “information theory” [37] (Shannon 1948; Shannon and Weaver 1949) and (2) the higher status and prestige associated with the term information, including the prestige obtained by confusion of document management with issues related to more technological issues, or confusion of information specialists with IT specialists (1 and 2 are not unrelated).

Concerning Shannon’s theory, it should be said that it is a theory, which is very important in computer science, and which in the 1950s and 1960s was believed by many to be able to contribute in a very deep and important way to solve problems in librarianship and documentation, and to which most people trying to do serious research in these fields saw no real alternatives [38]. And the fields of librarianship and documentation were (sometimes) renamed information storage and retrieval (see Hjørland 2015), and later the label information science became influential. The term information science has been traced back to Farradane (1955) about the education of information scientists, a term introduced by Farradane (1953), which he considered a synonym for documentalists [39]. Fields such as library science, the science of bibliography, scientific information and documentation were predecessors of information science, as pointed out by Kline (2004, 19):

Called bibliography, documentation, and scientific information during the first five decades of the twentieth century, the field became known as information science in the early 1960s.

One of the events that marks the entry of the term information in the fields of documentation is the change in name of the American Documentation Institute (founded in 1937) in 1968 to the American Society for Information Science. Another set of events is about establishing LIS as a field, which is associated with schools of LIS, which became established in the latter half of the 1960s when schools of librarianship began to add the term “information science” to their names. The first school to do this was the one at the University of Pittsburgh in 1964. More schools followed during the 1970s and 1980s and, by the end of the 1990s, almost all the library schools in the USA had added the element “information science” to their name, and a similar development took place in many other parts of the world.

The connection between information and information science was suggested in Oxford English Dictionary (OED) by Proffitt (2010), who noted:

In quick succession [after information processing, information retrieval, information storage (all three dated from 1950)] came terms relating to the academic study of the phenomenon, appearing in a neatly logical sequence: first the idea (information theory, 1950), next its budding adherents (information scientist, 1953), then the established field of study (information science, 1955).

This is one indication of how the term information became so influential in librarianship and documentation that it became the name for the field. Information theory is not just a theory of a phenomenon (information) that was known before the theory was formulated. Information theory provided its own definition of information. Oxford English Dictionary, information, sense 2c:

As a mathematically defined quantity divorced from any concept of news or meaning […]; spec. one which represents the degree of choice exercised in the selection or formation of one particular symbol, message, etc., out of a number of possible ones, and which is defined logarithmically in terms of the statistical probabilities of occurrence of the symbol or the elements of the message. The latter sense (introduced by Shannon, quot.1948, though foreshadowed earlier) is that used in information theory, where information is usually regarded as synonymous with entropy (entropy n. 3b).

This theory allows us to measure, how many bits are in a given file or are being transmitted in a wire or a wireless connection [40]. It is simply a necessary theory for computer science. But although there have been expectations that this theory and its corresponding definition of information would also be fruitful for librarianship/documentation/information science, this turned out to be a false hope. A clear explanation of why Shannon’s information theory does not work for the field of documentation is given by Spang-Hanssen (2001), who wrote:

I shall only mention a few points to show the limitation of this measure [Shannon’s amount of information] to our conception of information.
In Shannon’s sense, the amount of information is proportional to the length of the message (in a given code). This obviously does not apply to the utilization of literature as information. Among other things, an abstract may be as informative as the complete paper.
Shannon’s amount of information presupposes a measure of the uncertainty on behalf of the receiver. By the utilization of literature as information no measurable uncertainty can be defined generally.
Shannon’s amount of information applies to some explicit coding and cannot in the case of normal writing (or speech) account for semantic relations that are not shown by similarities of expression. E.g., the synonyms ‘serials’ and ‘periodicals’ would be treated as different messages (or parts of messages) having different ‘amounts of information’.

An important thing to consider is whether this terminological shift from document to information was motivated by change in subject matter, if they had any substantial background, or if they were merely reflecting terminological shifts related to popular trends or fads? Spang-Hanssen wrote: “The word information — and combinations like information retrieval, information center — have definitely contributed to raise the public opinion of library and documentation work, which is generally held to be a little dull, dusty and distant from what is actually going on in society”. He also wrote that he had no moral objections to such use but warned about conceptual confusion. However, in retrospect the use of information rather than document has caused so much confusion in the field that we must question Spang-Hanssen’s view about the moral legacy of using the term. Academic fields must aim at terminological and theoretical clarity, and bad terminological hygiene cannot be justified by such political reasons.

The case is, as pointed out by Furner (2004), we don't really need a separate concept of information to do information studies, because we already have perfectly good concepts of sign, data, meaning, relevance, and so on, that allow us to get the job done. All the problems we need to consider in information studies can be dealt with without any need for a concept of information [41].

There is another serious problem with the concept of information in information studies. People educated in this field is sometimes called “information specialists”. But what is an information specialist a specialist in? If we recall Buckland’s statement (1991a, 50) “We conclude that we are unable to say confidently of anything that it could not be information”, we face the problem that information specialists are experts in anything, the logical implication being that they are experts in nothing.

Although the introduction of the term information in librarianship and documentation was, as we saw, primarily caused by the influence of Shannon’s theory, and although Wersig (2003, 213) called the period between 1948 and the 1970s “The Shannon and Weaver phase”, thus indicating that this period ended in the 1970s, the term information continued to be used, but its meaning changed according to the theoretical orientation (see Hjørland 2018b; 2018c about theoretical developments in LIS). There is a rising interest for social, semiotic and constructivist approaches in the field [42]. It should be mentioned, however, that, among others, Robinson and Bawden (2013, 136) still seek inspiration in the natural sciences development of information theories [43].

Burgin (2010, vii-viii) wrote about the use of the concept information in what he terms “information science” (which might better be considered a range of different information sciences):

Looking into information science, we encounter a peculiar situation. On the one hand, it has a lot of theories, a diversity of results, and even a proclaimed success. Scientists have created a bulk of information theories: Shannon’s statistical information theory, semantic information theory, dynamic information theory, qualitative information theory, Marschak’s economical information theory, utility information theory, Fisher’s statistical information theory, algorithmic information theory and so on. Researchers study information ecology (cf., for example, (Davenport [and Prusak], 1997) and information economics (cf., for example, (Marschak, 1959; 1974; Arrow, 1984; Godin, 2008)), created information algebra (cf., for example, (Burgin, 1997b; Kohlas, 2003)), information geometry (cf., for example, (Amari and Nagaoka, 2000)), information logic (van Rijsbergen, 1986; 1989; Demri and Orlowska, 1999), information calculus (van Rijsbergen and Lalmas, 1996), physics of information (cf., for example, (Stonier, 1990; Siegfried, 2000; Pattee, 2006)), and philosophy of information (cf., for example, (Herold, 2004)), but still do not know what information is. Each year, dozens of books and thousands of papers are published on problems of information. On the other hand, as it is written in the introduction to the authoritative book “Information Policy and Scientific Research” [Manten and Timman 1983], ‘Our main problem is that we do not really know what information is’.

Burgin’s conclusion seems thus to confirm the one we reached by considering LIS: there is no agreement of what information means or about its role in theoretical issues in the field, and there are even suggestions that the term should rather be substituted with document. The introduction of the term information has led to an unnecessary duplication of synonyms (materials selection becomes information selection, document retrieval becomes information retrieval etc. etc.).

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4.1 The term information in knowledge organization

Hjørland (2012) examined the relation between four phrases: knowledge organization (KO), information architecture (IA), information organization (IO) and organization of information (OI). Should they be considered synonyms, or do they represent 2, 3 or 4 different concepts?

Knowledge organization (KO) is well established and used as name for an established field of research with the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) and its publications, including the journal Knowledge Organization, as core actors in this field. ISKO got its name in 1989, and Bliss’ (1929) book The Organization of Knowledge and the System of the Sciences may also be considered a milestone in establishing the field. The tendency to relate → library classifications to classification of knowledge (e.g., the liberal arts curriculum in the Middle Ages: the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) goes, however, far back in the history of libraries (see Miksa 1994) [44].

Information architecture (IA) is a term of a more recent origin (its history is described by Resmini and Rosati 2011), first used about computer architecture in 1964, but today Evernden and Evernden (2003, 1, italics in original) claim: “Information architecture is a foundation discipline describing the theory, principles, guidelines, standards conventions and factors for managing information as a resource”. The field has different perspectives, among other an emphasis on design and architecture, but Rosenfeld and Morville (1998) was a very popular and influential book, which, for a period, made IA almost synonym with design of webpages. This book is very much in the information science/knowledge organization tradition (with, for example, → thesauri, controlled vocabularies, and → metadata, but with emphasis on web applications). Despite the overlapping topic, IA is relatively unconnected to KO (with different lists of highly cited authors and papers), and as said it claims to be an independent discipline. A question is, however, whether there is a basis for two different disciplines (KO and IA). IA may have a focus in which KO has a weaker profile. But if KO as a discipline aims at developing systems and processes for many different contexts (and if IA aims at the broad definition cited above) then the basis for two different disciplines seems to disappear. In other words, at the theoretical level, KO and IA should be considered synonym terms. See also Jacob and Loehrlein (2009).

Information organization (IO) and organization of information (OI) are two phrases that are more interdisciplinarily used and thus less sharply defined. Hudon (2021, 11) showed that these terms (OI and IO) are now by far the most used terms for knowledge organization in master’s programs accredited by the American Library Association, seemingly being used synonymous, with OI being the most applied phrase. Texts such as Svenonius (2000) and Taylor and Joudrey (2017) are clearly in the field of LIS/KO but have respectively preferred the terms organization of information and information organization in the title, while Rowley and Hartley (2008) wanted to guard themselves and therefore used both “knowledge organization” and “information” in their title. However, if we look at the collected number of disciplines, the most cited authors, papers, and journals using the terms IO and OI are more cited in other fields compared to KO, for example in cognitive psychology and management science. (This does not indicate, however, that IO and OI have the same meaning in, e.g., KO and cognitive psychology.)

Our conclusion is that KO, IO and OI are used as synonyms within library and information science, but that IO and OI represent other concepts in relation to, for example, cognitive psychology and management science. Again, the use of IO and OI seems not to be based on scholarly arguments but rather on issues about popularity.

If KO and OI (for example) are synonyms, which of the terms should be preferred? The field’s declining interest in information theory and its growing interest in “knowledge sciences” such as epistemology, the sociology of knowledge and the social history of knowledge is one argument for preferring the term KO. Another argument is that KO is historically and organizationally the term that is best established (the tendency often to change names for scholarly fields should be considered bad terminological hygiene if they are not well motivated) [45].

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5. Some selected compounds and phrases

Compounds and phrases containing the word information are numerous, and their use and meanings contribute to provide a deeper understanding of the term information. For example, why is information retrieval used as name for a field of study (rather than, for example, document retrieval)? Is the field known as knowledge organization the same as what is designated information organization? Below a selection of the most important are presented and discussed (in alphabetical order). No attempt has been made to provide a full coverage of all compounds, but to present the ones deemed to be most important.

• Information architecture. The name of a field closely related to knowledge organization, with emphasis on designing webpages (see further Section 4.1 in the present article).
• Information explosion. OED: “a rapid increase in the amount of information available, (now) esp. as a result of the increased use, availability, and sophistication of information technology”. Spang-Hanssen (2001) pointed out that this term is problematic by ignoring if anybody is being informed and found it “can in the first place be termed only the publication explosion” [46].
• Information management is a polysemic term. It can mean both a subfield of LIS, and an independent field or part of the field of management. As a LIS term it may refer to the way information resources are managed, and thus be synonym to knowledge organization (with classification, indexing, document description etc. being termed “information management”, as is the case with the journal Information Processing and Management, formerly called Information Storage and Retrieval), but it may also refer to the way organizations manage their information resources (and how information technology may support such activities), and this meaning is by far the most used. Information management also has an unclear relation to the term knowledge management (See further in Detlor 2017 and Bouthillier and Shearer 2002).
• Information need is a concept that is much used in LIS and IR. It is dominated by a psychological rather than by a subject-oriented perspective [47], which is problematic [48]. If, for example, a student (or a researcher) writes a paper, his teacher (or a peer-reviewer) may find, based on their subject knowledge, that the student or researcher needs to consult some sources. The idea that information professionals primarily need psychological knowledge about users to help them is therefore a serious fallacy. It is typical that researchers in the psychological school speak of information needs in very abstract ways, omitting, for example, to consider their own information needs or those of their colleagues, which quickly would reveal the subject-oriented and epistemological dimension of the concept.
• Information organization and organization of information are two terms commonly used as synonyms with knowledge organization (see Section 4.1 in the present article).
• Information overload. OED: “exposure to or provision of too much information; a problematic situation or state of mental stress arising from this (cf. information fatigue n.)”. This term is problematic by considering information as some physical quantities (documents). If information is understood as knowledge (corresponding to Buckland’s first category cited above) one would not speak of “knowledge overload” in the same way. What is meant by information overload is not that somebody is too well informed, but that the process of being well-informed is too time-consuming and costly because the user must consider too many fragmented claims with insufficient tools to select the most relevant ones [49].
• Information processing OED: “the processing of information (by a machine or by an organism) so as to yield new or more useful information; frequently attributive; cf. data processing n.”. This term seems unclear in distinguishing between data processing, message processing [50], sign processing [51] (including word processing and text processing), and knowledge processing. (The term is part of the title of the journal Information Processing & Management.) Probably the main use of the term is about algorithms working on data processing (see also Slamecka 2018).
• Information retrieval (IR) was coined by Mooers (1950; 1951). OED defined it: “the tracing and recovery of information using reference materials, esp. the recovery of information stored in a computer system”. The term is extremely much used and is considered a core field in information science, although research has mainly immigrated to computer science (and provide the basis for search engines, among other systems). As discussed in the present article it should be considered a misnomer for “document retrieval”. Hjørland (2021) found that mainstream IR research is based on statistical distributions of words or n-grams in documents, collections of documents and queries. Alternatively, he suggested a top-down perspective based on concepts and conceptions and the philosophy of science connected to the field of knowledge organization. Compared to the broader term information searching, IR is today mainly used about statistical based search techniques.
• Information science is a term that was first used by Farradane (1955). It is further described in the present encyclopedia in the article Library and information science (LIS) (Hjørland 2018b; 2018c). There is a lot of disciplines and fields engaged in the term information, and many use this term as a core term for their definitions. Different fields, such as information science, information systems science, information architecture etc. have so vague definitions that it is impossible to differentiate them based on such definitions. They are often strongly overlapping, and their differentiation seems less caused by subject matter and more by origins in different contexts (e.g., librarianship, management and computer science).
  Information scientist was first used by Farradane (1953) as another term for documentalist. It is sometimes used as a synonym for information professional, although the last term includes people who are not working as researchers.
• Information searching is a term with a different connotation compared to IR and information seeking. It is about selecting sources to be searched, → subject access points chosen and search strategies to be used. Professional principles for searching databases including “literature searching” and “document searching” are better termed information searching than information retrieval or information seeking. The terminology is loose, and this is also often called “information seeking”, but there is a need for another term. Example of texts are Higgins et al. (2019, chapter 4) and Markey (2019). Document searching includes the use of bibliographical references, see → Citation indexing and indexes (Araújo, Castanha and Hjørland 2021).
• Information seeking is a term mostly used about descriptive (as opposed to normative) approaches of the way people search for information, e.g., when they or one of their relatives get a disease. It is much connected to psychological issues and researchers” assumptions on psychological factors influencing why and how people seek information. It is a very popular subfield of LIS. The journal Information Research: an international electronic journal is mostly about this topic and Looking for Information (Case and Given 2016) is a standard in this field.
• Information storage and retrieval (IS&R) is a phrase that mainly seems to have been replaced by the term information science. The journal Information Processing & Management was founded in 1963 as Information Storage and Retrieval but changed its name to the current one in 1976. See further in Hjørland (2015).
• Information system. A term used by a multitude of rather different things (see Stewart, Cotton and Adya, 2017) [52]. Libraries, databases, → knowledge organization systems and information retrieval systems are, in a way, kinds of information systems, and logically this term should therefore be considered part of LIS (as it sometimes is, e.g., in Buckland 1991a). Information systems is however the name for another field with its own journals (e.g., Information Systems Research), associations (e.g., Association for Information Systems, https://aisnet.org/), conferences, university departments, etc. [53]. As a discipline, information systems is related to management (management information system, MIS). See further in Haigh (2001).
• Information technology (IT) was defined by OED: “The branch of technology concerned with the dissemination, processing, and storage of information, esp. by means of computers” [54]. Haigh (2011, 432-3) explained that the term changed meaning. Its first use (Leavitt and Whisler 1958) intended to promote a technocratic vision for the future of business management but was revived in policy and economic circles in the 1970s with a new meaning:

  Information technology now described the expected convergence of the computing, media, and telecommunications industries (and their technologies), understood within the broader context of a wave of enthusiasm for the computer revolution, post-industrial society, information society (Webster, 1995), and other fashionable expressions of the belief that new electronic technologies were bringing a profound rupture with the past. As it spread broadly during the 1980s, IT increasingly lost its association with communications (and, alas, any vestigial connection to the idea of anybody actually being informed of anything) to become a new and more pretentious way of saying “computer”. The final step in this process is the recent surge in references to “information and communication technologies” or ICTs, a coinage that makes sense only if one assumes that a technology can inform without communicating.

  Despite great overlap with computer science and other fields, there seems to be a tendency for information technology to establish itself with societies, journals, educational programs etc. There are, for example, many bachelor programs in IT [55].
• Information theory goes according to OED back to 1948 and is closely associated with Shannon’s (1948) theory, although Spang-Hanssen (2001), among others, argued that this a misnomer [56]. Other meanings refer to the various theories used in information science (e.g., Wersig 2003), which would be logical if it the term information science itself was not also a misnomer. See also Hofkirchner (1999), Hjørland (2002b).

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6. Conclusion

In developing scholarly fields, such as library and information science with knowledge organization, one should consider the different theoretical orientations and work on the further development of the most fruitful perspective. In this process, all the terms used should be considered and evaluated from the perspective of providing theoretical clarity, theoretical coherence, etc. One should not start with a concept or theory because it has appeal or prestige or is popular. Of course, the usefulness of such theories should also be considered, and it is important in scholarship that negative results are also well considered and documented. A term should not be considered in isolation, but in relation to other terms (e.g., data, sign and knowledge) in the given domain. The conclusion is therefore that the way forward is first to consider the relative merits and disadvantages of different meta-theoretical positions such as information theory and semiotics, and second to develop the field from such a well-considered perspective.

The term information seems to be a very clear example of the theory of semantic holism associated with Kuhn”s (1962) theory of scientific paradigms, which suggests that each paradigm is associated with its own concept of information, and the other way round: that each concept of information, more or less, corresponds to a specific paradigm. We have seen how ancient hylomorphism understood information as bringing everything in the world in-form, which was replaced by empiricism”s view that the world came to in-form the senses of individuals, implying a very different concept of information. Shannon’s view of information as a mathematically defined quantity divorced from any concept of news or meaning, which is highly fruitful in computer science, but not in LIS. The cognitive view of information as something that changes the knowledge structures of individuals and semiotic, social, and cultural understandings of information such as Goguen (1979): an interpretation of a configuration of signs for which members of some social group are accountable. The lessen to be learned is that information can only be understood as a part of its theoretical context, and the search for a fruitful understanding must consider the fruitfulness of the paradigms and theories of which it forms part.

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