

Information and Society
Author: Michael Buckland
Narrator: Steven Jay Cohen
Unabridged: 3 hr 48 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Ascent Audio
Published: 04/30/2018
Categories: Nonfiction, Computers, Language Arts, Information Science
Synopsis
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.