Information and Society, Michael Buckland
Information and Society, Michael Buckland
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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


Synopsis

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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Antariksa on October 17, 2021

This book serves as a useful introduction to information science, with a heavy focus on information organization. It is easy to read and gives a lot of everyday examples and cases to show why it is important to study information, although the book could be a lot shorter than it is.......more

Goodreads review by Philip on June 01, 2020

A fascinating dive into a "I-thought-I-knew-about-that" world. I enjoyed the book. I enjoyed the subject matter. Unfortunately I thought that the author could have done a better job at both organizing the material, and describing the material. On the organization front, there are several themes, but......more

Goodreads review by Jay on October 12, 2018

The title is expansive, but I found the text to be modest in its target. I was expecting a kind of primer on metadata, with broad implications. Instead, I found this more tied to how to use metadata to help people find related documents. I had also expected to read about technical innovation in meta......more

Goodreads review by Kieran on August 25, 2020

The book was quite well laid out, and met expectations for both the technical and sociopolitical analysis of information in the modern day. This book combined with another in this series by MIT called metadata is quite interesting. The short chapter does it some justice, but it makes this book a mor......more

Goodreads review by Jonatan on October 15, 2024

Nah, I don’t know man. It looked kinda interesting at first. Got less interesting the more I read. And at the very end (well, to be honest, more like the second half), I had to force it. When the reading ain't natural, it is just not the right book at the right time. Not for me.......more