The fundamentals of information science

an online overview

web.njit.edu/~robertso/infosci

  • Berners-Lee on the "broken web"
  • Bradford's Law of Scattering
  • Chubin and Moitra's Citation Typology
  • Computer "bug" -- origin of the word
  • Conservation of data
  • Controlled vocabulary
  • Copyright: what the Constitution says
  • Crawford and Gorman's updated laws of library science
  • Darknet: what is it
  • Data, information, knowledge hierarchy
  • Digital death: nine modes by Richard Wiggins
  • Heinlein on information science
  • Hyperbolic space
  • Information obsolescence and information half-life
  • Information science: what is it?
  • Killer app by Berger
  • Memes
  • Metcalf's Law
  • Mooers's Law (Calvin Mooers)
  • Mooers (Calvin) on Boolean retrieval systems
  • Moore's Law (Gordon E. Moore)
  • Persistence of Information
  • Polysemy
  • Pre- and post-coordinate indexing systems
  • Recall and precision
  • Redundancy
  • Reference service: measuring quality
  • Relevance feedback
  • Semantic web -- what is it?
  • Serendipity
  • Shelf fatigue
  • Stop words and stop lists
  • Swanson's undiscovered public knowledge
  • Synonymy
  • Taylor on six categories of value-added
  • Truncation vs. wildcards
  • Unintended data usage
  • Warhol, updated for the web
  • Zipf's Law
  • In addition to the entries I've written above, I'd like to also point readers to other sites on the web that have interesting information and essays about information science topics.

  • Michael Lesk's The Seven Ages of Information Retrieval.
  • Joan Reitz's ODLIS: Online Dictionary of Library and Information Science
  • ASIS's list of Information Science Pioneers

  • Disclaimer: While I am a professional librarian, I make no claims to be an expert information scientist. This guide is intended for laypeople and librarians who want to understand some of the concepts behind basic information science theories (as well as other interesting thoughts on "information society"), without necessarily mastering the mathematics.

    Created Jan. 30, 1996, by Jim Robertson. Last update: 11-Oct-2004.