The fundamentals of information science

an online overview

jamescrobertson.com/infosci

This was written some time ago; it is preserved because there is some good info here. (Jim in Dec 2012)

  • Berners-Lee on the "broken web"
  • Bradford's Law of Scattering
  • Brook's Law
  • CAPTCHA
  • 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
  • Data mining
  • Digital death: nine modes by Richard Wiggins
  • Dunbar's Law
  • Dunn's Law of Service
  • Heinlein on information science
  • Hyperbolic space
  • Information obsolescence and information half-life
  • Information science: what is it?
  • Killer app by Berger
  • Linus' Law
  • 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
  • Reed's Law
  • Redundancy
  • Reference service: measuring quality
  • Relevance feedback
  • Semantic web -- what is it?
  • Serendipity
  • Shelf fatigue
  • Simon and the Economy of Attention
  • Small Worlds, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, and Erdos Numbers
  • Stop words and stop lists
  • Swanson's undiscovered public knowledge
  • Synonymy
  • Taylor on six categories of value-added
  • Turing Test
  • 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.

    Disclaimer: While I am trained as a 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.