Like Any Real-World Object,
Information Has Many Interesting Qualities

Information can be contained

• "The repository 'contains' information, in some static sense. We have to have some mental system for imagining what is inside that repository." William Kent, Data and Reality: Basic Assumptions in Data Processing Reconsidered  North-Holland, 1978

Information can be stored

• "The information stored in an information system is called a data base" Dagobert Soergel, Organizing Information: Principles of Data Base and Retrieval Systems  Academic Press, 1985

Information can be represented, stored, organized, and accessed

• "Information retrieval is concerned with the representation, storage, organization, and accessing of information items" Gerard Salton and Michael J. McGill, Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval  McGraw-Hill, 1983

Information consists of something

• "Information retrieval is best understood if one remembers that the information being processed consists of documents" Gerard Salton and Michael J. McGill, Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval  McGraw-Hill, 1983

Information can take a form

• "Traditionally, information takes the form of text, implying that information retrieval is synonymous with document or text retrieval, regardless of whether we talking about full-text, administrative, directory, numeric or bibliographic information" Peter Ingwersen, Information Retrieval Interaction  Taylor Graham, 1992

Information is more than just books

• "'Information' is more than books, regardless of the early impressions we all gained as student-clients of the library. Information that is considered useful or worthy of retention over a period of time appears in many forms other than that of the traditional book. Information in this widened sense may, in certain contexts, include artifacts, inscriptions, and decorations which are the records of the anthropologist and the historian. Such records may vary in form from that of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Rosetta Stone. In the field of information retrieval, the word 'information' is usually restricted to designate documents ( or other graphic records ) which record this information for later reference and use." Allen Kent, Textbook on mechanized information retrieval   John Wiley, 1962

Basic information has repository

• "Traditionally books are the major constituents of libraries, but in special libraries their importance has declined, thought they are by no means as useless as is sometimes suggested. They remain the repositories of basic information, of facts and data, as in encyclopedias and other reference works, and occasionally present new syntheses, too broad in scope for any other sort of presentation." Thomas D. Wilson and James Stephenson, Dissemination of Information  Philosophical Library, 1966

Information transcends space and time

• "Information is what humans and human-produced records communicate to other humans over space and over time. Like life itself, it has many different forms, depending on the environment. We all use information, but, for all its familiarity, its essential nature has proved difficult to define." Jean Tague-Sutcliffe, Measuring Information: An Information Services Perspective  Academic Press, 1995

Information can be collected

• "Databases are collections of information that exist in machine-readable form, that is, in digital form in which they can be processed by computers and other data processing equipment." Stephen P. Harter Online Information Retrieval: Concepts, Principles, and Techniques  Academic Press, 1986

Enterprise information can be structured

• "One of the most important tasks a relational DBMS user or administrator has to perform is database design, the activity of structuring the enterprise information in well-specified relational schemas, that may be implemented in relational systems." Georges Gardarin and Patrick Valduriez, Relational Databases and Knowledge Bases  Addison-Wesley, 1989

Information can be responsive, timely, integrated, consistent, accurate and relevant

• "The nature of information is determined by its usefulness to the user. It is the usefulness of information that determines the success of a computer-based information system. The information must be responsive to the user in four main areas. It must be timely, integrated with other data and information, consistent and accurate, and relevant." Hossein Bidgoli, Handbook of Management Information Systems: A Managerial Perspective  Academic Press, 1999

Information is one of the two main requirements to a system

• "There are two main requirements necessary to a system: information and feedback" William F. Williams, Principles of Automated Information Retrieval  The Business Press, 1968

Information can create an ecology

• We define an information ecology to be a system of people, practices, values, and technologies in a particular local environment. In information ecologies, the spotlight is not on technology, but on human activities that are served by technology. Bonnie A. Nardi and Vicki L. O'Day, Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart  The MIT press, 1999

Information can be extracted

• "The science of extracting useful information from large data sets or databases is known as data mining." David Hand, Heikki Mannila and Padhraic Smyth. Principles of Data Mining  The MIT Press, 2001

Information can be needed and translated

• "The user of a retrieval system has to translate his information need into a query in the language provided by the system." Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, Modern Information Retrieval  Addison-Wesley, 1999

I began to tire at this point, but I hadn't yet exhausted my office library. If you feel it necessary-and I have the energy-I could extend this listing further.