Information vs. documentation

Birger Hjørland, in the preface to Henning Spang-Hanssen's "How to Teach About Information as Related to Documentation?"

[T]here is still much confusion about the concept of information and its place in library science and documentation. This confusion concerns whether information refers to information technology (IT) as a way of transmitting knowledge or whether it means the thing being communicated, the content of the transmission process. There are important differences between using the concept of information or the concept of documents (whether electronic or not). A document has a history, an author, a history of influence and reception in other documents, while "information" tends to be ahistorical and unsituated. "Information" is an important concept to help raise the status of a dusty library profession, as Spang-Hanssen writes, but it is problematic as a fundamental concept in LIS [library and information science]].

As a theoretical concept, "information" tends to move LIS unto theories about control, feedback, coding and noise in transmitting messages, while "document" tends to move LIS towards theories about meaning, language, knowledge, epistemology, and sociology. In LIS there may therefore be a whole paradigmatic conflict hidden in those words.

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