Information Science

Citation

Bawden, D. (2007), "Information Science", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 9, pp. 842-843. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710831365

A book with the title “Information Science” ought to be of immediate and clear interest to educators and reflective practitioners. Usually they are not. This one is no exception, although it rather more to recommend it to our profession than most of its equivalents.

David Luenberger, a well‐known author, has produced this book as a text for Stanford University students, from a variety of disciplines and at a variety of levels, following a course in the science of information. It is an example of the best kind of American student textbook: clearly written, well‐produced, with copious examples.

The author acknowledges at the start that, given the wide audience, the book cannot hope to cover “everything about information”. Instead it is limited to five “aspects”, and within those to specific examples and concepts, rather than trying to give an overview. The audience is said to be students intending to work in “the information industry”; this is not explained further, but the topics chosen for inclusion suggest that it is aimed primarily at computer scientists, information engineers, and management information specialists.

The five aspects chosen for coverage are: entropy (the foundation of information); economics (strategies for value); encryption (security through mathematics); extraction (information from data); and emission (the mastery of frequency). The section on entropy deals with Shannon‐Weaver information and some of its applications, and is as clear an account as any on offer. It includes some material familiar to a library/information audience, such as Zipf's Law and redundancy in texts, but generally focuses on the usual “communication channels” issues.

The economics section deals with issues such as the pricing of information products, economic modelling, and a game theoretic approach to common and mutual knowledge. This part of the book in particular would have benefited from an overview or review treatment, coming across as rather disconnected topics, and not dealing with many of those of particular interest in a library/information setting. The section on encryption goes beyond its stated remit, including a variety of security‐related topics, though all from a technical perspective.

The extraction section deals with data structures, algorithms for sorting and merging data, database systems, text retrieval, and data mining and classification methods. Coverage of the topics is clear, and the whole gives a good technically oriented overview, but I suspect than student of practitioner needing to get to grips with information representation and retrieval would choose one of the many good texts dedicated wholly to these topics. Finally, the section dealing with emission is a straightforward introductory account of telecommunications principles.

I cannot imagine that this book would be used as a main text on any library/information course, in Europe at least. It would be useful supplementary reading for some of the more technical issues, and a practitioner might find it useful in the same way, particularly if they had to gain a quick familiarity with some technical matters. The level of mathematical sophistication required to understand the book is not great, but even so it might be daunting to those who do not care for equations.