Information technology (IT) is meant to integrate both computer science and information science. Both study information retrieval perhaps most seriously. Since the recent radical progress of generative AI, IT appears to approach singularity. Meanwhile, a serious concern was recently expressed concerning the likely harm to be done human beings by AI. Most people would agree. This is where “Information Technology for People” comes in. Information and its technology should be made only to benefit people. Declining information science should better take it more seriously.
It is becoming more and more important, especially since the recent radical development of artificial intelligence (AI). It is becoming more than common sense. Therefore, they must be guided properly by good textbooks. Yet such guidebooks are rare. This essay may be used instead as minimal requirement.
A computer is composed of not only hardware but also software.
What is information vs. knowledge? Everybody has more or less knowledge. Scholars have more in their field. Some of it may be shared among others. We will call such shared knowledge information. The more shared and benefitting, the greater its value will be. To this end, information processing is needed in many ways. All our mental activity is IP. Either is diverse. To do our information processing better or faster, you may use both hardware and software of a computer. Google information retrieval (IR) system is a software. Artificial intelligence (AI) like ChatGPT is another. Such AI is more precisely called generative AI, because it generates a response to your prompt.
Information Seeking and Information Retrieval
Information seeking (iS) is traditionally one of serious scholarly jobs, long before information retrieval (IR) was coined more seriously than ever. While information retrieval was mostly computerized, even scholarly information seeking long remained manual. Its computer use was first proposed in 1975 by Kyung-Youn Park in his MSc thesis submitted to University College London. To help scholars in citation-context tracking, he required a citation-context index or database in digital form. This was realized as CiteSeer in 1998 by NEC Research Institute, now NEC Labs. It was granted a US patent for its automation aspect, excluding its concept which belongs to Park. It was followed by Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic (later withdrawn) and many others.
Information seeking (iS) is traditionally one of serious scholarly jobs, long before information retrieval (IR) was coined more seriously than ever. While information retrieval was mostly computerized, even scholarly information seeking long remained manual. Its computer use was first proposed in 1975 by Kyung-Youn Park in his MSc thesis submitted to . To help scholars in citation-context tracking, he required a citation-context index or database in digital form. This was realized as CiteSeer in 1998 by NEC Research Institute, now NEC Labs. It was granted a US patent for its automation aspect, excluding its concept which belongs to Park. It was followed by Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic (later withdrawn) and many others.
. To help scholars in citation-context tracking, he required a citation-context index or database in digital form. This was realized as CiteSeer in 1998 by NEC Research Institute, now NEC Labs. It was granted a US patent for its automation aspect, excluding its concept which belongs to Park. It was followed by Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic (later withdrawn) and many others.
Scholars are highly cognitive during citation-context tracking to make best sense of citations in context. We may call this phenomenon cognitive contextualism. This recognition was Park’s another theoretical contribution in addition to a practical one mentioned above. Meanwhile, information science experienced the cognitive turn since the late 1970s. More precisely since the First International Research Forum in Information Science held in London in 1975. It was organized by my supervisor Bertram Brookes and his doctoral students Stephen Robertson and Nicholas Belkin. Meanwhile, it still remains a historical question who practically caused it. The turn turned out highly productive. Not only the above three but also Marc de Mey of cognitive paradigm, Henry Small of citation-context analysis, Brenda Dervin of sense-making, Marcia Bates of berry-picking, Peter Ingwersen of cognitive information retrieval, and many others.
They say that the total amount of publications increases rapidly. This is often called information explosion. It may be somewhat exaggerated. The more information there is, the harder information retrieval (IR) would be generally. Meanwhile, the computer is far less sensitive to the massive amount of information. Quality of IR matters seriously rather than quantity of information. To resolve this, there is a long history of IR experimental research projects, including Cranfield experiments, SMART Information Retrieval System, and Text Retrieval Conference. These continued for almost four decades since the late 1960s. Strangely, all these were barren or ending with no IR system.
