[Sigia-l] Serious Discussion of IA Research?

[Conal Tuohy]

Boniface Lau:

> > From: Conal Tuohy
> > 
> > > From: Conal Tuohy
> > >  
> > > To me, it's precisely the ACQUISITION and STORAGE of that data
> > > which constitutes "information". Not the data themselves.
> > 
> > Boniface Lau:
> > 
> > > Are you saying that information is the act of acquiring and
> > > storing data?
> > 
> > More or less, yes. 
> 
> Then, information cannot be preserved for even a moment. Is that your
> understanding of information?

No I don't think so. Remember, my understanding of information is as a process rather than as a thing which can be preserved like fruit. What is really preserved when information is "preserved" is the ability to extract meaning from data. On the one hand, if the data are lost, then there is nothing for us to extract meaning from. But even if the data themselves are preserved perfectly, the information can still be lost if we forget how to read the data, or we lose related data which provide a necessary key to the data, we have insufficient metadata in order to "make sense" of the data, or some other context is missing. IA is about providing the conceptual tools and scaffolding to help people construct meaning from data.