INFORMATION SCIENCE: DISCIPLINE OR DISAPPEARANCE

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Abstract
It is now some twenty years since the activity which has come to be known as information science had its discernible origin as one of the so-called new interdisciplinary fields that emerged in the post-war proliferation of scientific activity. This scientific revolution which also produced such new fields as operations research, game theory, systems engineering, cybernetics and so forth can for the most part be traced to the war itself in that they were attempts to develop general methods for dealing with problem areas, the likes of which were encountered during the conduct of the war. The origins of information science, for example, can be directly traced to the war during which the efficient and knowledgeable handling of masses of information was necessary. Because these tasks were generally assigned to undermanned staffs, it was natural for people to believe that the solution to problems relating to information processing lay in the supply of necessary manpower to carry out a sequence of clerical tasks. With the immediate post-war proliferation of scientific publications which in no small degree resulted from the demonstration of the value of science in the war and hence the ensuing formation of new areas of activity, it was no wonder that scientists began to feel that (1) an information explosion was taking place and (2) critical communication problems were arising in the scientific community due to this information explosion.

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