Information Sources in the Medical Sciences [antikvár]

Series Editors' Foreword Mi- y Daniel Bell has made it clear in his book The Post-Industrial Society that we now live in an age in which information has succeeded raw materials and energy as the primary commodity. We have also seen in recent years the growth of a new discipline, information science. This is in spite of the fact that skill in acquiring and using information has always been one of the distinguishing features of the educated person. As Dr Johnson observed, 'Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.' But a new problem faces the modern educated person. We now have an excess of information, and even an excess of sources of information. This is often called the 'information explosion', though it might be more accurately called the 'publication explosion'. Yet it is of a deeper nature than either. The totality of knowledge itself, let alone of theories and opinions about knowledge, seems to have increased to an unbelievable extent, so that the pieces one seeks in order to solve any problem appear to be but a relatively few small straws in a very large haystack. That analogy, however, implies that we are indeed seeking but a few straws. In fact, when information arrives on our desks, we often find those few straws are actually far too big and far too numerous for one person to grasp and use easily. In the jargon used in the information world, efficient retrieval of relevant information often results in information overkill. Ever since writing was invented, it has been a common practice