EVALUATION OF INFORMATION‐HANDLING SYSTEMS

Abstract

One of life's biggest problems is that of being sure what it is we are talking about. Even if we are sure ourselves what exactly we mean when we talk about something, we very often have no guarantee that our audience is listening about the same thing. At its simplest level this is often a problem of homonymity; the doctor may have a use for plasma, but his use will differ depending on whether he is a doctor of medicine or of physics. At the more troublesome level, it is a matter of interpretation, often affected by emotional predisposition, so that ‘justice’, for example, means different things depending on whether or not one is in the dock oneself. It is particularly a problem when one is obliged to study something in detail with a view to future application. Before you can do any research into the topic of ‘evaluation of information‐handling systems’ you have to have an exact and unambiguous knowledge of what you mean by a system, what you mean by information‐handling, what you mean by information, and what you mean by evaluation, and not only must you have these things defined to your own satisfaction, but you must eventually define them so that everyone else will understand the same things. The usual approach is to sit and think very carefully, make up a definition, look for examples you want included but which your definition excludes, reshape the definition, and so on, in a process of successive approximation. After a while, you usually have a definition which includes either everything or nothing, and you are probably beginning to wonder if you know what you really mean by ‘of’. Happily, for our purposes today we do not need to do too much in the way of philosophical gymnastics. The literature is not entirely without definitions of the word ‘system’, and any one will do for the time being. I used the term ‘information‐handling’ in my title so that I could include libraries, parts of libraries, information departments, commercially available information services and the like. These parts of the title can be left comfortably vague; the thing we are really going to consider is ‘evaluation’; and this is the word I must define.

Citation

MARTYN, J. (1969), "EVALUATION OF INFORMATION‐HANDLING SYSTEMS", Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 21 No. 8, pp. 317-324. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb050204