Information Science Is Neither

(DRAFT—please do not cite or distribute) Introduction Information science isn't a science. Nor, even, is it primarily about information. To assert the former is no longer an especially controversial move. The skeptic might point to the supposed origins of the field in the postwar activities of communications engineers and applied computer scientists—many of whom, following Claude Shannon, understood " information " as a measure of informativeness—and to the indubitable achievements of a " Golden Age " of retrieval system design.