Information Entity Access Control Traditions of Practice

The enormous growth of the information entity universe, particularly since the invention of printing, has made it impossible for human memory or the efforts to collect information entities in one place to achieve any sort of efficient identification and retrieval This growth has in turn spawned a series of ongoing efforts to devise what may conveniently be called tools of information entity organization that enable information entity access control of one form and complexity or another. The tools themselves have taken the form of artifacts or technologies (lists, catalogs, and the like) and organizational schemes (classification schemes, cataloging rules) which in turn have taken on lives of their own as they have become refined. The efforts to produce these tools are described here as information entity access control traditions of practice. A tradition, following the ideas of Edward Shils,, is so named because it consists of systems of technology, beliefs, and practices which have been handed down from the past to the present and which in the course of being handed down have been modified to one degree or another as new applications for them have been encountered. Since virtually everyone in the modern world who uses information entities exercises information entity access control in one form or another or is the recipient of information entity access control promoted by someone else, the total possible number of