Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  The Historical Development of Information Infrastructures and the Dissemination of Knowledge: A Personal Reflection by W. Boyd Rayward (16 Apr 2005) The underlying goal of these kinds if studies is to examine the ways in which all societies are, in some sense, information societies. To do so, we focus on periods in which for some articulate and influential persons the information infrastructure of the time seems to be breaking down and is prompting them both to criticize what exists and to speculate about what is needed. What comprises information infrastructure? How does it assume institutional forms that historically integrate people, technologies and various kinds of practices involving collecting, preserving, organizing and making information available for use? And how does this complex infrastructure underlie social stability and change, both as cause and effect? These questions are grand, perhaps ultimately irresolvable, but how fascinating they remain even if one is still merely nibbling around the edges! Article URL: http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Apr-05/rayward.html Read 119 more articles from American Society for Information Science sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: The IA of Things: Twenty Years Of Lessons Learned     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy