Information and information resources

4. 1. 1 concept of information resources

For a long time, people didn't realize that "information is a resource". After the 1960s, with the increasing importance and role of information in social and economic development, this view was gradually recognized. Resources not only have various material forms, but also include intangible information forms such as knowledge, experience, technology and news, that is, material resources and energy resources, as well as information resources called the third resource. Today, information resources, material resources and energy resources together constitute the three pillar resources of modern social economy and scientific and technological development, and they are indispensable.

Generally speaking, information resources have two concepts: narrow sense and broad sense. The concept of "narrow sense" holds that information resources refer to the orderly accumulation of useful information in human social and economic activities, that is, knowledge of natural science and social science, as well as empirical information, policy and regulation information, technical information and market information. These are all important parts of the collection of information resources (useful information). The concept of "broad sense" holds that information resources are a collection of all information accumulated in human social and economic activities, as well as information producers, information technology and other elements of information activities. However, not all information is information resources. Only information that is useful to people or organized by human development can become information resources. Generally speaking, information resources are the general name of various information elements formed by human beings after developing, organizing, processing and processing information in the process of labor and life. Therefore, information resources contain several meanings: ① Information resources are information related to human needs; ② Information resources are available information, that is, useful information for human beings; ③ Information resources are information processed by human beings to achieve a certain purpose; (4) Information resources are information produced by various information processing technologies.

Information resources are available information. Compared with other non-resource information, information resources have four obvious characteristics:

(1) has the characteristics of development and utilization and value transformation. First of all, information resources have a direct impact on people as social subjects. Through people's understanding, digestion and application of information resources, people's own quality can be improved, and even some traditions and habits can be changed, which is conducive to stimulating people's subjective initiative and transforming it into the elements of real productivity or the driving force for changing production methods and lifestyles. Information resources are the information developed and organized by human beings, and the product of human mental labor or cognitive process.

(2) Scarcity. Because information resources are only a limited available part of information, information resources are always scarce compared with human demand for information.

(3) growth. Information resources are the crystallization of people's wisdom and talent, and they are intangible assets. Therefore, they have the ability to grow. They are the process of continuous enrichment and growth in the process of continuous development and utilization, which is inexhaustible. The growth of information resources requires people not only to pay attention to the utilization of information resources, but also to the research and development of information resources. In the modern information society, the strength and level of information resources research and development has become a prominent symbol of the development of social productive forces and even an important measure of social progress.

(4) integrity. Any kind of information resource does not exist in isolation, but is closely related to other information resources. As a whole collection of resources, information resources are a description and comprehensive reflection of politics, culture, economy and technology of a country, a region and an organization. Various categories of natural sciences blend with each other, and natural sciences, humanities and social sciences influence and blend with each other. People pay attention not only to the technical level, but also to the social and humanistic level from the perspective of observing the world and analyzing problems. In this resource collection, each resource element can only reflect one aspect of content. If the connection between these resources is separated, the value of overall utilization will be lost.

4. 1.2 Types and classification of information resources

Information resource is essentially a kind of information, but it is a kind of information with human labor attached. Therefore, if divided according to the breadth of information resources, it mainly includes two types: generalized information resources and narrow information resources.

4. 1.2. 1 generalized information resources

Information resources in a broad sense refer to information and physical facilities, manpower, institutions, funds and operational mechanisms related to operational information. Many scholars at home and abroad believe that information resources mainly include four aspects: people with information-related skills; Information technology hardware and software; Information facilities, including libraries, document information centers, computer centers and communication networks; Information processing and processing support system.

4. 1.2.2 narrow sense information resources

In a narrow sense, information resources refer to the collection of information itself and its carriers, which is what we often call information sources. As users of general information, they don't need to learn information resources in a broad sense, but should know all kinds of information resources in a narrow sense to facilitate information retrieval.

Among them, narrow information resources can be divided into natural information resources and social information resources. Natural information refers to the information sent by nature, which is based on pure natural objects, such as celestial information and biological information, and is the prototype of the objective material world process; Social information is the information that human beings process by means of language, characters, symbols, graphics and images. It is the information spread between people, the product of human activities, and the main research object of our course.

These information sources can be divided into printed information resources, audio-visual information resources and physical information resources according to different forms.

(1) Printed information resources: Printed information resources refer to documents with paper as the carrier and knowledge recorded by printing. Because of its convenience and practicality, printed literature has become the main form of human communication and dissemination of information. Its advantages are convenient reading and circulation, but its disadvantages are low storage density, large volume, heavy weight, large occupied space, difficult storage, mechanization and automation, which is not conducive to the enjoyment of resources.

(2) Audio-visual information resources: Audio-visual information resources refer to documents using magnetic materials and optical materials. As a carrier, it uses sound, light, magnetism, electricity and other technical equipment to record sound information and image information, such as records, audio tapes, video tapes, movies, CDs and so on. Audio-visual information sources are vivid and intuitive, which can record, record or make TV films of things that are difficult to describe in words, helping people to observe and understand some natural phenomena and explore material structure and motion mechanism. The disadvantage is that special equipment is needed when using it.

(3) Physical information resources are information resources expressed in physical form by human beings through creative labor. Common physical information resources include product samples, models, inscriptions and sculptures.

People can also divide and classify information resources according to different standards and different needs.

(1) Information resources can be divided into political information resources, economic information resources, military information resources, cultural information resources, life information resources and educational information resources. The proportion of the above information resources in the total social information resources reflects the development degree of all aspects of social economy, and also reflects the advanced degree of social development to a certain extent.

(2) According to the different materials (carriers) for storing information, it can be divided into: literature information resources, including all kinds of books and periodicals and their copies and audio-visual materials; Non-literature information resources include oral information resources and physical information resources.

(3) According to the confidentiality of information content, it can be divided into public information resources, semi-public information resources and non-public information resources. Open information resources information is open and can be shared. There are a lot of information in public information resources, such as a lot of scientific and technological information, economic information, life information and so on. , can be used as information commodities to enter the circulation field. Semi-public information resources, also known as internal information, can only be used within a certain range. Non-public information resources, that is, confidential information, generally cannot be used publicly. According to the degree of confidentiality, this kind of information is divided into various levels of confidentiality, and has a certain period of confidentiality, such as trade secrets and state secrets.

(4) Information resources can be divided into static information resources and dynamic information resources according to their different forms of expression. General literature resources are static information resources; Temporary release information and regular release information (resources) are dynamic information resources, such as stock market information, order information, news announcements, etc.

(5) Information resources can be divided into continuous information resources and discrete information resources according to the different relationship with time. Continuous information resources refer to resources that have close (time) correlation with each other, such as information resources in the process of social evolution; Discrete information resources refer to unrelated resources, such as information resources used to produce various products.

(6) According to different processing depths, it can be divided into zero-level document information resources, first-level document information resources, second-level document information resources and third-level document information resources. The zero-level literature information source refers to the literature information before its official publication, such as the first draft of the paper, experimental records, design sketches, conversation record, letters, etc. Literature information source refers to the literature information produced by the author in social activities, recorded on some carrier and published publicly. This is the most basic source of literature information. For example, most periodical papers, scientific reports, conference papers, dissertations, patent documents, technical files, etc. , are in the form of primary documents. The secondary literature information source refers to the information collection formed by people processing a large number of disordered primary literature information in a certain way, which is what we often call a retrieval tool. The information source of third-level literature refers to the product of deep processing of selecting the contents contained in first-level literature at the unit level and collecting, synthesizing, analyzing and commenting. Such as comprehensive subject summary, reference books (such as word dictionaries, encyclopedias) and so on.

4. 1.3 information resource structure

4. 1.3. 1 the meaning of information resource structure

The structure of information resources is related to the classification of information and also influenced by people's cognition of information. As mentioned above, information resources can be divided into natural information resources and social information resources. Natural information resources are material-based information resources, such as celestial information, object shape and attribute information. If information resources are divided more carefully from the perspective of development and utilization, social information resources should be composed of recorded information resources, physical information resources, intellectual information resources, communication information resources and electronic information resources. Therefore, the overall structure of information resources is shown in Figure 4. 1.

4. 1.3.2 Structure of social information resources

(1) recorded information resources. Information resources are knowledge information resources recorded and stored by traditional media (paper) and various modern media (such as disks, CDs and microfilms), such as various databases, books and periodicals. The storage and transmission of this information resource is not limited by time and space. Documentary information resources are unique to human beings, that is, commonly referred to as literature information resources.

Figure 4. 1 Overall composition of information resources

Document information is recorded after a series of processing (screening, induction and sorting). All information resources in the form of documents are collectively referred to as document information resources. Literature is the product of human development to a certain stage, which records human activity information and knowledge information by words, figures, symbols or other technical means. Document information can also be copied into various forms of documents that people need by changing the recording mode (copying, printing, microfilming, enlarging, etc.). Literature information, as its name implies, is the internal information recorded in the literature and the human spiritual information encoded by words, symbols and audio-visual signals. In short, literature information is everything that literature can record. The generation of documentary information enables the spiritual information of human society to spread in different places and stay in different times. According to the different contents, properties and processing methods of document information, document information can be divided into primary document information, secondary document information and tertiary document information.

(2) Physical information resources. The existence of physical information resources mainly comes from unusable information resources such as words, audio and video, or information resources that need to exist in direct physical form for a certain purpose, such as prototypes, samples, sculptures, cultural relics and other information resources. Physical information resources are similar to natural material information resources, both of which embody information in the form of material, but they cannot be equated with natural material information resources. The main difference is that physical information resources are products processed, produced or created by people, and are information wealth condensed with human wisdom in physical objects. For example, a prototype or sample itself represents a kind of technical information, and its information resources include processing technology, chemical composition, material parameters, design indicators, appearance status and other resources.

(3) Intellectual information resources. Intelligent information resources mainly refer to the knowledge information stored in the human brain, including all kinds of knowledge, know-how, skills and experience that people have mastered. Some of the knowledge can be clearly expressed and recorded in words and characters, while others are difficult to be clearly expressed and recorded, so it is also called invisible knowledge. Its main forms are policy consultation, investment consultation, medical and health consultation, legal consultation, market consultation and other experts from all walks of life. With the improvement of the knowledge-based structure of social production and the prominence of the importance of consulting industry, such information resources are becoming more and more important in social development and economic development.

(4) Communication information resources. Communicative information resources refer to information resources in various channels of information flow, and the information exchange between information sources and information audiences is mainly carried out in the form of oral carriers and body language. Its basic forms include speeches, conversations, meetings and discussions, reports, and information resources formed by other direct contact methods such as physical contact and eye contact between people. This kind of information resource is also called zero-order information resource. Oral information refers to information that exists in the memory of human brain and is communicated and disseminated through direct means such as conversation, discussion and report.

(5) Electronic information resources. Electronic information resources are information resources reproduced by responding computers and other external devices, such as radio, television, video conference, teletext, database, network and so on. By storing various forms of information such as words, images, sounds, animations, etc. in analog or digital form (that is, binary codes: 0 and 1) in optical, magnetic and other non-printing media. Electronic technology in information storage, dissemination and application has fundamentally broken the long-standing unification of storing and disseminating information on paper carriers, representing the direction of information development. Electronic information resources are the product of the development of information technology. Its emergence, development and wide application bring great convenience to people in collecting, storing and using information. Due to the improvement of modern network technology, electronic information resources have obvious advantages in utilization, which are mainly reflected in: ① convenient, fast and timely query; 2 * * * Good appreciation, wide spread, great mobility and fast update speed; ③ Large storage capacity, many varieties and strong selectivity.