Information Science

Information “science is the science and practice dealing with the effective collection, storage,
retrieval, and use of information. It is concerned with recordable information and knowledge, and
the technologies and related services that facilitate their management and use. Information Science
is a multidisciplinary science that involves aspect from computer science, cognitive science, social
science, communication science, and library science to deal with obtaining, gathering, organizing,
manipulating, managing, storing, retrieving, recapturing, disposing of, distributing, or
broadcasting information. Information Science studies everything that deals with information and
can be defined as the study of information systems.
This science originated as a sub-discipline of computer science, in an attempt to understand and
rationalize the management of technology within organizations. It has matured into a major field
of management that is increasingly being emphasized as an important area of research in
management studies and has expanded to examine the human-computer interaction, interfacing,
and interaction of people, information systems, and corporation. It is taught at all major universities
and business schools around the world. Organizations have become intensely aware of the fact that
information and knowledge are potent resources that must be cultivated and honed to meet their”
needs.
In the mid-1980’s Blum (1986) introduced the concepts of data, information and knowledge as a
framework for understanding clinical information systems and their impact on health care. He did
this by classifying the then-current clinical information systems by the three types of objects that
these systems processed. These were data, information and” knowledge.
Thus, information “science is the study of information systems, the application and usage of
knowledge focuses on why and how technology can be put to best use to serve the information
flow within the” organization.
Nursing Informatics The term “nursing informatics” was “initially seen in literature in the 1980s,
including a definition of combining nursing, information, and computer sciences for managing and
processing data into knowledge for using in nursing practice (Murphy, 2010).
In 1994, The American Nurses Association (ANA) began developing a statement to describe and
define the scope of nursing informatics (Baker, 2012). The meaning of nursing informatics has
evolved and been refined, with the American Nurses Association (2008) definition stated as “a
specialty that integrates nursing science, computer science, and information science to manage and
communicate data, information, knowledge, and wisdom in nursing practice”
Another definition of nursing informatics comes from the American Medical Informatics
Association (AMIA), which” states “Nursing Informatics science and practice integrates nursing,
its information and knowledge and their management, with information and communication
technologies to promote the health of people, families and communities worldwide”