Product Description: Michael Buckland offers an examination of information systems that is comparative rather than narrowly technical in approach. With careful attention to different meanings of information, Buckland examines the nature of retrieval-based information systems such as archives, databases, libraries, and museums, and their relationships to their social context...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

This creative, original interpretation of the nature and functioning of library services provides a coherent synthesis of the cognitive, economic, political and technical aspects of librarianship and relates them to social values and cultural contexts. In this revised and expanded second edition, Michael Buckland provides fresh material on the role of collections, on the different aspects of the loosely-used concept of 'access', on technology in relation to library services, and on long-term change. A conceptual framework for library service, seen as a member of a larger family of retrieval-based information services, is combined with practical insights into persistent problems of library use, library size, catalog evaluation, and, indeed, the survival of libraries.