The service professions such as medicine and teaching have proud and age-old traditions. Only relatively recently have we realised that serving peopl… - Brian Campbell Vickery

Classification in its simplest terms, means putting together things or ideas that are alike, and keeping separate those that are different.

In the past, documentation has frequently been compared with librarianship, with some argument as to which comprehends the other. The field is more helpfully characterised if we take its scope to be all forms of document (i.e. any physical carrier of symbolic messages) and all aspects of their handling, from production to delivery. The document system then becomes very much wider than conventional librarianship – it includes publication and printing, distribution, some forms of telecommunication, analysis, storage, retrieval and delivery to the user.

Information science is identified as... the study of the communication of information in society. This meaning is only beginning to emerge from its practical background, the social activity of facilitating information transfer.