The area of scientific interest is... the study of the objectives, functions, structure, properties, behaviour, performance and effects of informativ… - Brian Campbell Vickery

There is as yet no unified theory of retrieval systems, and a good deal of retrieval practice is still an empirical art, unsullied by theory.

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 systems, at any level of complexity above that of speech, necessarily involve technologies such as printing, telecommunications, or computers. However, to information science technical potentialities and constraints are of importance mainly in that they affect the social relations concerned.