Introduction

Information management is a complicated subject, and can be understood in different ways. Sometimes it is understood as a wide and all-embracing concept, including records management, knowledge management, library management and so on, and sometimes with a much narrower focus. It may, or may not, be taken to include the processes of ‘ordinary’ management – budgeting, managing people, and so on – which are as necessary in an information-providing institution or department as in any other. And it may be considered from a variety of perspectives, emphasizing information resources, technologies, organizational structures, and others; see Detlor (2010), Schlögl (2005), Bouthillier and Shearer (2002) and Rowley (1998) for examples.

In this chapter, we will take information management to include all the concepts, techniques and processes which underlie and enable information service provision. We take a wide view, including all the environments in which information, in all its guises, is managed. We focus on the ideas that recorded information, instantiated in documents, can be understood as a resource, though perhaps an unusual one in some respects; that information has a value, though this may be difficult to determine; and that information management processes can be related to the communication chains and information lifecycles mentioned in previous chapters.