1. MIKHAILOV, A. I,CHERNYI, A. I., GILYAREVSKY, R. S.

Informatics: its scope and

methods. In: FID/RI- International Federation for Documentation.Study Committee
Research on Theoretical Basis of Information. On theoretical problems of Informatics,
Moscou, ALL-Union for Scientific and Technical Information, 1969 (FID 435). p.13

A . I. MIKHAILOV
A . I. CHERNYI, AND R.S. GILYAREVSKII
(USSR)

INFORMATICS: ITS SCOPE AND METHODS

It has become almost a commonplace to start out any discussion of current

problems of scientific information with the thesis on the exponential growth of scientific and
technical literature as the main cause of the information crisis or explosion, which has
ultimately given rise to informatics as an independent discipline. Yet, when examined more
closely, this thesis is wide open to criticism.
It is true, of course, that with the growth of literary output information retrieval
problems are becoming increasingly critical. However, no increase in the number of
publications can make scientific-information activities an independent entity within the
scientific process and thus give rise to a new discipline, informatics. For the exponential
growth of publications is only one (necessary but not sufficient) reason for the emergence
of informatics.
That this is really so may be illustrated by the following examples. In the library of
the Assyrian king Achurbanipal , the 7th century B.C., there were over 30.000 cuneiform
tablets for all fields of knowledge [1]. Historians say that in 47 B.C., when Caesar was war
with Egypt, the holdings of the famous Alexandrian Library amounted to some 700,000
volumes. Referring to an unusually rapid increase of this Library’s holdings, the
outstanding Swiss hellenist André Bonnard wrote in this book “Civilisation grecque.
D’Euripide à Alexandrie”: “The library grew not only because classical works were bought,
but also because of the extraordinary prolificacy of contemporary authors. Thus, one
philologist named Didim Khalkenter, compiled three thousand and five hundred volumes of
commentary. Although at that time even not a very large manuscript occupied several
“volumes”, that is scrolls, such a prolificacy seems nevertheless frightening. The ancients
believed that to be so prolific one had to have a belly of brass: the above philologist’s
name of more that eleven hundred Hellenistic writers. Scientists and philosophers
included. What a deluge! A literary catastrophy! How much literature” [2].
Note that these words of André Bonnard refer to the second and first centuries B. C.
The above figures suggest that as far back as 2,000 years ago there appeared by
far more books than could be read by a single individual throughout his lifetime, however
hard he worked. It should be also borne in mind that at those remote times books were
available but to a small number of philosophers. Scholars, writers and poets. This means
that even then there was a tremendous number of books per “literate head” of the
population.
Thus it appears that the basic external characteristic of what is now known as the
“information explosion”, namely, a rapid quantitative growth of scientific, technical and
other literature, was already manifest 2,000 years ago. It failed, however, to generate a
social need for singling out scientific information activities and making them a separate
entity, a part of the scientific process.
We are of the opinion that the main reason for the emergence of informatics has
been not so much the rapid growth of literary output, as the features inherent in the
present day stage of science and technology development. One such feature is the
increasing participation of ever broader section of society in scientific activities; advanced
states are already appropriating an appreciable portion of their national budgets for
research purposes. Over a vocation have given way to whole professional armies of
scientific workers many hundred thousands strong.
As Academician L. A. Artsimovich has aptly said, in 1900 “all well-known Russian
physicists could be accommodated on a single sofa, while the funds allocated for physical
research were much less than those allowed for keeping the czar’s stables”[3]. In 1914
there were a total of only 11,600 scientific workers in Russia. By the end of 1967 their
number rose to 769,600 i.e. increased nearly seventyfold [4].
Before a new science or discipline can arise, it is necessary that the society felt a
need for it, since it is requirements of social practice that are the main motive force of
science development. F. Engels wrote that if society has a need for technological
progress, this need advances science much more than a dozen of universities [5].
When there were only a few thousand scientists in the world, it would be hardly
advisable to provide special information services for them, since at those times scientists
as a rule well knew their colleagues (either personally or from the literature) and were able
to follow all their publications themselves.
Such was the situation two or three hundred years ago. It is known from the
literature, for example, that even in the first half of the 17 th century, the franciscan monk
and scholar Marcenne was in correspondence with practically all outstanding men of
science of his time, thus performing the function which today is carried on by journals.
Marcenne’s cell in Paris was for a long time a center of scientific communication between
European scientists. In the middle ages, direct communication between scientists was
promoted by the lack of language barriers, since Latin was a universal language of
science. Can anything of the kind be imagined today, when there are now over 2,000,000
scientific workers in the world?
It is quite evident that today direct communication through correspondence and
personal contact could not be the main means for scientific information exchange. This
function is now of course performed by journal.
A second feature of the current stage of science development is the rapid growth of
material and intellectual expenditures involved in each new discovery. In order to keep up
the present tempo of science development. It is necessary to increase constantly the
expenses and the number of scientific workers. Of specially great important in these
conditions is to increase the efficiency of researcher’s work.
This can be mainly achieved through social division of labour, improved
organization, and extensive application of automation and mechanization in scientific work.
An important integral part of the scientific process are scientific information activities, such
as the reading of books and journal articles, the writing of reports, the preparation of
manuscripts for publication, the selection of pertinent literature in the library, and the
discussion of research results. It is important to note that these functions or activities have
always been and will be performed by the researcher himself.
As regards the information service, its task consists merely in helping the
researcher with his scientific information work and in relieving him of necessity to waste his
valuable (and expensive, too) time on doing very tedious and time-consuming work of
hunting for publications of pertinent interest in the ocean of scientific and technical
literature. It must be emphasized in this connection that any talk about be possibility of
freeing the researcher from all information work is not only unjustifiable but also harmful.
The fact that scientific information activities have become an independent part of
the scientific process means, first of all, that an increasing number of individuals is
beginning to be engaged in this, and only in this, kind of activities. This could happen and
did happen only at a time when a large number of people had come to be drawn directly
into scientific labour.
A third feature of science development at the present stage is the sharp reduction of
time lag between a scientific discovery and its practical application, which creates the
impression of an exclusive character of the present day scientific and technological
revolution. In the article “The Natural Sciences and their Importance for the Development
of World Outlook and Technological Progress”, Academician M.V. Keldvsh wrote that
“when people say that the age of science and technology has come now, they are
sometime wrong for at all times the material and technical progress largely depended upon
the development of science. Thus, the roots of the Industrial Revolution also lay in
science, and the last century, too, saw a very large number of major scientific
achievements. It is wrong to think that formerly there were few discoveries in the natural
sciences that had considerable consequences for material production, and that it is only
now that we have entered upon the road of continuous discoveries.
There is one feature, however, which is very characteristic for the present day
development of science and technology, namely, the promptness with which scientific
discoveries find practical application. A number of examples may be given. Thus, about a
hundred years elapsed between the discovery of electric current (Galvani) and the building
of the first electric station. Or, it took some 70 years before mineral fertilizers found
intensive application in agriculture. Things were quite different, however, with the
discovery of uranium nucleus division, only 3 and 15 years having elapsed between its
discovery and the construction of the first nuclear reactor and of the first atomic power
station, respective.
It is precisely because our time is characterized by an exceedingly prompt
application of scientific accomplishments that a good organization of research projects and
proper utilization of research results in production are acquiring an ever increasing
significance, so that today that country may by the first which is capable of organizing
prompt utilization of a scientific discovery, rather than that in which the discovery was
made [6].
That the time lag between a discovery and its practical application is really
diminishing, is also evidenced by the following examples. One hundred and eighteen years
elapsed between the discoveries which ultimately led to the appearance of photography
(first half of the 18th century) and the introduction of photographic equipment into practice.
For telephone communication this period was equal to 56 years; for radio to 36 years; for
radar 15 years; for television 12 years; for transistors 5 years; and for integrated circuits
only 3 years [7].
The increased tempo of research and development activities has called for
information systems which higher speeds, and this can be achieved only through
extensive application in information practices of radically new methods of work, and
though mechanization and automation.
 A fourth feature of science and technology development is the emergence and a
rapid increase of so-called mission-oriented problems, and an ever greater number of
scientists and engineers are being involved in their solution. A striking example of such a
problem is the projected landing of man on the Moon.
The traditional systems of scientific communication which are discipline-oriented, do
not satisfy those working on mission-oriented problems. Yet, since these problems are
numerous, it would be impracticable to have a traditional system of publications for each of
them (e.g., an abstracting journal with indexes).Hence an increasingly acute need for new
methods and means for the dissemination and retrieval of interdisciplinary information.
Similar difficulties arise due to the increasing integration of sciences.
Over a certain period of time information workers rested more or less satisfied with
the methods and means offered by applied sciences and disciplines. However, as the
number of researchers and the amount of published and unpublished documents grew, a
whole range of mission-oriented problems emerged., requests for information became
more complex, and the time allowed for the preparation of replies to requests diminished,
information workers have come to be faced with the task of considerably increasing the
efficiency of their work. This task can be successfully solved only provided a profound
study has activities and of the century-old experience gained by internal laws governing
scientific information phenomena have been disclosed. As a result, a new discipline,
informatics, has emerged whose main object of study is the scientific information process
in all its complexity and whose main task consist in increasing the efficiency of
communication between scientists and experts.
Beginnings of informatics as a discipline may be traced back to the eve of World
War II. In 1931, the International Institute of Bibliography was renamed the International
Institute of Documentation, and in 1938 the International Federation for Documentation. In
1933 the Soviet scientist P.P. Troyanovskii was grant an author’s certificate for his
invention of a “machine for selecting and printing words during translation from one
language into another or into several language simultaneously”. In 1938-40 a microfilm
selector was built at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the guidance of V.
Bush, which served as prototype for the widely known “Rapid Selector” designed and
constructed in 1949. A general idea of such a selector was patented by the German
engineer E. Goldberg as far back as 1927.
The second World War hindered this process, which, however, was given a fresh
impetus in the postwar years. In 1945, publication was initiated in Great Britain of the
“Journal of Documentation. In July of the same years the well-known article “As We May
Think” by V. Bush was published, which for the first time called attention of a broad
scientific community to the need for mechanizing information retrieval [8]. In 1948 the
Royal Society convened in London the first International conference on scientific
information, in which some 500 experts from many countries took part. In 1950, the
journals “American Documentation” and “Nachrichten fur Dokumentation” were
inaugurated.
Thus, it appears that informatics emerged on the international scene as an
independent discipline in the late forties-early fifties of this century.
In the Soviet Union this trend in science received its official recognition in 1952 with
the establishment of the Institute of Scientific Information under the Academy of Science of
the USSR.
It is common knowledge that each science travels its own road of formation.
However, there are some characteristics common to all sciences which show whether a
given sum total of knowledge has become an independent discipline or science. These
include the
- definition of the subject area;
- elaboration of basic concepts pertinent to this subject area;
- establishment of the fundamental law peculiar to the subject area in question;
and
- discovery of principle or creation of the theory that permits explanation of a
plurality of facts [9]
As far as informatics is concerned, only two of these conditions have been fulfilled,
i.e. the subject area has been determined and a system of basic concepts pertinent to it
has been elaborated. Yet the latter two conditions have not yet been fulfilled, and this
means that informatics is still at the stage of formation, being in a similar position as
cybernetics, semiotics, structural linguistics and other new disciplines.
The subject matter of informatics are processes, methods and laws related to the
recording, analytical-synthetical processing, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of
scientific information, but not the scientific information as such which is the attribute of a
respective science or discipline. Such an understanding of the subject scope of informatics
is of principal significance, for it permits a more or less precise line to be drawn between
informatics and any other science concerned with the generation and logical processing of
scientific information in a given field.
In this connection it should be pointed out that the term “scientific information” is
used in this case to mean the logical information which is obtained in the process of
cognition and which adequately reflects the laws of the material world and of spiritual
activities of human beings and is utilized in the socio-historical practice.
 To put it differently the subject matter of informatics are phenomena and general
laws of scientific information activities, rather than these activities themselves which may
and should be performed by experts and scientists in the respective domains of science
and technology. Thus, for instance, informatics deals with the study of internal
mechanisms of human abstracting of documents in natural language and with the
elaboration of general methods of such abstracting. But it has nothing to do with
abstracting as such.
It should be emphasized that informatics is not concerned either with the
determination of truth or falsehood of information, nor of its novelty usefulness, etc. More
than that, it is a matter of no concern for informatics whether a given document deals, say,
with a new insect species important is the fact that there is a certain piece of scientific
information which is to be timely brought to its potential user in the most effective way and
in a suitable and sufficiently complete form.
Nor is informatics concerned with the logical processing of existing not contained, in
an apparent form, in the initial information, as well as the evaluation of its quality are
impossible unless facts, laws, and the theory of the science to which it belongs are utilized.
If we considered these tasks as lying within the scope of informatics, we would have of
necessity been compelled to declare informatics a science of the sciences, which is of
course absurd.
It follows from the above definition of the subject area or scope of informatics that
the latter belongs to the category of social sciences, since the of its study – i.e., scientific-
information activities – is a phenomenon peculiar to and occurring only in the human
society.
The method of investigation common to informatics and to all other sciences and
disciplines is the dialectical method, while the same special methods are employed in
informatics to study individual aspects of information activities as are used by other
sciences. As yet informatics lacks its own special methods of investigation peculiar to it
alone. However, other new sciences and disciplines are in a similar position too.
In the foregoing discussion we have tried to demonstrate that informatics is an
independent discipline within the complex of social sciences, as well as to define its scope
and methods. Clearly, it is very difficult as yet to make such a definition with a sufficient
degree of precision. Even more difficult is to establish the place of informatics among other
discipline and to ascertain its relationships with them. The list of sciences with which
informatics interacts is ratter long. These include, among mathematical logic, logical,
semantics, psychology, book science, bibliography, and various branches of engineering.
 This is due to the fact that informatics is a new discipline which is shaping itself at
the interface of many sciences; yet traditional sciences, too, are now experiencing similar
difficulties arising from the integration of sciences. It would seem sufficient to illustrate this
by citing only one example of such an old science as physics.
In his speech on connection between physics and other branches of science
delivered at a jubilee conference devoted to the 400 th anniversary of Galileo , V. F.
Weisskopf, one of the most outstanding physicists of our time, said the following: “First of
all, the title [ of my talk] is wrong. I will not speak about physics in relation to other sciences
– that is difficult because it is so hard to say what other sciences are. We know, for
example, that chemistry was a science for itself, but the chemists themselves have worked
hard and successfully into making it part of physics; and the biologists...work very hard to
transform biology into physics. This of course is semantics, it is a way of speaking, but we
physicists know what this way of speaking means. We would like to have all phenomena
which we observe explained in a unified way, and this is why all sciences at the end are a
branch of physics” [12].
Relationships of informatics with other disciplines have already been considered by
us in our monograph “The Fundamentals of Informatics” [13]. In the present article we
think it necessary to discuss in some detail those relationships which are, in our opinion, of
the greatest significance for informatics today, namely, its relationships with semiotics,
psychology and library science.
“The term “semiotics” is at present used to designate a science that is concerned
with the purpose of disclosing their common principles and concrete differences revealed
by comparing these systems”[14]. Since information activities are a particular case of the
sign activity of man (i.e., activity aimed at the generation and perception of signs),
semiotics being a general theory of sign systems, may serve as the theoretical foundation
of informatics. Traditionally, semiotics is divided into three parts: pragmatics, semantics,
and syntactics, each part being in a certain way associated with respective aspects of
information activities and informatics.
Pragmatics studies signs from the viewpoint of their involvement in the sign
activities of man (relation of the sign to man), including, for instance, such sign properties
of significance for informatics as intelligibility and unintelligibility, and essentiality and
unessentiality. Abstracting, for example, may be regarded as a pragmatic task: an abstract
must be condensed intelligible and contain all the essential. Broadly speaking, the analysis
of a concrete information activity (such as the creation of an information retrieval system;
improvement of the system of primary publications; indexing; etc.) may be conducted in
terms of pragmatics. Unfortunately, pragmatics is the least developed part of semiotics.
 Semantics studies signs from the viewpoint of ways of designating objects and
concepts by means of signs (relation of the sign to the object). Semantics includes all
aspects of what is called the sense (“content”) and meaning (“volume”) of the sign.
Semantics studies not only relations between sign systems and the reality, but also
relationships between different sign systems that reflect the reality. At present all semantic
problems hold a place of priority in informatics. It is obvious that in creating and analyzing
information retrieval languages and information retrieval systems, the study of senses and
meaning of signs plays a decisive role. Of great importance, in particular, is the study of
such structural transformations which do not alter the sense of a given structure.
Syntactics deals with formal, external properties of signs and their combinations
(relation of one sign to another). Syntactics ignores the sense and meaning of the signs
and considers only their geometrical characteristics and combinatory rules of their co-
occurrence. In particular, syntactics is concerned with all aspects of formal derivation of
sentences from other sentences on the basis of only formal bonds between them
manifested in a certain similarity of external structures of these sentences. Syntactics also
studies all aspects of compilation and utilization of algorithms. Methods of syntactics play a
decisive role in the mechanization of information activities since automatic devices (as well
as humans who act “automatically”, that is according to strict formal instructions) are
capable of responding only to external geometrical features of the signs and their
combinations.
One of the main methods of semiotics is formalization, which consists in the
identification of formal external indicators of the presence of certain semiotic phenomena.
It may be said that in terms of semiotics formalization consists in reducing pragmatics and
semantics to syntactics. Thus, for instance, semiotics is searching for external
characteristics of intelligibility (reduction of pragmatics to syntactics) and unambiguity
(reduction of semantics to syntactics) for expressing them in natural and artificial
languages.
Being the source of the more general theoretical notions underlying informatics,
semiotics is being considerably enriched owing to this aspect of its application. It will not
be an exaggeration to say that interaction of semiotics with informatics is exerting a strong
and, in some cases, decisive influence on the development of semiotics itself{15}. To
illustrate this, it seems sufficient to refer to the following three semiotics research projects
conducted at VINITI. A system of coding of chemical structural formulae for putting them
into logical information machines has been developed, and a mechanized fact retrieval
service for one section of organic chemistry has been established [16]. An experiment has
been carried out in machine-aided deciphering of Oytan and proto-Indian texts; as a result
it has been established that the Oytan writing is related to the Mongolian language, and
the proto-Indian one to the dravidian languages [17]. Also, general principles for
transliterating Russian texts with Roman letter have been formulated [18].
Of no less importance for the development of a theory of informatics are its
relationships with psychology. In recent years psychology has considerably expanded
itself owing to the emergence of a number of new, trends, some of which are closely
associated with problems beings solved by informatics. We mean such new disciplines as
labour psychology, engineering psychology, and psycholinguistics.
Labour psychology emerged at the turn of the 19 th century, but has been rapidly
developing only in the last decade. “The main problem areas of labour psychology include
psychological laws of labour activity in the various domains of professional labour and also
studies aimed at improving the quality of personnel training in conditions of polytechnical
general education schools and vocational education establishments” [19]. Among the
problems within the scope of labour psychology are questions of increasing labour
efficiency; specific features of various professions; elucidation of psychological bases of
rationalization of labour skills; feature of design of machines and apparatus; psychological
measures aimed at facilitating labour and at prophylaxis of fatigue and traumas, and
personnel selection and training. Even from this list of problem areas it may be seen that
as far as a specific type of labour – scientific and technical creative activities – is
concerned, a number of aspects of labour psychology are intimately linked with problems
of informatics.
Even closer to the interests of informatics is engineering psychology which studies
complex “man-machine systems”, the main problem being the study of “operator’s work
with information models of control of real objects” [20]. “Engineering psychology involves
application of knowledge on human behavior to the design of systems and their
components with the purpose of attaining a maximum efficiency with minimum
expenditures for their operation and servicing”[22]. If one remembers that the construction
of information retrieval systems is one of the central tasks of informatics, one can readily
understand the great significance of engineering psychology data for the resolution of this
task. However, this problem does not embrace all the psychological aspects of informatics.
Psycholinguistics considers problems arising at the interface of psychology and
linguistics, including the nature of speech activity, hierarchical organization of verbal
behavior, mechanisms of speech and of it perception, problems of semantics and of non-
verbal motivation of verbal behavior; as well as practical tasks involved in mass
communication and speech culture[22]. Psycholinguistics closely approaches such
problems of importance for informatics as the study of creative thinking, and of generation
and utilization of scientific and technical information. Although these problems lie outside
the scope of informatics, results of their study are extremely important for an
understanding the mechanism of analytico-synthetic processing of information, including
its coding. Yet, psycholinguistics, too, is not directly concerned with those problems of
psychology which are of importance for creation of a theoretical basis of informatics.
All this gives grounds to psychologist to raise the question of developing a special
branch of psychology, whose main object of study would be the interpretation of
information activities. The range of problems involved here would include processes of
thinking during scientific information processing: psychological laws governing the
utilization of information retrieval systems; and psychological bases of various stages of
information activities [23].
Information activities of scientists have always been associated with libraries whose
workers helped scientists in the selection of pertinent literature, made them aware of new
accessions and provided them with requisite materials. It is for these reasons that for
thousands of years libraries have been the only social institution that accumulated and
generalized the experience of information services to such a specific category of readers
as scientists. This valuable experience has been reflected in library science and
bibliography. However, radical changes that have taken place over the last 50-70 years
have called for the organization of information services to scientists and specialists on a
completely new basis.
As recently as the 18th century the main library readers were scientists whose
number was very small, so that libraries were in a position to concentrate their efforts on
servicing scientists, and they did it sufficiently well. But with the growth of literacy among
the population and with development of culture and education the library readership
underwent considerable changes. Scientists ceased to form the bulk of readers, while the
main function of libraries had gradually come to be ideological and cultural-educational
activities rather then provision of services to scientists. Accordingly, librarians have been
increasingly specialized as workers of the ideological front, as disseminators of knowledge
among broad sections of the population.
The information activities, too, have underwent qualitative changes, having by far
exceeded the limits of routine library bibliographic work involving only the traditional means
of information dissemination such as books, periodicals and the like. These developments
were well understood by the beginning of the century, who separated from library
bibliographical activities all processes associated with the collection, processing, storage,
retrieval and dissemination of documents to unite them under the general name of
“documentation”. At present this term is regarded as a synonym of “informatics”, although
informatics studies the laws governing all forms of information activities, as well as their
theory, history, methodology, and organization, rather than the documentary activities only.
Thus informatics is in a way a continuation of bibliography and library science, but
the experience inherited by informatics from these branches of science is being subjected
to complete reappraisal and appears in a new quality.
Although a recently born discipline, informatics has already developed a number of
radically new methods and means of scientific information services unknown to library
science and bibliography. These include coordinate indexing, descriptor information
retrieval languages and thesauri, inverted files, uniterm cards and peek-a boo punch
cards, KWIC-type and alphabetical correlative indexes, citation indexes, etc. Informatics
deals with some aspects of recording and dissemination of scientific information, while
library science and bibliography have never even posed such questions.
As regards library science and bibliography, they continue to develop and specialize
on the elaboration of more efficient procedures and organization of work with readers; on
the solution of problems of long-term storage of literature; on the development of
procedures for prompt provision of readers with requested literature; on improving
principles of cataloging: as well as on various aspects of theory, history, methodology and
organization of library and bibliographical services.
In the textbook on general library science used in Soviet higher educational
establishments, the subject area of library science is defined as the “study of content,
organization and methods of public utilization of books and guidance of reading, is
possible only in close association with studies aspects of book utilization for communist
education of the people, is in essence a pedagogical discipline”[24].
From the foregoing it is clear why work on problems of interaction between library-
bibliographic and information activities has of late years become a matter of urgency. A
discussion going in special library and scientific information publications on the subjects of
“The Library and Information” has already proven to be very useful, having contributed to
bringing together the viewpoints of librarians and information scientists on common and
distinctive features of these two related fields of human activities and informatics; so that
continued efforts in this direction seem to hold much promise.
This statement may be supported by the following words by I.P. Kondakov, one of
leading scientists of Soviet library of science, spoken at the 32 nd Session of the IFLA
Council (The Hague, 1966): “The general theory of information has developed during the
last few years as a special discipline and has already formulated its main concepts. It
concerns such problems as the principles and systems of information, the types and kinds
of sources of information, the principles and trends of mechanization of information work,
and the methods of factographical information, etc. It is not difficult to understand the
interest of special librarians and bibliographers in the suction and co-operative work on
related problems (e.g., problems of classification) ... We now face the necessity of working
out effective forms of co-operation and coordination of the activity of information
institutions and lybries”[25].

* *
*

It is obvious that the subject which is discussed here cannot be exhausted by the
present article, nor have we tried to do this. Rather, we have attempted to throw some light
on the reasons for the emergence of informatics and to mark off clearly its subject area or
scope. We would like to warn against the danger of extending too far this subject are by
including into it problems associated with the processing of contents of scientific
documents and against tendencies to describe information activities as a universal means
of solving specific scientific problems. In addition, we have tried to focus attention on
relationships of informatics with such disciplines as semiotics, psychology, and library
science. This seems to us to be a paramount importance for the development of
theoretical basis of informatics.

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 R.A. Fairthorne

THE SCOPE AND AIMS OF THE INFORMATION SCIENCES AND TECHNOLOGIES*