Development of Information Management

The term 'information management' is used variously in the literature of several fields. However, according to Wilson (2002) information management emerged in the mid-1970s, and there was a substantial growth in literature dealing with this topic at the beginning of the 1980s (Schlögl, 2005).

The general purpose of information management is to make available the

• right information
• at the right time
• at the right place.

Information management is an interdisciplinary field which focuses on information as a resource. Information professionals select, describe, classify, index, and abstract this information to make it more accessible to a target audience within or outside their organization.

Bergeron (1996) defines two perspectives on information management:

• information technology (including information systems) perspective and
• integrative perspective harmonizing external and internal corporate resources.

Many authors believe that information management is a field of wide scope which is also related to other fields, such as information systems, computer science, artificial intelligence research, information science, documentation and more (Maceviciute and Wilson, 2005).