What topics should be included in a course entitled “Introduction to Information Science?” This is not a question that has a single answer, for people view information science from different perspectives, and the discipline itself is changing rapidly.

Roger Flynn, the book’s author, is a professor in the Department of Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He developed the course materials through “a lengthy process of selection, trial, and revision.” The text is designed for use in an introductory course at an undergraduate level. Information science is equated with answering questions, that is, with the activities involved in seeking, processing, and using information to solve problems and to make decisions. That these activities are complex and that they require competence in many additional skills, techniques, and procedures becomes obvious from even a cursory reading of the table of contents or a quick glance through the nearly 800 pages of text.

The book is divided into ten sections with a total of twenty chapters. After an introduction, three sections deal with the collection and analysis, organization and use, and coding of data. Next, four sections cover storing, retrieving, displaying, and communicating data. The final two sections are devoted to data manipulation (including numerical and text processing techniques), and procedures for decision making and problem solving. Frankly, I think this is too heavy a load for a one-semester undergraduate course.

The method for presenting the material is logical and follows good pedagogical procedures. Each chapter begins with a statement of objectives and an introduction, followed by an orderly presentation of the subject matter, with examples and figures as appropriate. Each chapter concludes with a summary and a list of related readings. For example, the chapter on information retrieval systems includes an explanation and illustration of PIRETS (the University of Pittsburgh information retrieval system), examples of a Boolean search request, and the calculation of precision and recall measures for evaluating system effectiveness and efficiency. Also included in this chapter are examples of commercial retrieval systems, databases, and query languages. All in all, the reader is provided with rather good coverage of information retrieval systems.

As was pointed out in the beginning, the book is oriented toward a particular, perhaps some would say narrow, view of information science as being exclusively concerned with information seeking and question answering. However, this is the orientation of the schools of library and information science for which the textbook is intended. For use in this setting, the book’s orientation and contents are appropriate and comprehensive. One could, perhaps, argue that too many topics are being crowded into a one-semester course, but if this is so, the instructor can be more selective in making assignments. Alternatively, if the coverage of some subjects requires more depth than is provided in the text, the list of related readings given at the conclusion of each chapter can be consulted. There are also author and subject indexes.

Flynn deserves praise for undertaking a difficult task and for succeeding in preparing a useful introductory text for information science.