Information and Communication I: Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom; the Information Life Cycle; the Role of Information; Information Science and the Information and Knowledge Society; and Communication with Trends in Scholarly Communication

The syllabus names four stages: generation, collection, storage and dissemination. Generation is the creation of new information by research, observation, administration, creative work or transactions; in science it takes the form of experiments, field notes, data sets and manuscripts. Collection is the acquisition and gathering of that information by individuals and institutions, and for libraries it means selection and acquisition. Storage means recording the information on a medium and organising it so it can be found again: classification, cataloguing, indexing and, now, digital repositories with metadata and preservation. Dissemination is the delivery of information to those who need it, through publication, lending, reference service, current awareness, networks and open access. Use then generates new information, closing the cycle.

Records managers and digital curators use longer versions of the same cycle. The Digital Curation Centre's curation lifecycle model (2008) runs conceptualise, create or receive, appraise and select, ingest, preservation action, store, access, use and reuse, and transform, with disposal and reappraisal as possible exits; records management speaks of creation, maintenance and use, and disposition (destruction or transfer to an archive). All versions share the idea that information must be managed from the moment it is created, not only once it reaches a library.

Information is treated as a resource in the same sense as land, labour and capital, and the syllabus lists six areas where it matters. In planning, information on population, resources and needs is the raw material of every plan; India's Census, the National Sample Survey and administrative statistics feed national and state planning. In management, information reduces uncertainty in decisions, and management information systems (Unit VI) are built to supply it. In socio-economic development, access to information on prices, markets, credit, health and rights raises incomes and participation; this is why the RTI Act, common service centres and community information services exist. In cultural development, libraries, archives and museums preserve and transmit heritage. In educational development, information underpins teaching, self-learning and lifelong learning. In technological development, patents, standards and research literature let innovators build on what exists instead of reinventing it.

Information science grew out of documentation, the movement Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine led from Brussels at the end of the nineteenth century. The American Documentation Institute (1937) renamed itself the American Society for Information Science in 1968; it added "and Technology" in 2000 and has been the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) since 2013. Harold Borko's widely quoted definition (1968) calls information science "that discipline that investigates the properties and behaviour of information, the forces governing the flow of information, and the means of processing information for optimum accessibility and usability". It is interdisciplinary by nature.

The information society is a society in which the creation, distribution and use of information is the most significant economic and cultural activity. Its intellectual history runs through Fritz Machlup's measurement of the "knowledge industry" in the United States (1962), Daniel Bell's post-industrial society (1973), Marc Porat's information economy (1977), Alvin Toffler's Third Wave (1980) and Manuel Castells's network society (1996). The United Nations held the World Summit on the Information Society in two phases, Geneva (2003) and Tunis (2005). The knowledge society is the broader, more human-centred idea: not only more information but the capacity to turn it into knowledge for development. Peter Drucker popularised the "knowledge worker" (1959), and UNESCO's report Towards Knowledge Societies (2005) argued for plural knowledge societies built on access, education, cultural diversity and freedom of expression.

Communication is the process by which a message passes from a source to a receiver so that meaning is shared. It is classified by the number of people involved (intrapersonal, interpersonal, group, mass), by code (verbal and non-verbal), by setting (formal and informal), and by direction in organisations (downward, upward, horizontal and diagonal). For information science the key distinction is between formal channels (journals, books, conference proceedings, reports, patents: public, permanent, citable) and informal channels (conversations, correspondence, preprints shared among colleagues, conference corridors, social media: fast, private, ephemeral). Derek de Solla Price's "invisible college" (1963), developed by Diana Crane (1972), names the informal networks of scientists at the research front, and "gatekeepers", a term from Kurt Lewin (1947) applied to technical communication by Thomas Allen (1977), are the well-connected individuals who bring outside information into a group.

Barriers are anything that distorts or blocks the message: semantic (jargon, ambiguous words, different meanings of the same term), physical (noise, distance, poor equipment), psychological (attitudes, prejudice, selective perception), cultural and linguistic (different languages, norms and scripts), organisational (rigid hierarchies, too many levels) and information overload (more information than a receiver can process). Libraries attack several at once: translation and multilingual catalogues address language barriers, abstracts and reviews address overload, and reference interviews address semantic mismatch between a user's question and the system's vocabulary.

Scholarly communication is the system by which research is created, evaluated, disseminated and preserved. Its modern form began with two journals in 1665: the Journal des sçavans in Paris (January) and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London (March). Peer review, the scientific article and citation became its pillars. Several trends are now changing it.

• Open access: the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), the Bethesda Statement and the Berlin Declaration (both 2003) defined free online access to research; routes include gold (published open in a journal), green (self-archived in a repository), diamond (open with no author charges) and hybrid journals; Plan S (2018) requires funded research to be open.
• Preprints and rapid dissemination: arXiv (1991) for physics, mathematics and computer science, followed by bioRxiv, medRxiv and SSRN; preprints grew sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Open peer review, open data and open science: reviews published with articles, data deposited in repositories, the FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable, 2016) for data.
• Persistent identifiers: DOI for objects, ORCID (2012) for researchers, ROR for organisations, making the record machine-readable.
• New metrics and social media: altmetrics (Unit IX) track attention beyond citations; academic social networks spread papers informally.
• Threats to integrity: predatory journals, paper mills and fabricated data. In India the University Grants Commission maintained the UGC-CARE list of journals from 2019 and in 2025 discontinued it, asking institutions to judge journals against suggested parameters.
• National licensing: India's One Nation One Subscription scheme, approved in November 2024 and operating from 1 January 2025 through INFLIBNET, gives government higher education and research institutions access to a common set of journals.