BROOKESS FUNDAMENTAL EQUATION AND THE CON CEPT OF INFORMATION

B. C. Brookes's Fundamental Equation has been regarded as one of the m ost influential models that depict in a simple form how a person deals with information. His equation suggests that the concept of informati on is likely to be something that modifies the recipient's knowledge s truture as s/he uses information. Although this concept is generally a ccepted in current information research community, the equation still has some vagueness on the definitions of its terms. Information scient ists after Brookes have discussed over this point of issue from variou s perspectives. In this paper Brookes's concept of information as an o bject of scientific research is delineated definitively by examining h is way of scientific thinking as well as his view of information scien ce. His study lays emphasis on such topics as the uniqueness the pheno mena of human information use assumes in character, the difficulty of distinguishing objective from subjective matters in that phenomena, an d the necessity of paradigm shift in information science. This emphasi s means Brookes's concept of information reflected in the term of 'Del ta I' of his equation should not be treated as a metaphor of a thing b ut of a process in relation to the personal cognition and understandin g. P. Ingwersen, a Denish scientist, also examines the Brookes's equat ion and gives some modifications to it. The main point in his modifica tions seems to be an addition of 'potential information'. Ingwersen's interpretation may be significant as far as the phenomena of human inf ormation use can be seen as successive and static steps. But human inf ormation use is rather dynamic and interactive, then it is concluded t hat his interpretation makes little contribution to the explication of that phenomena in terms of human cognitive process.