Gestao da informaçao, holística e sistémica, no campo da Ciencia da Informaçaoestudo de aplicaçao para a construçao do conhecimento na Universidade de Coimbra

Resumen

This thesis aims to study, value and uphold Information Management (IM) as a transversal and applied area under the scope of Information Science (IS). The theoretical and conceptual contexts are analysed and reviewed (operational concepts of the scientific field, paradigms and theories), and the limits of research, focused on information (human and social phenomenon), are defined. Systemic Theory is applied as an interpretive “tool” of the reality under analysis. On the one hand, this implies a review of the technicist board, which has been the core foundation of the disciplines traditionally linked to the custody and technical treatment of documents (Archivistics, Library Science, and Documentation). On the other hand, it involves assuming the integrated vision of information within any organizational context. With the study of the current IM model and its relationship with Knowledge Management (KM) as a starting point, the contact with the objectified reality is instrumentally consummated, and a complex entity with more than seven centuries of history, the University of Coimbra (UC), is elected as a case study. The analysis of the UC’s information services, tendentially organized and managed with an artificial separation of the various components of the organic whole, points out to the pressing necessity of conceiving an Information System (IS) whose functional component will be fulfilled in the structuring of services encompassing all informational components. The prospective vision, drawn from this path, is embodied in the proposed model for the IM, holistic and systemic, that will afford the UC the (re)cognition of its information resources, by articulating organisational structure, info-communicational flux and technology.