Information, Communication and Information Policy Questions and Answers

Answer: D

ACRL's scholarly communication cycle covers publication, discovery and dissemination, and research with data collection and analysis, so the answer is (i), (ii) and (iii) are correct.

The Association of College and Research Libraries describes scholarly communication as the system through which research is created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community and preserved for future use. Its stages run from research, data collection and analysis, through authoring, peer review and publication, to discovery and dissemination and preservation.

Stock verification is an internal library housekeeping routine, the physical check of the collection against the records. It has nothing to do with how research is communicated, so every option that includes (iv) is wrong.

Answer: A

The order of enactment is (iv) (iii) (i) (ii).

1. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (United States): 1998.
2. The Information Technology Act (India): 2000.
3. The Right to Information Act: 2005.
4. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act: 2009.

The two Indian rights Acts are the usual trap: the RTI Act came first, in 2005, and the Right to Education Act four years later, so any sequence putting (ii) before (i) is wrong. The DMCA is the oldest of the four, which rules out every option that does not start with (iv).

Answer: B

The answer is (A) is true but (B) is false.

Statement (A) is correct: the economist Fritz Machlup introduced the idea of a knowledge industry in The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States, published in 1962, where he measured the share of the economy devoted to producing knowledge.

Statement (B) has the wrong date. Paul Watzlawick's systemic model of communication was set out with Beavin and Jackson in Pragmatics of Human Communication in 1967, not 1992. With (A) true and (B) false, the options calling both true, both false or only (B) true are all wrong.

Answer: D

The name associated with the measurement of information is Hartley.

Ralph Hartley of Bell Laboratories, in his 1928 paper Transmission of Information, proposed measuring information as the logarithm of the number of possible messages. The Hartley is still a unit of information, and his work was the direct forerunner of Claude Shannon's information theory of 1948.

The others belong to other parts of library science. Melvil Dewey devised the Dewey Decimal Classification, S.R. Ranganathan the Colon Classification and the Five Laws of Library Science, and C.A. Cutter the Rules for a Dictionary Catalog and the Expansive Classification.

Answer: B

The Shannon and Weaver linear model was expanded by Berlo.

David Berlo's SMCR model of 1960 (Source, Message, Channel, Receiver) took the linear Shannon and Weaver model and added the factors that shape each element: the communication skills, attitudes, knowledge, social system and culture of the source and the receiver, and the content, code and treatment of the message.

Shannon-Weaver is the original model itself, so it cannot be its own expansion. Harold Lasswell's verbal model ('Who says what in which channel to whom with what effect') dates from 1948, the same year as Shannon's paper, and George Gerbner's general model is built around perception rather than being the textbook extension of Shannon and Weaver.

Answer: B

World Intellectual Property Day is observed on April 26.

The World Intellectual Property Organization chose the date because the Convention establishing WIPO entered into force on 26 April 1970. The day was first observed in 2001 and is used to promote awareness of how patents, copyright, trademarks and designs affect daily life and creativity.

The other dates fall a month either side and mark nothing in WIPO's calendar. The near miss to watch is World Book and Copyright Day, which UNESCO observes three days earlier, on 23 April, and which is a separate observance from WIPO's.

Answer: A

The word data comes from Latin.

Data is the plural of the Latin datum, 'something given', the past participle of dare, to give. It entered English in the seventeenth century for facts given or granted as the basis of reasoning or calculation, which is still the sense in which information science uses it: raw facts that become information when processed and interpreted.

French, Greek and Spanish are wrong. The word came straight from Latin, not through French, and Greek is the source of other information words such as bibliography and lexicon, not of data.

Answer: A

The answer is Both (A) and (R) are true. The paper prints 'patient' in (A) where it means 'patent'.

Read that way, Assertion (A) is correct: a patent grants the inventor exclusive rights over the invention for a limited period, usually twenty years, so it is one of the main instruments for protecting intellectual property rights in an invention.

Reason (R) is also correct: a patent document is a primary source of information, because it is the first public disclosure of new technical knowledge and often the only one. Since both statements are true, the options marking either one false are wrong.

Answer: D

The correct matching is (a)-(iii), (b)-(iv), (c)-(ii), (d)-(i).

• Logical theory of information: Charles Sanders Peirce, the American philosopher and logician.
• Informatik: Karl Steinbuch, the German computer scientist, who coined the term in 1957.
• Information retrieval: Calvin Mooers, who coined the term around 1950.
• Information architect: Richard Saul Wurman, who introduced the term in the 1970s.

Once Steinbuch is fixed to Informatik and Mooers to information retrieval, only the last option remains; the others give Informatik or information retrieval to the wrong person.

Answer: C

The correct order is (iii) (iv) (ii) (i).

1. Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works: 1886.
2. Universal Copyright Convention: 1952, adopted at Geneva under UNESCO.
3. Rome Convention on performers, phonogram producers and broadcasters: 1961.
4. WIPO Copyright Treaty: 1996.

The Berne Convention is the oldest international copyright agreement and the WIPO Copyright Treaty, written for the digital environment, the newest, so any order not beginning with Berne or not ending with the WIPO treaty is wrong. The remaining choice puts the UCC before Rome.