ABSTRACT
Information auditing has been increasingly used over the last two decades or so in a variety of contexts, to look at many aspects of information use. It has seemed to me for a long time that it would be a useful tool for looking at IPs, as suggested by R Taylor’s advanced thinking in the early 1980s. This very prescient writer, already quoted on information environments and information products (see pp64 and 109) argues for information auditing (one of the earliest uses of the term) as a means of looking ‘ “backward” at the design of the production or support system, and “forward” to the function and utility of these outputs’ (Taylor, 1982, p313), and proposes that, in order to make information systems more cost-e≠ective, criteria for assessing the outputs should be derived from users and their environments. ‘The key questions for each type of output are how it is actually used and how well it serves its intended function.’1 He also says that it is essential to understand what the organization does, its history, the place it occupies in its industry, and its market share; to know about its customers, its clients, and its ‘public’; and to be aware of organizational ‘dynamics’ and ‘culture’ and how they influence the flow of information.
