Information is a central yet difficult concept for information management. To understand the meaningof information today, it is important to understand its history. The goal of this paper is to provide anunderstanding of this history and to make explicit important lessons from this history for informationmanagement. First, a model of information’s history is presented that explicitly focuses oninformation’s relation with ontology and epistemology. Second, the history of information is describedusing this model. This history is then used to explicate lessons for information management today, asit has been unrealistically restricted by a narrow, objective understanding of information. The historyof information provides several directions to change this embarrassing situation
