The Properties of Information: Characteristics and Challenges

Every decision you make, from choosing a college course to a government framing a national policy, rests on information. Yet information is not like other resources we use. It behaves in ways that set it apart from physical goods, and understanding these behaviours is fundamental to anyone studying library and information science. Information has distinct properties that shape how it is created, shared, and used, and it also faces real obstacles that block its free movement. This post examines the core properties of information, how those properties differ across scientific, technological, and economic domains, and the barriers that prevent knowledge from reaching everyone who needs it.

The general properties of information 🔗

Before looking at specialised fields, it helps to understand the traits that apply to information of every kind. These foundational characteristics explain why information demands its own theory and its own management systems, separate from the way we handle material goods.

Information is non-consumable 🔗

The most striking property of information is that it is non-consumable. When you eat food or burn fuel, the resource is used up and gone. Information works in the opposite way. When you share a fact with someone, you still keep it. A research paper can be read by one person or by a million people, and it loses none of its value in the process. This non-depletable nature means information can be copied and distributed at almost no cost, which is exactly why digital libraries, open repositories, and the internet have transformed access to knowledge. The challenge for information professionals is therefore not scarcity, as it is with physical resources, but organisation, retrieval, and quality control.

Information drives the continuous growth of knowledge 🔗

A second defining property is that information is cumulative. It is the raw material from which knowledge is built, and unlike physical stockpiles, it keeps expanding. New findings are layered on top of older ones, and each generation of researchers builds on the work of those before it. This is why the discipline of information science is concerned with the properties and behaviour of information and the forces that govern how it flows, as captured in the widely cited definition discussed in academic overviews of the field on platforms such as ScienceDirect. Because knowledge compounds in this way, the volume of recorded information grows faster every year, creating both opportunity and the problem of information overload.

Information is universal and adaptable 🔗

Information is also adaptable. A single dataset can be reinterpreted, reformulated, and applied across very different contexts. Census figures can serve economists, town planners, public health workers, and historians alike. This adaptability allows information to flow across disciplines and create new connections between fields that might otherwise stay separate. It is precisely this property that makes information so central to innovation, because fresh ideas often emerge when knowledge from one area is applied to a problem in another.

Scientific and technical information 🔗

While the general properties apply everywhere, certain kinds of information behave in distinctive ways. Scientific and technical information has three features that stand out: universality, validation through peer review, and a tendency to become outdated quickly.

Universality across borders 🔗

Scientific information is meant to be universal. A discovery made in a laboratory in Bengaluru is, in principle, accessible and relevant to researchers in Berlin or Boston. Science aims to produce knowledge that holds true regardless of where it was generated, and this shared character is what allows global collaboration on problems like disease, climate change, and clean energy. The ideal that scholarship should be judged purely on its intellectual merit, rather than on who produced it, is often described as universalism in the study of how research communities operate, a norm examined in research on peer review published on repositories such as bioRxiv.

The peer review system 🔗

Scientific information earns its authority through peer review. Before findings are accepted as reliable, independent experts examine them for methodological soundness, accuracy, and significance. This filtering process protects the integrity of the scientific record so that only well-substantiated work contributes to the shared body of knowledge. Peer review is not perfect, however. Studies have documented delays of several months to more than a year, and researchers have raised concerns about biases linked to an author’s nationality, institution, language, or gender, as analysed in work available on arXiv. For students entering research, understanding both the strengths and the limits of this system is essential, because it shapes which information reaches the public and how quickly.

High rates of obsolescence 🔗

Scientific and technical information also has a short shelf life compared with many other kinds of knowledge. It is marked by high obsolescence, meaning newer findings continually replace older ones. A method considered cutting edge today may be superseded within a few years. Information scientists have studied this pattern quantitatively, modelling how the usefulness and citation of scientific literature declines over time, in classic work such as the analysis of obsolescence published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science. This rapid ageing has practical consequences for libraries, which must constantly update collections, and for professionals, who must keep relearning to stay current.

Technological and economic information 🔗

Information in the technological and economic spheres behaves very differently from open scientific knowledge. Here, the dominant features are competitiveness and secrecy rather than free sharing.

Competitiveness and commercial value 🔗

Technological and economic information carries direct commercial value. A new manufacturing process, a pricing strategy, or a market forecast can give one company a decisive advantage over its rivals. Because of this, the same property that makes information easy to copy also makes it something firms guard closely. The free flow of information drives economic growth, trade, and innovation, which is why restricting it imposes real costs, a point argued in policy analysis on cross-border data flows by organisations such as the World Economic Forum. Yet within a competitive market, individual businesses have strong incentives to keep their most valuable information private.

Secrecy and the divide between disciplines 🔗

This leads to a pattern of secrecy that contrasts sharply with the openness of academic science. Trade secrets, patents, and confidentiality agreements all exist to control who can use commercially sensitive knowledge. There is often a visible fissure between universities, which are designed to publish and share, and private companies, which are designed to protect and monetise. Researchers have described this as a barrier between scientific knowledge and product knowledge, where different goals, rules of expression, and levels of trust create fences around information, as discussed in work on the flow of knowledge available on ResearchGate. For an information professional, recognising which sphere a piece of information belongs to, open or proprietary, is key to managing it correctly.

Barriers to the flow of information 🔗

Even though information is non-consumable and easy to copy, it does not reach everyone equally. A range of obstacles stands between knowledge and the people who need it. These barriers are particularly visible in a diverse country with deep social and economic differences.

Language barriers 🔗

Language is one of the most significant obstacles. A large share of the world’s scholarly and online content is produced in English, while most people are more comfortable in another tongue. With 22 officially recognised languages and hundreds of dialects, a vast number of citizens cannot fully use English-language resources. Although regional-language content is expanding, the gap continues to limit meaningful participation in the digital world for many. Beyond everyday language, each field of expertise has its own technical vocabulary, which can shut out non-specialists even when they speak the same language. Translation, multilingual cataloguing, and plain-language summaries are therefore important tools for breaking this barrier down.

Social differentiation 🔗

Social factors create a second set of barriers. Access to information is shaped by gender, caste, education level, and geography. The gender gap is stark: women are far less likely than men to use mobile internet, and ownership of devices remains unequal, with cultural norms and limited financial autonomy restricting women’s access, especially in rural areas. ICT skill deprivation is also concentrated among historically marginalised communities, reinforcing existing disadvantages, as documented in analyses of the digital divide. When access to knowledge mirrors social hierarchy, information stops being a force for equality and instead deepens the gaps that already exist.

Economic constraints 🔗

Economic barriers are perhaps the most decisive of all. The cost of devices, data, and reliable connectivity remains out of reach for many low-income households, even as prices fall. This is the heart of the digital divide, the gap between those who can access information and communication technologies and those who cannot. The divide is closely tied to wider factors like income inequality, education, and regional disparity, as set out in detailed research on bridging the gap in India hosted on SSRN. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: those already disadvantaged fall further behind as education, services, and economic activity move online.

Other obstacles to free flow 🔗

Beyond these three, information faces political and structural barriers too. Governments around the world have used censorship, restrictive legislation, and bureaucratic obstruction to control what information circulates, an inventory of obstacles famously catalogued by the UNESCO-linked MacBride Commission and discussed in scholarship on human rights and the free flow of information. Overcoming all of these barriers, whether linguistic, social, economic, or political, is one of the central missions of the information profession.

Why these properties matter 🔗

Taken together, the properties of information explain why it cannot be managed like any ordinary commodity. Its non-consumable nature makes universal sharing possible. Its cumulative growth makes organisation essential. Its universality powers global science, while peer review safeguards quality and obsolescence forces constant renewal. In the economic sphere, the same information that wants to flow freely is locked behind secrecy and competition. And running through all of this is the persistent challenge of barriers that keep knowledge from reaching everyone. Understanding these characteristics is what allows librarians, archivists, and information specialists to design systems that move knowledge efficiently and fairly.

What do you think? How can technological advances be used to reduce the language and economic barriers that keep information from reaching everyone equally? And should scientific knowledge follow the open, universal model while commercial knowledge stays secret, or is there a better balance between sharing and protecting valuable information?

References

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/library-science
2. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/400515.full.pdf
3. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1008.4324
4. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.4630300509/full
5. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2016/07/free-flow-of-data-between-countries/
6. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242282953_The_Importance_of_the_Free_Flow_of_Information_and_Knowledge
7. https://www.clearias.com/digital-divide-in-india/
8. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5248471
9. https://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1531&context=fac_articles_chapters