Five Laws of Information in Society

 The Libraries, Information and Society (LIS 502) GSLIS Course at University of Illinois Urbana Champaign Fall 2015 Semester Prof. Kate Williams’s Class edited down Paul Wheelhouse’s draft of the Five Laws of Information and Society on October 30, 2015. Paul Wheelhouse made one more edit to the class' 5-sentence summary of the five laws below on November 10, bringing consistency to 2 and 3 ("Everyone/ user") and bringing 2 and 3 together and placing the “value” at 4.

 1.         The word (information) is life.

 2.         Everyone/ user should have equal access to information regardless of format.

 3.         Everyone/ user should have free and non-restrained access to information.

 4.         The user decides the information value.

 5.         Google is not God.

The below extended form is Paul Wheelhouse's October 29, 2015 draft written on a moment of creative thought on that Sunday afternoon a week or two after learning about Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science in the LIS 502 course.

 All people and every individual needs information for life, from information necessary for locating, obtaining, and using such things as food, clothing, housing, health/medical care, libraries, schools, laws, public safety and law enforcement, government agencies, public welfare, political representatives, banking, religious/spiritual houses, etc.

 Every individual should have the freedom to access all the information the need for life in the form they want whether printed on paper or digital premised on the view that digital information does NOT have an intrinsically greater value over paper/printed information just because its digital.

 All people have a right to basic and necessary information (non-proprietary) for life and no one should be denied access to it. 

 There are several kinds of information that should be freely available to all citizens, rich, middle class, or poor, provided by government agencies, public libraries, and non-profit organizations, such as laws, tax forms and instructions, schools, family planning, health care, political representatives, etc. but there are some areas of information that citizens may expect information to Not be free, but a charge, such as higher education, professional growth, personal growth, and business training and development.

 Google is not God, no matter how big their data centers become and no matter how amazing fast search results appear and its sheer quantity of results or any other “wizardry” it will be able to code.