Learning Skills for Science Skill Area : Information Retrieval Activity 1.1: Saving and finding information Activity materials: Information history Note: The images in these activity materials are copyright, and may not be reproduced for any other purpose

Information history Storage and retrieval of information, from caves to computers Human brains don’t last forever. And we forget things easily. So people started making more permanent records of the ideas inside their heads. These cave paintings are thousands of years old. After all this time, we have some image of what those cave- painters were thinking. 1

Hieroglyphs store information in pictures. You have to learn to ‘read’ the symbol, to retrieve the information. 2

The first books were written by hand. There was no other way. So there weren’t many books, and they were hard to get hold of. Most of the books were religious. Later, people made records of other ideas. But only a few people could ever read those books. 3

Printing was a new technology that changed everything. Printers could produce many copies of a book, quickly and easily. Suddenly, far more people could have access to books and the information they contain. 4

People and organisations could begin to collect books. The collections were called libraries. A library is a huge store of information. To retrieve the information you first pull a book from the shelf. The information is stored in symbols. If you can’t understand those symbols then you are not reading this now. 5

There is a lot of information in those books, but none of it means anything without fully working human brains. 6

You can put information into a computer. It stores or ‘remembers’ it. If you know how to use a computer then you know how to retrieve information when you want it. 7

DNA carries information from generation to generation. It tells a new body how to grow - to be just like Mum and Dad. DNA is a chemical information store. 8

This man has a brain tumour, and he is about to have an operation to cut it out. Machines have gathered information about the inside of his brain. A computer has stored the information. The computer projects an image of what’s inside onto the outside of his head. Surgeons use the information. They can ‘see’ the tumour, even before they cut into the skull. The image is a kind of ‘virtual reality’. 9