The Information Life Cycle

Most people in the 21st century consume information online through social media, news outlets, or pop-up advertisements. While information is more accessible than at any other point in human history, the way information is organized is highly dependent on historical approaches to how that information was created and shared. We call the model of how information is created and disseminated the information life cycle.

The information life cycle places information we consume on a timeline with milestones such as “Day of” or “Months after,” in temporal relation to an event. The information life cycle helps us discover what kind of information and research are available about any given event over time. Where a piece of information occurs in the information life cycle shapes how we think of it as evidence or potential research material.

The graphic below identifies milestones along the information life cycle.

Here is the most important thing to know about the information life cycle: WHEN we encounter a piece of information has a significant influence on the quality and quantity of information available. If we are hunting for information sources about the Grammy Awards in 2024 we will find a variety of primary sources on social media and in newspapers and magazines. If we are hunting for information about how scholars have analyzed the Grammy Awards and their impact on the music industry, we should seek out secondary sources in articles or books written and published by scholars. However, we might not expect scholars to cover the most recent awards ceremonies because of the time it takes for secondary research to be conducted and published. Tertiary sources like Wikipedia will summarize important facts an scholarship that has been published about the Grammy Awards over time. The information life cycle reflects how information sharing and technology work together (or sometimes not!) to create and disseminate new knowledge.

It is also important to know that the information life cycle follows Western European publishing traditions. For example, oral and nonwritten traditions of information sharing are completely absent, ignoring the ways that non-Western cultures may share information differently.

The information life cycle seems to be chronologically linear, moving from days to weeks to months to years. However, you may notice encyclopedias listed at the end of the information life cycle and wonder, “Why would it take 5 to 10 years for something to appear in an encyclopedia when Wikipedia is updated every day?”

The answer is that traditional encyclopedias are managed by large teams of editors who solicit experts to provide summaries of the scholarly landscape for readers. Some encyclopedias, like Oxford Music Online, focus on presenting expert perspectives from one academic discipline. The writing, editing, and publishing process is lengthy—it can take up to a decade to revise every article in a scholarly encyclopedia. This example shows how technology—in this case Wikipedia—can disrupt the traditional information life cycle. As you can see, these disruptions often impact the way we perceive knowledge production. But the information life cycle is still a helpful tool as a basic landscape for your research process.

Opportunities with new technology—such as immediately updating an entry in Wikipedia—can change audience expectations. The assumption that information can and should appear instantly influences the way information is produced and shared. However, as we discuss in Part III: Publishing Practices, business models that evolved around technology can be resistant to changing as quickly as technology might allow. This means that being an effective researcher depends on your understanding of the production of knowledge in the past and how those practices impact the way it is produced today.

Different Kinds of Information: Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources

Navigating terminology when learning about the research process can be confusing. What do you call something in the information life cycle? What should you call information sources that include tweets, magazine features or news stories, and scholarly articles? Is there a difference between a scholarly article, a peer-reviewed article, and an academic article? (No, they’re all the same thing!)

In this book, we discuss information sources with consistent terminology:

• Resource: Any kind of information source can be a resource. We use this term when we mean “every kind of resource including popular, scholarly, and multimedia sources.”
• Scholarly article: This is a kind of article that follows the methodological and publication traditions of an academic discipline. It might be referred to as an academic article, a peer-reviewed article, or a journal article.
• Scholarly: We also apply the adjective to scholarly to describe books, presentations, and practices that involve peer-review and are part of all aspects of knowledge production created by scholars.

Traditionally the information these resources convey existed as physical objects. Today, the confusing part is that we don’t always interact with these resources in physical forms. This can make it hard to figure out which kinds of resources to use as evidence to support or contradict a claim we’re testing as researchers. To make it even more complicated, objects such as archaeological artifacts, archival collections, and ancestral heirlooms contain valuable information that simultaneously provides contextual knowledge and illuminates individual human experiences from a specific (and possibly remote) time and place.^[1]

The first way we want to think about categorizing resources is in terms of a resource’s relationship to the event or phenomenon. The example of the 2024 Grammys earlier in this chapter employed the terms primary sources, secondary sources, and tertiary sources. These categories help us understand how specific kinds of resources situated along the information life cycle can serve as evidence in a research project.

Tertiary sources—summaries of scholarship—can help you decide where to get started or how to situate information needs that comprise your research question. Secondary sources can tell you what other scholars have discovered and which methodologies they used to engage with topics related to your research question. Finally, primary sources give you first-hand knowledge of events or music that you are studying. Examining these resources helps you form your own perspective and make contributions to the secondary source literature.

Primary Sources

Resources you find at the beginning of the information life cycle are primary sources that help you gather first-hand perspectives of an event or phenomenon. For example, to understand how Beyoncé’s album and documentary Renaissance were received, you can look at music magazines and websites like Billboard, Rolling Stone, or Pitchfork. You can also scour sites like Twitter/X or Instagram to learn what the broader fan community was saying when Renaissance was released.

When looking at historical events, we can expand the idea of primary sources to items such as letters, autobiographies, or diaries left behind by historical figures. Even scholarly articles can be primary sources! For example, if you are interested in understanding the history of popular music research studies, then the first scholarly articles about that topic will serve as primary sources for understanding how that academic discipline was formed and developed.

Musical performances can also be primary sources. This is especially true of audio recordings of world premieres or other notable interpretations of a musical work. You are often creating primary sources when you document your research-creation. Depending on a researcher’s question, research-creation centered in any one of the four modalities covered in the Chapter 1: What is Research? could become a primary source.

Secondary Sources

Secondary sources can be found a little further along on the information life cycle. These sources are the result of scholars employing a methodology from their discipline to analyze primary sources. Common secondary sources include scholarly articles and scholarly books. They can also help you access or understand the way other scholars have analyzed primary sources on a topic. Unlike general nonfiction, scholarly books go through a process of peer-review where other scholars assess the book for clarity, accuracy, and potential contributions to knowledge. The longer format of a book allows scholars to answer research questions that broadly address a topic, framework, or idea. Scholarly books can also help you access or understand how other scholars have analyzed primary sources, especially resources that are material and not textual. They provide analysis of music manuscripts, instruments, or artifacts that you may not be able to examine in person or that you may not have the expertise to analyze as documents.

Musicians may also produce secondary sources through performance. This is most likely to happen when you are working in the modality of research-for-creation or creative presentations of research. When working in these modalities, your performance is presenting your analyses of primary and secondary sources while synthesizing your research-creation into a source for other researchers to examine.

Tertiary Sources

Tertiary sources, such as encyclopedias, are not designed to add to the scholarship of an academic discipline but to summarize it. In that regard, even though Wikipedia is updated quickly, it can be limited when it presents information that is very recent. Tertiary sources rely on a rich body of published primary and secondary sources to present summaries of published perspectives from a disciplinary or general perspective. Wikipedia provides general perspectives quickly, sometimes almost immediately after information is published about an event. Gaining understanding from a specialist perspective takes time, because those perspectives need to be developed and then published. To avoid potential inaccuracies from its quick publication cycle, Wikipedia utilizes editorial standards that prescribe what kinds of sources are required to create or add to an article on the site. This approach has proven to be incredibly valuable at providing a quickly produced general resource. However, specialized resources represent decades of research knowledge and still hold value. Older, musicology-focused encyclopedias, notably the New Grove Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians, remain important tools for understanding the specialized research landscape on important music topics.

New encyclopedias like Wikipedia and traditional encyclopedias like New Grove each have benefits and limitations. Wikipedia requires a learner to have more expertise to know what might be missing, and despite the ability to publish quickly, learners need to recognize that these articles also improve over time as more experts contribute. New Grove requires a learner to examine when its content was last updated and have some knowledge of how research perspectives have changed since that time. While you can be confident in the scholarly process used to create New Grove articles, musician-scholars still need to read closely to see what perspectives might be missing and plan for what secondary sources might be missing.

Conclusion

It’s evident that the information life cycle is a useful tool for situating how resources can be used as evidence or examples in your research-creation. We also define ways to classify different kinds of resources that we might use in our research. This begins to create a foundation for approaching specific research-creation projects that align with your artistic practice. In the next chapter, we’ll examine historical approaches to archiving and organizing information as well as the methodologies historically used by music researchers. Gaining familiarity with these foundational concepts about how music research is made, organized, and archived help us align our information needs with the information systems we access in our research-creation work.

About the authors

name: Kathleen DeLaurenti

institution: The Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University

website: https://peabody.jhu.edu/faculty/kathleen-delaurenti

Kathleen DeLaurenti is the Director of the Arthur Friedheim Library at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University. She holds an MLIS from the University of Washington and a BFA in vocal performance from Carnegie Mellon University.

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name: Andrea I. Copland

institution: Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals/Répertoire international de la presse musicale (RIPM)

website: https://outwardsound.org/

Andrea I. Copland is an oboist, music historian, and librarian based in Baltimore, Maryland. Andrea has dual master’s of music degrees in oboe performance and music history from the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University and is currently Research Coordinator at the Répertoire International de la Presse Musicale (RIPM) database. She is also a teaching artist with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s OrchKids program and writes a public musicology blog, Outward Sound, on substack.

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