“The problem of directing a user to stored information, some of which may be unknown to him, is the problem of "information retrieval"… In information retrieval, the addressee or receiver rather than the sender is the active party. Other differences are that communication is temporal from one epoch to a later epoch in time, though possibly at the same point in space; communication is in all cases unidirectional; the sender cannot know the particular message that will be of later use to the receiver and must send all possible messages; the message is digitally representable; a "channel" is the physical document left in storage which contains the message; and there is no channel noise because all messages are presumed to be completely accessible to the receiver. The technical goal is finding in minimum time those messages of interest to the receiver, where the receiver has available a selective device with a finite digital scanning rate.”

—  Calvin Mooers

Calvin Mooers (1950). " Information retrieval viewed as temporal signaling http://www.mathunion.org/ICM/ICM1950.1/Main/icm1950.1.0565.0576.ocr.pdf#page=8". Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians. Vol. 1, S.572-573

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Calvin Mooers 5
American computer scientist 1919–1994

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“An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it… Where an information retrieval system tends not to be used, a more capable information retrieval system may tend to be used even less.”

Calvin Mooers (1919–1994) American computer scientist

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“Information retrieval is the name for the process or method whereby a prospective user of information is able to convert his need for information into an actual list of citations to documents in storage containing information useful to him. It is the finding or discovery process with respect to stored information. It is another, more general, name for the production of a demand bibliography. Information retrieval embraces the intellectual aspects of the description of information and its specification for search, and also whatever systems, technique, or machines that are employed to carry out the operation. Information retrieval is crucial to documentation and organization of knowledge.”

Calvin Mooers (1919–1994) American computer scientist

Calvin Mooers (1951) "Zatocoding applied to mechanical organization of knowledge." American Documentation, 2, p. 25; Cited in: Birger Hjørland (2006) " Information retrival (IR) http://www.iva.dk/bh/Core%20Concepts%20in%20LIS/articles%20a-z/information_retrieval.htm" on iva.dk.

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Calvin Mooers (1919–1994) American computer scientist

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Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

B.C. Vickery (1970) Techniques of information retrieval, London: Butterworth. p. v; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011) " Brian Vickery and the foundations of information science http://www.iskouk.org/conf2011/papers/robinson.pdf".

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On Kawara (1933–2014) artist

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“We all would like to know more and, at the same time, to receive less information. In fact, the problem of a worker in today's knowledge industry is not the scarcity of information but its excess. The same holds for professionals: just think of a physician or an executive, constantly bombarded by information that is at best irrelevant. In order to learn anything we need time. And to make time we must use information filters allowing us to ignore most of the information aimed at us. We must ignore much to learn a little.”

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Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)
Context: In the face of almost infinite useful knowledge, we have adopted the strategy of "information regeneration rather than information retrieval."... most importantly, you should be able to generate the result you need even if no one has ever done it before you—you will not be dependent on the past to have done everything you will ever need in mathematics.

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