This paper studies the composition and scope of the information sciences. These arise, or will arise, from the dependence of the modern world upon records, and therefore upon means to facilitate discourse. Such means range from the physical to the conceptual, but all entail aspects of language, therefore they must all involve social activities, explicitly or implicitly. This excludes purely physical events on the one hand, and private mental activities on the other. The information sciences may be applied to other fields, but applications must not be confused with the sciences themselves. The main divisions of information sciences are related to those of semiotics (documentation to semantics and pragmatics, computation to syntactics and pragmatics, signalling and reprography to pragmatics). However, they have no useful common principles or theories, but are a federation of various technique s working within the wider field of management (in its widest sense) to facilitate discourse. To give mutual assistance towards this end they require a reasonably unambiguous common terminology. (Author)