Information through a Cooking Lens

In everyday cooking, a pantry of ingredients holds potential for separate ingredients to be transformed into a meal. A recipe imposes order: chop, sauté, simmer. But even then, a recipe is inert unless a cook reads, interprets, and adjusts accordingly. A cookbook can then embed accumulated wisdom: what constitutes a “pinch of salt,” which substitutions work, what spices match a culture’s palate, how to improvise when an oven runs hot or when a guest is allergic to nuts. 

Dr. Joan Donovan’s reminder that “Information is fast and cheap. Knowledge is slow and expensive” (Brown, 2022), captures the stakes of this transformation. We are awash with plentiful ingredients and recipes, yet the expensive art of turning them into nourishing meals—trusted knowledge—requires time, expertise, and care. Dr. Marcia J. Bates, in The Invisible Substrate of Information Science, reveals that much of the work enabling such transformation lies beneath the surface: tacit decisions about representation, organization, and values that shape how we encounter and interpret recorded information.

Bates identifies two layers:

• Above the waterline – visible activities like cataloging, indexing, searching, and retrieval (recipes and their instructions).
• Below the waterline – the invisible substrate: implicit values, representational choices, methodological dualities, and social contexts (culture, care, nuance).

From Ingredients to Meals: Examples in LIS Practice

Libraries collect raw data—books, digital files, archives, oral histories. Consider a community oral history project that accumulates dozens of recorded interviews (raw audio files). Without description, indexing, or transcripts, the interviews are like unlabeled spices: available but irrelevant. Similarly, raw usage statistics (e.g., checkout counts, database click-throughs) do not, alone, inform strategy and policy.

Transforming raw holdings into usable information requires cataloging (the recipe stage). Dublin Core metadata can change the structure of the ingredients, facilitating the creation of a subject heading that clusters materials on a topic. The visible work—writing the guides or records—appears simple, but it depends on the invisible substrate: controlled vocabularies, decisions about authority records, or choices about reading level.

Knowledge emerges when information (recipes) is internalized, contextualized, and tested. For instance:

• Archivists preserving Indigenous materials consult with tribal elders to ensure respectful description. They may override standard subject headings to honor local language and protocols.
• Librarians responding to book bans draw on historical knowledge of intellectual freedom struggles, community values, and legal precedent—not just a list of titles—to defend access.

These invisible layers parallel a cook’s intuition—their understanding of when to stir, how to season, or which dish fits an occasion. This is expensive work that requires relationship-building, cultural sensitivity, and iterative teaching—all largely invisible to outsiders who see only a visually appealing shelf or search result. 

Culture, Care, and Nuance in LIS

Culture shapes knowledge just as cuisine shapes flavor. Bates notes that recorded information is a human product embedded in social worlds which requires expensive cultural labor. A cookbook from one country may confuse another’s palate. Likewise, a librarian who adopts community archiving models—such as the Black Lives Matter Archives Project—adjusts taxonomies and description practices to reflect the culture of the creators, not merely the defaults of a cataloging standard.

Care is the attentive labor of cleaning data, double-checking sources, and mentoring patrons. A digital librarian might verify author attributions before digitization—like tasting a sauce before serving. Without this care, misinformation can seep in, as when mislabeled images circulate online.

Nuance appears when librarians mediate gray areas: Is Maus a children’s book or adult graphic novel? Should a controversial author be shelved in multiple places or within a locked cabinet? Is a meme a primary source? These judgments can’t be automated easily—they require a seasoned librarian’s knowledge and discernment, familiarity with community values, and professional ethics.

Global Perspective: Knowledge as Culturally Situated Cuisine

Just as Thai cooking differs from French, knowledge practices differ globally. An open access policy drafted in Europe may not fit information ecologies in rural Africa without adaptation. Librarians in Kenya developing local language storybooks invest time in translation, community feedback, and culturally resonant imagery—expensive but essential for knowledge transfer. Bates’s framework reminds us that the “waterline” is not universal—local cultures determine what remains invisible or visible.

Conclusion: Nourishing Communities with Knowledge

A pantry full of ingredients does not guarantee dinner. A recipe on paper does not guarantee an edible meal. Only through culture-informed practice, careful attention, and nuanced judgment does nourishment emerge. In LIS, this means that collecting data and distributing information are only the beginnings. Knowledge—the ability of a community to learn, decide, remember, and act wisely—depends on the invisible substrate of representation, ethics, nuance, culture, and care. As Donovan warns, cheap information can flood the shelves, but expensive knowledge—sustained by librarians’ hidden labor—feeds democracy and culture. 

References

Bates, Marcia J. (1999). The invisible substrate of information science. Journal of the American society for information science, 50(12), 1043-1050. Available at: https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/substrate.html.

Brown, Andrew James. “Information Is Fast and Cheap. Knowledge Is Slow and Expensive.” Information is fast and cheap. Knowledge is slow and expensive., March 18, 2022. https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2022/03/information-is-fast-and-cheap-knowledge.html

Cheng, S., Lee, L., Ocepek, M. G., & Oleschuk, M. (2025). Everyday foodwork in single-person households: an expansion of the information practice model. Journal of Documentation, 1-19.

Hartel, J. (2010a). Managing documents at home for serious leisure: a case study of the hobby of gourmet cooking. Journal of documentation, 66(6), 847-874.

Hartel, J. (2010b). Time as a framework for information science: Insights from the hobby of gourmet cooking. Information Research, 15(4), 15-4.

Frummet, A., Elsweiler, D., & Ludwig, B. (2022). “What Can I Cook with these Ingredients?” Understanding Cooking-Related Information Needs in Conversational Search. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 40(4), 1-32.