“One of the fundamental challenges for both librarianship and information science is to find a way to contend with ever-larger piles or stacks or sets of information. Because of the linguistic, psychological, cognitive, social, and technical complexities of information retrieval, each increase in size of the information source or database requires different solutions; scalability is a fundamental problem in this field.” (p.77)
Bates, M. J. (1999). The invisible substrate of information science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50(12), 1043–1050.