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459 
(a) 
The Government
(b) 
Advice or information bureaux eg Reuters 
(c) Consultants 
(d) 
Newspaper and magazine publishers
(e) 
There may be specific reference works which are used in a particular line of work
(f) 
Libraries and information services
(g) 
Increasingly businesses can use each other's systems as sources of information, for instance via 
extranets or electronic data interchange (EDI)
(h) 
Electronic sources of information are becoming increasingly important
(i) 
For some time there have been 'viewdata' services, such as Prestel,
 
offering a very large 
bank of information gathered from organisations including the Office for National 
Statistics, newspapers and the British Library. Topic
 
offers information on the stock 
market. Companies like Reuters
 
operate primarily in the field of provision of information – 
often in electronic form. 
(ii) The 
internet
 
is a vast source of information.
6.6 Efficient data collection 
To produce meaningful information it is first necessary to capture the underlying data. The method of 
data collection
chosen will depend on the nature of the 
organisation
, 
cost
and 
efficiency
. Some 
common data collection methods are listed below. 

Document 
reading 
methods 

Magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) 

Optical mark reading (OMR) 

Scanners and optical character recognition (OCR) 

Bar coding and Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS) 

Electronic Funds Transfer at the Point of Sale (EFTPOS) 

Magnetic stripe cards 

Smart 
cards 

Touch 
screens 

Voice 
recognition 
6.7 Why do organisations need information? 

Data 
is the raw material for data processing. Data consists of numbers, letters and symbols and 
relates to facts, events and transactions. 

Information 
is data that has been processed in such a way as to be meaningful to the person who 
receives it. 
Organisations require