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Introduction
Although the issues of information limits have been appearing in the subject literature since at least the 1960s they have not yet been systemized, which may be due to a very broad scope of meaning of the term "information limits", that is, various obstacles hindering the access to and the use of information. These include macro-barriers, such as financial or geographical ones, as well as micro-barriers, i.e. individual factors resulting from a person's characteristics as a user of information. Meanwhile, the majority of authors engaged in the study of limits tended to focus on a part thereof, not on the whole; for example, recent studies have encompassed problems related to using the internet. Therefore, although such findings are important, they are also fragmentary. Undoubtedly, there is a demand for a more comprehensive study on this significant and topical subject.
An analysis of the world's literature of the subject has been performed, beginning with the 1960s up to the present. The term "information limits" is not commonly used and yields few search results. The phenomenon may be referred to under various names. This impeded the research. While reading through the articles it has been noticed that the relevant publications are labelled with such key words as: barriers (sometimes "information barriers", [98], [97] Swigon, 2006, 2010), access to information, flow of information, etc. Furthermore, it has been found that the issue of information limits has so far usually been raised together with, or even on the margin of, more popular topics, such as information need and information behaviour. In such publications the term "information limits" (or "information barriers") has not been included in the key words section; sometimes, but most often, one had to read through the whole text in order to find it. As a result, the bibliography of this paper contains a number of publications, which would not have been found by using automatic indexes.
The primary aim of this literature review is to synthesize and organize the issues related to information limits. It is an attempt to fill the gap present in the writings on information science. The motives for undertaking this broad issue comprise the following questions: What problems do "information limits" indicate? What kind of information limits are there? In order...