The field of information lifecycle management (ILM) aims for a cost-effective strategy for maintaining information assets in terms of balancing the cost of maintaining information vs. business value. However, despite impressive commercial systems, the field needs more research studies and focus. This paper contains a contribution toward developing a theoretical foundation for ILM. Information values are developed based on a classification scheme that does not consider operational factors (e.g., storage, access). An informational flow model provides the foundation for such categorization according to collected, processed, created, released, and transferred information.