1997-2007: A Decade of Find, Use, Manage, Share
Jinfo Blog

By Karen Loasby

Item

On the evolutionary scale, 10 years isn't even a blip, not a blink, not a breath in. It's hardly anything at all. But on the information scale, especially in the years from 1997 to 2007, a decade is a new mountain range, a new species, a new world.

FreePint has been covering this evolution revolution from tip to tail, keeping up with changes in the business information industry as they've happened. Now, as we celebrate our 10th birthday, we've invited four top experts in their fields of finding, using, managing and sharing information to explain what these changes mean from a distance.

By the time you read this, the landscape is likely to have evolved again - who knows what earthshaking ideas are rippling forth? Until then, here are the hottest trends in the last 10 years. We'll keep an eye on the seismograph while you read.

Manage By Karen Loasby

We manage many things within the boundaries of information. There are things that must be found, acquired, classified, organised, monitored, protected, archived and eventually disposed of. Curiously, we never talk about 'book management', but records, content, documents, digital assets and even knowledge are all managed.

Many of these phrases came into existence with the arrival of digital technologies in the latter half of the 20th century and by 1997 were common and accepted phrases. But the last decade has seen a growth in activity, discussion and jobs in these areas.

It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the decade has also seen the coming of age of the Internet. FreePint shares its 10th anniversary with the BBC's Website. Amazon was around in 1997, but Larry Page and Sergey Brin were still trying to get Google off the ground. Information professionals had certainly noticed the potential of the Internet by then, both as a resource and as a domain needing a touch of their expertise. At that time Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville were applying their information science training to the Web and writing the O'Reilly book, "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web".

As the Web increasingly became a place of business as much as a place of anarchy and unrestrained freedoms, the need for some aspects of information management became clear, particularly data protection and copyright controls. Digital information brought new challenges in meeting freedom of information and other legal requests.

A new concept, knowledge management, built momentum throughout the decade. There was much debate about what differences, if any, distinguished KM from information management, but there was also an indisputable boom in intranets, information audits, corporate blogs and wikis.

Metadata became a surprising buzzword, bringing with it new terminology and applications, but in many ways tapping into old expertise in abstracting and indexing. Dublin core, taxonomies, XML, Semantic Web, topic maps, tagging and folksonomies were all part of the debate.

The term 'information architect' was coined in the 1970s but the new Web profession found its feet in the late 1990s. Information architects combined information management with ethnography, human computer interaction and graphic design to tackle the accessibility, usability and findability of information on the Web.

Web 2.0 arrived, identifiable in part by an enthusiasm for "tagging not taxonomy" <http://digbig.com/4wdnh>. Software developers were exhorted to rely on the wisdom of the crowds not the commitment of librarians. Initially it felt like the digerati found information management concepts and rejected them in the space of the decade, but 2.0 poster children like Google's PageRank and Amazon recommendations remain 'managed' systems. They were not built and left to their own devices. The companies still plan where the users will contribute, design the systems that allow and encourage this, and then evaluate and report on how well the systems (and the users' contributions) are achieving the companies goals. There is still plenty of work to be done.

The next decade will doubtless see the arrival of a new thing to be managed but we are also still managing books thousands of years after they were invented. It is tempting to say that the one thing that we are guaranteed to need to manage is 'change', but we need to remember the similarities in the management problems we face as well as noticing the dazzling differences.

« Blog