3.1. Organizational Challenges
In recent years, increasing attention has been focused on the
challenge of organizing information. Yet, this challenge is not new.
People have struggled with the difficulties of information
organization for centuries. The field of librarianship has been
largely devoted to the task of organizing and providing access to
information. So why all the fuss now?
Believe it or not, we're all becoming librarians. This quiet
yet powerful revolution is driven by the decentralizing force of the
global Internet. Not long ago, the responsibility for labeling,
organizing, and providing access to information fell squarely in the
laps of librarians. These librarians spoke in strange languages about
Dewey Decimal Classification and the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules.
They classified, cataloged, and helped us find the information we
needed.
The Internet is forcing the responsibility for organizing information
on more of us each day. How many corporate web sites exist today? How
many personal home pages? What about tomorrow? As the Internet
provides us all with the freedom to publish information, it quietly
burdens us with the responsibility to organize that information.
As we struggle to meet that challenge, we unknowingly adopt the
language of librarians. How should we label that
content? Is there an existing classification
system we can borrow? Who's going to
catalog all of that information?
We're moving towards a world where tremendous numbers of people
publish and organize their own information. As we do so, the
challenges inherent in organizing that information become more
recognized and more important. Let's explore some of the
reasons why organizing information in useful ways is so difficult.