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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.
Biography
Karen Loasby is Information Architecture Team Leader for BBC Future
Media & Technology. She has been at the BBC for six years working on
content modelling, controlled vocabularies, metadata schema, automatic
indexing and trying to support organisational memory. She writes at
<http://www.iaplay.com/>.
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