information management: tradition and challenges ahead

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LIBER 2010 THEME PAPER

"Information Management: Tradition and Challenges ahead".

Introduction

Modern society is said to be highly information dependent and almost all social activitiesnowadays are information, knowledge and learning oriented. Information Society is a term usedfor a society in which the creation, distribution, and manipulation of information has become themost significant economic and cultural activity. The information not only affects the way peopleinteract but it also insists the traditional organizational structures to be more flexible, more

participatory and more decentralized. With modern information access systems the lifestyle of people in the present information society, wherever they are, has turned at many sharp corners,making the life sophisticated in urban areas and complicated in rural areas (Seneviratne, 2008).The social man as a part of this society cannot avoid this revolution but needs to survive thesituation. Thus information is indispensable in the development of any society, be it economic,social, political or cultural (Hughes, 1991). Information is also treated as a factor of productionand obtaining of which, whenever necessary, is a right of a citizen of any social status (Mchombu,1996). In this outset, managing this valuable asset, is treated highly important in all social aspectsand the role of librarians as knowledge and information managers becomes indispensable in thisrespect.

Definitions - Conceptual

There are definitions for the concept Information management in different anglesincluding the definitions in library bias. According to a simple straight forward definitionthe information management is; acquisition, recording, organizing, storage,dissemination, and retrieval of information ( www.bnet.com, 2010) . The Wikipedia definethe concept as; Information management (IM) is the collection and management of information from one or more sources and the distribution of that information to one or more audiences. ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_management , 2010 ).

Definitions Functional

The concept is treated functionally by different organizations and institutes depending onthe nature of information and its management by the function of that particular organization. The British Records Association contributes the definition as A broader

professional grouping for all activities and functions concerned with managinginformation, regardless of its nature or medium( www.britishrecordsassociation.org.uk/ 2010).

Information Management Structures

According to the behavior of information as recognized in modern organizations,information management can be divided broadly into three categories;

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Information management in organization structures where information is treatedas the base resource. These systems inputs, processes and outputs informationand impacts the knowledge.Information management in organizational transactions where information istreated as the main supporting resource (media services, stock/security etc.

exchanges, commodity markets etc.) inputs information, support processing adifferent product and outputs another information product or service.Information management in organizational operations where information istreated a factor of production (consumer and capital goods production cycles).Information is one of the input, process a different product using information andoutputs a good or service.

Information as the base resource:

This paper deals with the first category of information management where theinformation behaves as the base resource and the input and output of the institute or

organization constitute information itself. Information is treated as main resource inlibrary and information centres where information management is strictly adhered with along established tradition in information acquisition, organization for informationretrieval and information dissemination. According to the significance given to eachinformation component, it automatically became a resource to be managed withsystematic methods and tools with multiplication of manuscript production that used

printing technology, with information explosion and with the emergence of ICTs.

This base model depicts input as the raw information, base as the organized informationand the out put as the processed information blocks retrieved; see figure I below. Theseare the impact areas of information behaviour in case of the first category of information

management that we hope to discuss here.

Figure I Behaviour of Information Base model

Here the raw information entered or acquired into the system in material form in any possible kind of media. The information is processed and documented by the informationscientists as a routine function which paves the way to originate documentation products.The information processed now ready for deployment to delegate literature survey or literature search which activates the information retrieval and the information retrieval

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now become a special skill that should be propagated by learners as a learning to learnskill. This process is the base for the documentation theories developed by both Prof. S.R.Ranganathan (in his exemplary analysis on Documentation in 1949) and Dr. Th. P.Loosjes (in his work on documentation of scientific literature, Documentatie vanwetenschappelijke literatuur .Met een voorwoord van L.J. van der Wolk in 1957 . Noord-

Hollandsche Uitgeversmij in Amsterdam ).

It is worth to account how the information management and the documentation processwas settled on a clear platform of bibliographic control with the mammoth effortlaunched 1910 by Paul Otlet, the father of modern documentation systems and by Henryla Fontain. Figure III below shows the mundaneum, where 13 million of scientificinformation was documented on standard index slips in thousands of index drawers. Heintroduced the standard 3x5 inch index card (catalogue card) used in most librariesaround the world to date.

Figure II - Fig. II Index card processing room & Telegraph Room at Mundaneum

Born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1868 he is considered as first contributor to the creation of the networked knowledge towards systematic control of scientific informaton. Otletworked with organizing knowledge structures of information that could be considered asthe earliest precedent of the World Wide Web. He spent his entire life trying to conceivesearch engines that could establish hyper-connections between all existing information.He dreamt of the creation of an infinite network of information that could contain andinterconnect the whole body of human knowledge. This was the first artificial conceptionof a hyperlink model of infogathering infosharing. He envisioned a system of

information access similar to the semantic web.He created the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) and introduced the standard inEurope. Otlet wrote numerous essays on how to collect and organize the worldsknowledge, culminating in two books, the Trait de documentation (1934) and Monde:

Essai d'universalisme (1935). He and Henri La Fontaine founded Institut International de Bibliographie in 1895 which later became the International Federation for Documentation and Information, FID.

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Though the pragmatic approach was as such, an analytical approach clearing all thedoubts eliminating confusions and setting boundaries to the concepts of documentation ininformation management was brought out by Prof. S.R. Ranganathan who is treated asfather of modern library science after his article written to Libri , issue number one of volume number one,1950. Prof. Ranganathan sets the significance of defining the

meaning of documentation, which is the very essence of information management, whichemerged at a discussion in 1949 at Washington,D.C.

An examination of the Review of Documentation of the FID, the Journalof Decumentation of the ASLIB and American Documentation from MITdoes not clarify the issue.. Therefore the only means to eliminate wastedue to the nebulousness of this term is to come to am agreement about itsdefinition and if possible to define it by enumeration (Ranganathan,1950)

Thus the demarcation of active and passive documentation emerged accommodating

documentation works and services. In the outset documentation is taken to besynonymous with compilation of bibliography, where one of the oldest advanced methodof information management. Professor Ranganathan extracted the essence of the fact andemphasized the analysis of micro-units of thought embodied in papers and articles in

periodical publications and occasional releases. He embraced stage where bibliography building is necessary, reference service undertaken by the library and the reproduction of information to generate a copy of any particular material needed by the user.

With the displacement of the emphasis in publication from the book to the periodical thenecessity arose for a continuous analysis of articles from periodicals particularly theresearchers had to be informed speedily of the latest stage of research in their field. This

kind of analysis was to be performed by the documentalists in libraries. With the adventof new area of expertise the library science had to be contributed with necessaryclarifications. Th.P Loosjes in his work on documenation of scientific literature(Documentatie van wetens chappelijke literatuur ,1957) had defined the documentation asa process of information analysis. He asserted that the documentation can be said to havetwo starting points; a) from the library b) from research. Figure III indicates theLoosjess Model of polarity of documentation.

Fig: III

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In the above model, following abbreviations are used to indicate the information flow.

MS = MANUSCRIPTS

MU = MULTIPLICATION OF THE MATERIALS USING DIFERENT METHODS

LI = DOCUMENT RECEIVE IN THE LIBRARY OR INFORMATION CENTRE

DO = MATERIAL IS DOCUMENTED BY THE INFORMATION SCIENTISTS

RE = RESEARCH STARTS-LITERATURE SEARCH BEGINS

When documentation is started from the library, it is the need for analysis of individual periodical articles. When the process is initiated form research, it is the necessity for delegation of literature searches.

The Loosjes model is still valid as the base conceptual model of information managementeven for today though the information landscape had changed in its formats

tremendously. Manuscripts are produced in different formats, accessible online beforegetting indexed presence through a formal bibliographic control tool, information iscaptured by documentation products such as abstracts, indexes and bibliographies at itsmultiplication level, before coming into a library. Still the concepts of this model remainand above all, importance of documentation though in its novel formats and accessiblemedia, had reached its heights with the need for instant information retrieval wheredynamic information management is highly necessary.

Hence the importance of documentation, be it active or passive, still has its worth evenwhen a user access the web for instant information or knowledge. The user maybeunaware about the automatic indexing undertaken by a web software behind the user

interface and may be thinking that he himself had got rid of old cumbersome methods of information retrieval for sure, but he is also unaware that the same documentation

principles still underpins the modern information management and retrieval systems. Itsthe same old wine that came in delicate vessels with lustre and glitter and the differenceis, earlier the user can see what the bibliographer or indexer is doing and the process isvisible, now the retrieval systems outputs the information blocks at the instant of retrievalwithout showing the complexity of the modern information processing systems.

The traditions in information control

The theoretical approach to information management thus was asserted by many

scientists those who wanted to provide accessibility to plethora of literature that emergedwith scientific and industrial discoveries time to time. When dealing with the tradition of information management, it has been established that the ancient Kemets (Egyptians)who were an African race with a long history, and has roots to information gathering andmanagement about 6000 years ago. The chief library builder of ancient Kemet, and themost famous, was Rameses II (c. 1304-1237 B.C.), who had formed the first librarymotto, reads as "Medicine for the Soul". The tradition evolved through building uplargest and first systematic library in Alexandria around 32 B.C.

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During the same long centuries libraries of other kingdoms also sprang into life. Libraryof King Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, which contained more than 30,000 clay tablets (c. 625BC), and the royal and academic libraries of Sumeria, Babylonia, Assyria, China, Indiaand other early civilizations have great contributions to library history. Private literaturecollections maintained by royals, elites and merchants of trade also have added

considerable weight to the information management tradition.

Tools and instruments used to control or manage information too dates back to theancient Kemetic concept of the seven liberal arts (grammer, rhetoric, logic, geometry,arithmetic, astronomy, and music), the general mystery system of the four elements (fire,water, earth, air), four qualities, duality of opposites (hot-cold, wet-dry...) etc. Ptolemicand other ancient libraries too had similar treatment to the material gathered. Modernclassifications systems have divisions in similar bases with much more developed subjectanalysis.

Greeks used in their "book hall" a wall catalog in the Horus temple at Edfu, which lists37 titles and dates from the time of Ptolemaios VIII and Euergetes II (177-116 B.C.). InEgypt papyrus rolls placed in clay jars or metal cylinders labeled with a few key wordsdescribing their content and via parchment scrolls divided by author, title, or major subject placed in bins or on shelves." (Gates, 1983).

Pinakes ( "tables", plural of ) was the first library catalog, a catalog of books and scrolls. This library catalog was a set of indexes used at the Library of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt , but only a few fragments of it have survived the firethat destroyed the great library in 48 B.C., which give an approximation of theorganization of the whole.

The library collection at the Library of Alexandria contained more than 120,000 scrolls,which were grouped together by subject matter and stored in bins. Each bin carried alabel with painted tablets hung above the stored parchments. Pinakes was named after these tablets and are a set of books or scrolls of index lists. The bins gave bibliographicalinformation for every scroll. A typical entry started with a title. It also provided theauthor's name, birthplace, his father's name, any teachers he trained under, and hiseducational background. It contained a brief biography of the author and a list of theauthor's publications. The entry had the first line of the work, a summary of its contents,the name of the author, and information about where the scroll came from.

The existence of classification system at that time is also should be mentioned especiallythe comprehensive system designed by Callimacus that supported the Pinakes. Hissystem divided works into six genres and five sections of prose. They were rhetoric, law,epic, tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, history, medicine, mathematics, natural science andmiscellanies. Each category was alphabetized by author. The Pinakes provedindispensable to librarians for centuries. It became a model to use all over theMediterranean. Its influence can be traced to medieval times, even to the Arabiccounterpart of the tenth century: Ibn al-Nadim' s Al-Fihrist ("Index"). Variations on this

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system were used in libraries until the late 1800s when Melvil Dewey developed theDewey Decimal Classification in 1876, which is still in use today. There are other evidences too that can be brought forward from the early history relating to the presenceof bibliographic guides to the information stores, not developed comprehensively as

Pinakes though.

The information management scenario had further taken its roots with the informationseeking behavior at that time where royals and elite society searched the libraries and

bookstores for different political, social and cultural purposes. Thus the bibliographiccontrol to manage information and the information retrieval concept developed as theobverse and the reverse of the same coin.

Evolution of information retrieval- concept and practice

Information retrieval as a concept emerged with the evolution of informationmanagement Information retrieval is the science of searching for documents, for a

particular block of information and for metadata about documents. Information retrievalhas evolved through four phases: manual and mechanical devices; offline computing;online computing and vendor access; and distributed, networked, and mass computing(Griffith, 2002).

First recorded systematic information retrieval was recorded in the second year of thereign of King Neferhotep (ca. 1788 B.C.) of Kemer, when the king asked to see theancient writings of Atom in the temple of Heliopolis. His nobles, scribes of thehieroglyphics, cabinet of intellects, masters of all secrets, and librarians, agreed andexamined the books in the temple library and thereafter decided to build a temple inhonor of Osiris, based upon the information discovered (Metzger, 1980).

Modern informaton retrieval history begins in 1880s with invention of HermanHolleriths recording of data on a machine readable medium. He used cards, key punchesto process the 1890 US Census. In late 1940s, the US military confronted problems of indexing and retrieval of wartime scientific research documents which were capturedfrom Germans. Venner Bushs revolutionary article (1945), explicates a desire for a sortof collective memory machine with his concept of the memex that would makeknowledge more accessible. Bush envisioned the ability to retrieve several articles or

pictures on one screen, with the possibility of writing comments that could be stored andrecalled together. He believed people would create links between related articles, thusmapping the thought process and path of each user and saving it for others to experience.Wikipedia is one example of how this vision has been realized, allowing users to link words to other related topics, while browser user history maps the trails of the various

possible paths of interaction. In 1947 Hans Peter Luhn a research engineer at IBM since1941, began work on a mechanized punch card-based system for searching chemicalcompounds.

In 1950s Growing concern in the US for a "science gap" with the USSR motivated,encouraged funding and provided a backdrop for mechanized literature searching systems

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(Allen Kent et al., 1962) and the invention of citation indexing by Dr. Eugene Garfield .Dr. Garfield was the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which waslocated in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Garfield is responsible for many innovative

bibliographic products, including Current Contents , the Science Citation Index (SCI), andother citation indexes, the Journal Citation Reports , and Index Chemicus (Garfield,

2006). In 2007, he launched HistCite , a bibliometric analysis and visualization software package.

The first automated information retrieval systems were introduced in the 1950s and 1960smost card based (punch card systems, edgenotched cards, peek-a-boo systems, zato cardsetc.). By 1970 several different techniques had been shown to perform well on small text corpora such as the Cranfield collection (several thousand documents). Large-scaleretrieval systems, such as the Lockheed Dialog system, came into use early in the 1970s.The term "information retrieval" appears to have been coined by Calvin Mooers in 1950.In 1951 Philip Bagley conducted the earliest experiment in computerized documentretrieval in his master thesis at MIT .

In 1955 Allen Kent and colleagues published a paper in American Documentationdescribing the performance measures of information retrieval; precision and recallmeasures, as well as detailing a "framework" for evaluating an IR systems. InternationalConference on Scientific Information held in Washington DC in 1958, includedconsideration of IR systems as a solution to problems identified. It is also important tonote in 1959 Hans Peter Luhn published "Auto-encoding of documents for informationretrieval." During the early 1960s Gerard Salton began work on IR at Harvard later moved to Cornell. In 1962 Cyril W. Cleverdon published early findings of the Cranfieldstudies, developing a model for IR system evaluation. In the same year Kent published

Information Analysis and Retrieval . Joseph Becker and Robert M. Hayes published text

on information retrieval ( Information storage and retrieval: tools, elements, theories) in1963.

The National Bureau of Standards sponsored a symposium titled "Statistical AssociationMethods for Mechanized Documentation." Several highly significant papers, includingG. Salton's first published reference to the SMART system. National Library of Medicinedeveloped MEDLARS Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System, the first major machine-readable database and batch-retrieval system. F. Wilfrid Lancaster completedevaluation studies of the MEDLARS system and published the first edition of his text oninformation retrieval.

In 1968 Gerard Salton published Automatic Information Organization and Retrieval .John W. Sammon, Jr. 's RADC Tech report "Some Mathematics of Information Storageand Retrieval..." outlined the vector model. In 1969 Sammon's "A nonlinear mapping for data structure analysis" (IEEE Transactions on Computers) was the first proposal for visualization of a search interface to an IR system.

In early 1970s first online systemsNLM's AIM-TWX, MEDLINE; Lockheed's Dialog;SDC's ORBIT were introduced and used bu research institutions. Theodor Nelson

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promoting concept of hypertext , published in Computer Lib/Dream Machines . In 1971 Nicholas Jardine and Cornelis J. van Rijsbergen published (1971) "The use of hierarchicclustering in information retrieval", which articulated the "cluster hypothesis." 1975:Three highly influential publications by Salton fully articulated his vector processingframework and term discrimination model: 1979: C.J.Van Rijsbergen published

Information Retrieval (1971) . Heavy emphasis on probabilistic models. mid-1980s:Efforts to develop end-user versions of commercial IR systems. 1989: First World Wide Web proposals by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN .

In 1992, the US Department of Defense along with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), cosponsored the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) as part of the TIPSTER text program. The aim of this was to look into the information retrievalcommunity by supplying the infrastructure that was needed for evaluation of text retrievalmethodologies on a very large text collection. This catalyzed research on methods thatscale to huge corpora. The introduction of web search engines has boosted the need for very large scale retrieval systems even further. In 1997 Publication of Korfhage' s

Information Storage and Retrieval with emphasis on visualization and multi-reference point systems. In late 1990s web based search engines came into existence and ever developing its user oriented or user friendly features for information retrieval till today.

Challenges ahead

Information management thus paved the way for efficient use of information in generalorganizations and promote systematic and effective information retrieval and literaturesurvey in libraries. It is obvious that the library and information practice had been highlyinfluenced by the social, political and technological advancements occurred during thehistorical era it passed. The fact is very clear when considering the historical landmarks

mentioned above in case of bibliographic and information control methods adopted bythe librarians time to time. These development not only introduced the methods of documentation or information control, but also paved the way to set bibliographicstandards, introduce sophisticated tools, information control & documentation practices,legal protections and information ethics in the field of information management.

The present information science landscape is highly shaped by the web technology henceits boundaries are hard to identify due to broad dispersion of every corner of it. Thechallenge is hard upon information scientists as custodians of books no longer couldcapture information generated elsewhere in unfathomable speed. Emerging technologiessometimes may not smart enough to capture the information generated at such a speed.

New web applications that set interactivity with the user, like library 2.0 and web 2.0,creation of bibliographic families through semantic web, efficient meta data creation,archival and repository building software with web presence, e-learning applications,mobile technology library systems etc. had given the librarians an unavoidable challenge.

The mobile based technology that had taken its strides over the learning sphere (M-Learning) is also to be considered Ignoring these challenges can be depicted as harmlessand interpreted as part and parcel of that particular socio- political system. Nevertheless

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negligence of such challenges is the most disastrous factor which stops the library andinformation science developing on par with other sciences and with the socialinteractions. The fact is as such mismanagement of information questions its existencewithin the fast changing modern social structure where excuses are not allowed.

In summary the articles tries to bring forth the evolution of information management andthe conceptual approaches developed on par with the socio technological revolutions andevolution of the knowledge models. Challenges focusing information management that isenvisaged by librarians would be specific to an information landscape, but the over rulingchallenge at present is the web and the mobile technology.

References

Blum, Rudolf (translated from the German by Hans H. Wellish). Kallimachos: TheAlexandrian Library and the Origins of Bibliography. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

Davies, D.W. "Review of The Oldest Library Motto and Other Library Essays by Cora E.Lutz." in Journal of Library History 15 (1980) 3: 334-36.

Edwards, Edward. Libraries and Founders of Libraries from Ancient Times to theBeginning of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Bert Franklin, 1865 (originally

published, reprinted in 1968).

Garfield E (2006). "The history and meaning of the journal impact factor". JAMA 295(1): 903.

Gates, Jean K. (1983) Guide to the Use of Libraries and Information Sources. New York:McGraw-Hill.

Griffith, J and Donald, D.W. (2002) US Information Retrieval System Evolution andEvaluation. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 24 (3). 35 55pp.

Information retrieval. (accessed on 2010). http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/ Information

_retrieval

Kent, Allen (1962). Text book on mechanized information retrieval. 268p.

Metzger, Philip A. "The Cover." Journal of Library History 15 (Spring 1980) 2: 210-221.

Nicholas, J. and Van Rijsbergen C.J.(1971) The use of hierarchic clustering ininformation retrieval. Information Storage and Retrieval,7(5) December. pp.217 240.

Th. P. Loosjes (1973) On documentation of scientific literature. London. Butterworths.187 p.

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information management: tradition and challenges ahead

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