The future of online information: challenges and opportunities
| Published date | 01 April 1993 |
| Pages | 233-235 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb045237 |
| Date | 01 April 1993 |
| Author | Roger K. Summit |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Article
The future of online
information: challenges
and opportunities
Roger K. Summit
3460 Hillview Avenue, Palo
Alto,
CA
94304,
USA
1.
Introduction
Information retrieval
as a
concept
or a technique is
not gener-
ally recognized beyond the profession as a societal need or
even necessarily as a useful tool. It has often been said of
online that it is an expensive way of doing much faster what
you could otherwise
do manually
in
a
library.
I have long been
perplexed by this misunderstanding of
the
power of online.
Let me
offer
one
possible explanation.
The average person in their everyday experience is famil-
iar
only
with single word or phrase indexing and retrieval, as
with file folders, computer files saved to disk, telephone di-
rectory
access
or library catalog card
files.
Retrieval of
such a
nature can be thought of as direct or label-based retrieval.
That
is,
you think of the label you want and look
up the
entry
in an alphabetically ordered list. Everyone is familiar with
this process.
The
power of
online,
computer-based retrieval
such as
that
provided by DIALOG (and other similar systems), however,
is that they provide for retrieval based on the
content
of the
document, not merely a
label
that has been assigned to the
document. Such a process may be thought of
as
indirect re-
trieval.
That
is,
you
are
asking for
the
document that contains
particular information. I have found this distinction — i.e.,
content (or indirect) versus label
(or direct)
retrieval —
to
be
useful
in
understanding
the
power
and
utility of
online
versus
manual searching.
In what follows I wish to provide some context for this
understanding (or lack thereof), trace the evolution of infor-
mation retrieval tools and look forward to what we in the
profession can expect to see during the remainder of the dec-
ade.
2.
History
In the very early days of information technology before lan-
guage was
codified
into written
form,
the need
for information
retrieval was not
as
pressing as it
is
today.
Prior
to the
printed
book, communication of knowledge depended primarily on
the memory skills of
individuals
in the population. Everyone
needed the arts of memory which, like other arts, could be
cultivated.
The
inventor of
the mnemonic art was
said to be the
Greek lyric poet Simonides of Ceos (c. 556-468 BC). The
basis of
the
Simonides 'technology' was associating physical
places
with the
objects
one
wished
to
remember.
These techniques dominated European thinking in the
Middle
Ages.
Laws,
for
example,
were
preserved
by
memory
before they were preserved in documents. The collective
memory of the community
was the
first information archive.
One person, Peter of Ravenna, who lived in the 15th cen-
tury, boasted that he could repeat verbatim the entire canon,
two hundred speeches of Cicero, and twenty thousand points
of
law.
Retrieval in those days required that one knew who
had memorized what. There were, however, several limita-
tions to this type of
archive.
Such an archive was difficult to
pass on
from generation
to
generation
as
it had to
be
re-memo-
rized.
There was
necessarily limited
access
and
thus little
geo-
graphical dissemination. Finally, there could be no cumula-
tion beyond
the
community memory capacity.
With the invention of the book, many of
the
limitations to
a memory archive
were
overcome.
A
person could
refer
to the
rules of grammar, the speeches of Cicero and
the texts
of
the-
ology, canon law and morality without storing them in mem-
ory
or having to
contact
a
knowledgeable
individual.
Knowl-
edge
could
now be
cumulated over generation boundaries
and
not be limited by a particular community's collective mem-
ory. As books are portable, they could be widely dissemi-
nated, thus empowering more than a handful of individuals,
and the exchange of technologies across cultures was facili-
tated. What an incredible development this was for civiliza-
tion.
With
so
many books
emerging,
however,
people needed an
innovation
which would
help
them locate
desired information
in a timely and convenient manner. There are two aspects to
this
problem.
As
books became more varied
in
content, it
be-
came harder to find material within a given book. Also, be-
cause
of
the
greater number of
books
published, it
was
harder
to
determine whether
a
book existed relating
to the
particular
interest of a
reader.
The
first
innovation focused
on making an
individual
book more
useful.
Although the
first
concordance of
the
Bible
was
produced
in the 13th century (the effort of
900
monks over
a
period of.
several years), it was not common practice to number the
pages of books until nearly
1500.
The innovation of consecu-
tive page numbering was important as it made possible the
development of indexes (such
as the back
of
the book
indexes
we know today)
later
in the 16th
century.
Thomas
Carlyle,
the
19th century Scottish writer / philosopher, spoke out em-
phatically on the need for indexing. He made the statement
that any publishers who failed to include an index in a book
The Electronic Library, Vol.
11,
No. 4/5, August/October 1993 233
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