Information overload is a gold mine

Some days ago I was being asked to prepare maximum two slides in which I explain why organisations should adopt social media tools in order to enhance information and knowledge sharing.  As a result, I came up with the following:

The amount of information will not stop growing in the near future. With new technological developments we can, for instance, use our telephone easily to submit messages and share knowledge via a Twitter or Facebook account. Or what to think about hard disk spaces. The total amount of gigabytes, or perhaps now even terabytes (which are available to you and me) are increasing every month. Networks are becoming faster through which it becomes easier to share information (from a song you can download within a couple of seconds to a movie you can have in more or less than 15 minutes). In 2003 the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley already gave an estimation that “the world’s total yearly production of print, film, optical, and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage.  This is the equivalent of 250 megabytes per person for each man, woman and child on the earth”.

So what do we need to do. Do we need to make sense of information by letting librarians sort it out for us and we will then use it. No! First of all, this is a mission impossible to the librarians out there. Secondly, when the librarian thinks he or she has found the answer, it is most likely already out-dated. For example the existence of portals. In many organisations, librarians or information professionals are dedicated to the collection of valuable websites. They save these websites in a portal which they maintain on their own website. However, websites come and go and therefore there is a big chance the websites in the collection are out-dated or even not working anymore. Therefore I do not believe the information overload can be managed by one type of discipline (the librarian/information professional).

I believe that we need to cherish the information overload and that we don’t want to let individuals sort out this mess.  Firstly, because information overload result in unexpected opportunities. It creates less limited boundaries to the scope of your view and, as a result, make it more likely that you may find things you did not even think to look for. Secondly, because information overload results in future needs.  It is one thing to find something you did not know you need right away; it is a whole other skill to be able to recall knowledge that seemed marginally useful at best in the past, but crucial in the future.

In order to embrace this vision, it is crucial to implement social media tools. These tools let you easily recall knowledge or learn from things which were first completely out of your range because those things were just not a part of your narrow discipline. So don’t let librarians manage the information overload. Their  job in the future is to introduce peers how to use social media tools and which social media tools should be combined for the specific information need.  When people are becoming a part of a big network of social media tools, different and innovative information and knowledge is being stored and shared by people who you did not know beforehand.

Let’s give you an example by showing the next picture:

In order to explain the complexity of choosing which social media tools you should use, I would like to give the example I recently used in the weblog post “Getting started with Social Media” on www.mindjumpers.com:

“Many of us have played with Lego.  By mixing bricks of different shapes and colours, it is possible to build different objects (from cars and houses to space ships). This sounds like an easy thing to do. However, appearances are deceiving! In most cases, people cannot manage without the instructions to make sense of all the different bricks and decide over which brick should connect the other in order to build the particular object.

This small anecdote can also be translated into the issue of social media. Social media is everywhere and is increasingly shaping our daily life as a way to share and create new knowledge. With social media we communicate (by (micro)-blogging and social networking) and collaborate (by using Wikis and social-bookmarking) through different types of multimedia (by photo-sharing with Flickr and video-sharing with YouTube).  As a result, all these different tools – social media tools – create a lively environment where people can tell their own stories, connect with other people who are telling their own stories as well and, as a result, engage each other.

In order to create an environment where people engage each other through lively conversations, the trick is to successfully combine social media tools.  Businesses should make sense of all these different tools and decide which combinations will best work for them.  This means that there are different combinations of social media tools that can add value to your business. That is why it is difficult to only give one instruction (as highlighted in the Lego anecdote) to build a social media environment for the business. Social media expertise is required!”

Dia 2

The amount of information will not stop growing in the near future. With new technological developments we can, for instance, use our telephone to easily submit messages and share knowledge via a Twitter or Facebook account. Or what to think about hard disk spaces. The total amount of gigabytes, or perhaps now even terabytes (which are available to you and me are) increasing every time. Networks are becoming faster through which it become easier to share information (from a song you can download within a couple of second to a movie you can have within 15 minutes). In 2003 gave the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley already an estimation that “the world’s total yearly production of print, film, optical, and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage.  This is the equivalent of 250 megabytes per person for each man, woman and child on the earth”.

So what do we need to do. Do we need to make sense of information by letting librarians sort it out for us and we will then use it. No! First of all, this is a mission impossible to the librarians out there. Secondly, when the librarian thinks he or she has found the answer, it is most likely already out-dated. For example the existence of portal. In many organisations, librarians or information professionals are dedicated to the collection of valuable websites. They save these websites in a portal which they maintain on their own website. However, websites come and go and therefore there is a big chance the websites in the collection are out-dated or even not working anymore. Therefore I do not believe the information overload can be managed by one type of discipline (the librarian/information professional).

I believe that we need to cherish the information overload and that we don’t want to let individuals sort out this mess.  Firstly, because information overload result in unexpected opportunities. It creates less limited boundaries to the scope of your view and, as a result, make it more likely that you may find things you did not even think to look for. Secondly, because information overload results in future needs.  It is one thing to find something you did not know you need right away; it is a whole other skill to be able to recall knowledge that seemed marginally useful at best in the past, but crucial in the future.

In order to embrace this vision, it is crucial to implement social media tools. These tools let you easily recall knowledge or learn from things which were first completely out of your range because those things were just not a part of your narrow discipline. So don’t let librarians manage the information overload. There job in the future is to introduce peers how to use social media tools.  When people are becoming of a big network of social media tools, different and innovative is being stored and shared by people who you did not know beforehand.

Let’s give you an example.

Twitter #[ISBN nr] and enrich valuable information published in a book with personal knowledge

I started using Twitter 6 to 7 months ago. Probably as everybody I was a bit skeptical, but soon after registering I already understood the huge benefits of 'informal networking'. Via Twitter I followed conferences I was interested in but, unfortunately, unable to participate in because (1) it was too far away or (2) too expensive. Within Twitter, thoughts, ideas and other comments during a conference are being tagged with a specific tag (# and an abbreviation of the conference). This is a great way to stay up-to-date of thoughts/discussions from the ones who have the same interests (because the are attending the conference ) - but who I don't know personally.

As a result, I think that Twitter can also become really valuable to librarians, researchers and students. While I am reading my books in the field of knowledge management, innovation management and organizational learning I use Post-It notes to mark my thoughts in certain sections of the book. This can become an intensive job - especially if the book is generating so many interesting thoughts. Additionally, the Post-It notes are only accessible for the one person who has my own book in his/her hands. This is not what we call 'knowledge sharing'. Therefore I was thinking of the following:

Use Twitter to save citations and/or thoughts from a book with a special tag. So, for example, right now I am reading the book 'Knowledge Governance: Processes and Perspectives' edited by Nicolai Foss. It's ISBN number is: 9780199235926. Every thought/citation that might be of interest to me will be tagged with the tag #9780199235926. This tag is unique for the book and if everybody is starting to use Twitter to tag their own thoughts with its unique tag, we collaboratively create a very rich description of a book. Or perhaps it isn't a description, it's knowledge that is being added to information.

One critical comment about this idea how Twitter can help out librarians, researchers and students: the tag only consists of 11 characters, so you should be very precise with what you want to say in your comment about the books via Twitter, because this leaves you with only 129 characters (and if you also want to include the page number)...

However, keep a close eye on my Twitter account (http://twitter.com/richardlalleman), because in the next month I will certainly experiment with this.

Future of the libraries

What is the future of the library? We often ask us this question, especially since the introduction of Internet within the libraries and, since the Internet is redeveloping itself continuously, the library should ask itself the same question over and over again. One of the additional questions to the future of library is: should we have books in the library?

The library will become paperless. JSTOR is already offering many academic articles digitally. And now, since today, there is a new development that will make books superfluous! It is the announcement that Google has reached a deal with book publishers regarding copyright violations. There is a settlement for $125 million which will be used to establish a Book Rights Registry.

This will eventually lead that Internet users like you and me might soon be able to build an "online bookshelf" and buy licenses to read the full-text of books in Google's index. Libraries, universities, and other organizations will also be able to purchase an institutional subscription, which will give users the ability to access the full text of all the titles in the Google Books index. This, depending on the pricing, could turn out to be a revolutionary development for libraries.