A few weeks there was "climbing inside your users' heads and seeing your web site through their eyes". In Beyond Search, a 22/11/2006 article in Information World Review, by David Tebbutt, we have the equally extreme “a good information professional should be able to crawl into the skin of the user and understand their thought processes", in this case a quote from Susan Feldman, from the market intelligence firm IDC, in support of the argument that . The focus of Tebbutt's article is the shake-up that is happening in the commercial search world, stemming from the way in which vast tracts of content are now being routinely indexed, with storage costs no longer really relevant, and the increasing sophistication of the software systems that determine how search terms are turned into search results.
Where does this leave the information professional? According to Tebbutt:
"it means that if your department is not already integrated with the organisation, it soon will be. Whether the initiative comes from you, from IT or from somewhere else, the fact is that your world, the business world, and the IT worlds will merge."
On a related issue, and straying into territory that I observe rather than in which I have professional expertise, here is an interesting report of a discussion between Tim Berners-Lee ("father" of the Web) and Peter Norvig (Director of Research at Google) at the July 2006 American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference. This highlights the "divide" between people who want information and the links between it to be curated, with thought given to how both are described, and people who think that as more and more of the content "out there" is produced by amateurs, never going near an information or ICT professional, the only way forward is for search tools to extract meaning from the content without reliance on how that content has been categorised.
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