How much is too much?

When considering preservation of information it is important to note the quantity of information that already exists, and how much new information is being created each day. It seems logical to expect that the larger the amount of information we have to deal with the more time it will take to index it, the more storage space it will consume, and the more cost it will incur, does it not? So, that said, consider a real world example of a preservation challenge created by a massive amount of information gathered by a single person - Paul Otlet.

To keep this in context here is a very brief introduction to who this man is (or was as it were). He if the founder of the the Universal Decimal Classification system that is still used today, an example of faceted classification (Rayward, 1994). He also used, literally, tons of index cards to develop his system, but it revolutionized the Dewey system by allowing for unlimited extensions off the existing Dewey group (Collins, 2008). He also predicted a very Internet-like future despite living at a time when computers had never been heard of. In 1913 he won the Nobel Peace prize for his work on information organization and dissemination and his ideas regarding these efforts on an international scale.

This is kind of a long video, but it shows an excellent example of what I am referring to in this post - how much information can accumulate, and what that entails when it comes to preservation efforts. While watching the video, keep in mind that this man's accomplishments...



Imagine if you will how much information that this one man accumulated, and understanding that although we all do not collect quite this much information directly, how much information must have been generated that has to be sorted, indexed, and considered for preservation up to the present date. Unimaginable quantities of information surely. Now, consider how much information is being generated each day, in this age of rapid information generation and dissemination; the number of small publishers are growing rapidly resulting in massive growth in the amount of published materials (Barbato, 1988), more and more information is being published in electronic formats so the number of versions of the same information is rapidly growing (Richardson, 2005), the number of websites grew from 17 million in the middle of 2000 to 65 million in the middle of 2005 (Zakon, 2006). Given these staggering numbers, and the scenario examined above, how can we possibly keep up with all of this information?



works cited:

Barbato, J. (1988). Small publishers are growing up. The publishers weekly, 234, 16-21.

Collins, P. (2008). When the Internet was made of paper. New Scientist, 197(2648), 46-.

Rayward, W B. (1994). Visions of Xanadu: Paul Otlet (1868-1944) and Hypertext. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 45(4), 235-.

Richardson, M. (2005). Post-print archives: parasite or symbiont?. Learned Publishing, 18(3), 221-.

Zakon, R. H. (2006). Hobbes' Internet Timeline v8.2. Retrieved June 16, 2008 from http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline.