Information Access Old and New

Pinar Öztürk

Pinar Öztürk, associate professor of artificial intelligence and computer and information sciences, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway, and visiting scholar at the School of Information, will briefly introduce herself and her work.

Michael Buckland: Information Access Old and New

Conventional information access (indexing, cataloging, classification) is mainly based on 19th century ideas implemented with spectacular success in the 20th century (online catalogs, Medline, OCLC, etc.). As of 1990 the achievement was impressive. But now, rather suddenly, it all seems outmoded, even rather irrelevant as new techniques with novel names have swept the scene: tagging, ontologies, name spaces, RDF, georeferencing, the Semantic Web. Also FRBR and RDA.

Are these mainly old wine in new bottles? Or the logical development following evolving technology? Or really new and different? How do these new techniques relate to the old ones? How should we adopt them and/or adapt to them?

What are the implications for curriculum development and faculty recruitment in I Schools? Join me for a discussion.