Problems & Strategies of Information Keeping & Management
Keeping
Every human keeps or stores information. Some keep their information organized, others not. People encounter huge amounts of information daily, too much to store it all. There are various costs that prevent us from storing all the information we receive.
The more information we keep, the more management is required to keep all the information organised. Information needs to be organised so that people can obtain value from it. As with Management, exploitation is also a cost of storing all available information.
Information of low value should not be kept because it only makes the process of information retrieval more difficult. Keeping a massive amount of items can be distracting when manual search is used to find the relevant information.
People acquire large amounts of information daily, such as E-Mail, Bookmarks, Contacts, Photos etc. & they must decide which to keep & which are irrelevant & should be disposed of. But people find it difficult to make a decision whether to keep or to dispose information. A theory of why people rather want to keep information is because it might prove useful in the future.
To know what information to keep & what information to dispose of, one has to determine the future value of information. Determining the future value of information is difficult as the human being tries to reason about hypothetical situations, in which, they are very poor*.
The decision to keep or dispose of potential future information is prone to two types of mistakes, information isn’t kept & is not available when it is needed & keeping irrelevant information can make a person feel guilty about being disorganised.
The world is moving away from paper & beco...
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...This process is often repeated.
Users have problems in the processing of informational messages. Observations have shown that people spend large amounts of time trying to organize these messages.
A possible solution may be to create folders for informational messages, but creating dedicated folders for informational messages is hard for several reasons. Generating folders need considerable effort & filing is cognitively difficult.
Successful filing of informational information is highly dependent on the user’s ability to know if they will need they information in the future.
Web information is largely not actionable but informational. One form of management is bookmarking certain web pages. Other strategies include printing pages, people sending themselves links in their email, copying links to documents, generation of sticky notes or the use of cognitive memory.
After entering the modern society, people living in a high information environment, a salient feature of it is that peopl...
...6. Fisher Center for Information Technology & Management, University of California in Berkeley. June 1995
"Now days there is access to millions and billions of archives that informs the public about daily situations, and gives advice in how to approach problems and dilemmas in a more effective way. Before all this, it was necessary
Fourth, and finally, archivists must determine how to become involved in the decision- making process of creating automated information systems and to demonstrate to system designers, through cogent arguments based on hard research results, why long-term retention is important. Sufficient technological sophistication will be required to suggest how this can be done. Archivists have no choice. If they do not do this, they risk losing information of enduring value that has been destroyed or is otherwise irretrievable.27 Archivists must be sensitive and responsible to the changing context of their mission, realizing that theirs is the only profession with the unique role of identifying and preserving information of enduring value.
One of the challenges that the information management professional informed me was one involving time. With the amount of time that is available, it may become difficult for the professional to gather information on a certain issue. This process leads to the submission of either incomplete information or inaccurate information.
is in the nature of most things to be lost whether it be something unimportant to us or something
As new formats and technology becomes available, the ways that people organize information will continue to change, but the need to do so will always be there. Therefore, the organization of information not only has very long history it is a something that will continue to happen.
With the world of digital data growing exponentially year on year, the above quote could just represent a mere drop in the ocean when accounting for the time workers spend looking for information. The next question is, once the information has been found, can it then actually be interpreted and understood within its original context and in the context required? Without adequate systems to deal with the data deluge, and efficient working practices around ingestion, and storage and retrieval, many digital objects can be lost forever, floating in a digital ether, costing money not only in storage, but in the potential recreation of an existing asset, as well as in lost time searching and retrieving content.
Can you imagine how things were 20 years ago? How we communicate and exchange information with one another? Some things then may not be that accessible to us now, but in this day and age, everything is almost made possible by the advance communications technology surrounding us. Whether it’s printed, audio or visual materials, all are now within our reach, especially because global trading is made available to almost all over the world. And with the invention of internet all sorts of information are accessible to the youth in just a click away. Along with all these, just imagine the vast information being thrown in each and every one of us almost every second. However, as we always say, these developments may or may not be that all beneficial to us.
Etzel and Thomas (1996) recommend using an information management strategy that is derived from your personal or professional goals. In developing such a strategy, ask yourself: Will this information help fulfill my goals? When determining what to retain, remember that information is perishable and its importance decreases over time. Ask yourself: When, how, and in what situation will I use this information again?
Once change was incremental and meant more of the same, only better. Today, however, we are experiencing discontinuous change in many areas of life. Discontinuous change makes it impossible to predict with any confidence what will happen, so it does not guarantee more of the same (Handy 1991, cited in Edwards and Walton 1998). The movement of information resources from internal library holdings to external, electronically accessible materials represents both an incremental and discontinuous change (Edwards and Walton 1998). The information is still available (i.e., more of the same, only better), but the new information environment places new demands on the information user. These demands make it impossible to predict whether the information sought will be acquired, how useful the information will be, and so forth. Although these same issues may have existed before, a familiar information provider could then be consulted for assistance. Many websites offer contact information for assistance or further information but the quality of this assistance, its timeliness, and so forth are unknown.
Today, our society has access to mankind’s collective knowledge with the internet. Constantly updated, the internet keeps everyone in the loop. If there is a traffic jam, Google Maps will notify you. If there is a new movie release, Fandango will ask to reserve tickets for you. If there is a limited-time sale, Amazon will email you. Information constantly bombards us. The internet moves fast, and we must try to keep up to stay in
...the learner needs a goal for the information, what they want to do with it. If the learner prioritizes the information as important then they will think about it more. A lot of times information is learned and just forgotten because the learner had no use or desire to keep the information, but if the learner needs the information and thinks about it every day then there is a higher probability that the learner will have actually memorized it.
One of the wonderful things about the internet is how it makes life much easier if the information can be found in the convenience of the home instead of going to a library and making a day out of it. This is especially true if the internet offers updated information as soon as it happens were as a library may only update a few things every week or month at a time. It is truly remarkable how much information can be found and because of this it isn’t unbelievable that more and more people are using the internet instead of going to a library or using another service the internet can offer them. However, without organization and direction information is useless. Search engines offer this stepping stone by storing all the data in a manor that is searchable. Two of the major search engines are Google.com and Msn.com. Both offer great search engines and services, but have different styles and appeal to different audiences looking for different things.
In the world today, information is an important aspect in almost every part of our life. From what time the movie we want to see begins to whether we should buy stock in Dell or IBM, we depend on accurate information. Is this kind of information a commodity? The dictionary defines a commodity as something valuable or useful (Webster 1993). Presently, information is a commodity because people are willing to pay high prices for information in order to make better decisions. In this paper, I will give many examples of how information acts as a commodity. I will also show how information acts as a commodity in other areas than just technology and business.