Legal Research

Early candidate for 2008 phrase/trend of the year: Information Overload

By Jason

In the last few weeks I’ve seen a slew of articles and blog posts about information overload.

Stephen Abram points to a Basex report on lost productivity caused by information overload, finding that from an ARS Technica post.

iLibrarian blogged about a Reader’s Digest article on information overload.

And earlier this week CIO online had an article about information overload, called “Information Overload is Killing You and Your Productivity.”

According to the article:

42 percent of IT managers complain that they are bombarded by too much information; 39 percent say they can’t figure out which information is current; 38 percent say they need to weed out duplicate information; and 21 percent say they don’t understand the value of the information they do receive.

What gets me about most of these articles is that they include a handful of “tips” which, while very helpful (I particularly like the idea of Bill Gates’ information retreat), are not going to solve the problem of information overload. As Stephen Abram said, “Sounds like these companies need librarians!”

It sure does. These problems are not going to go away with a couple of tips for reading emails. The change in the way we produce, manage, and consume information necessitates a change in the way we work. Dealing with information overload requires more than better email reading procedures, and to-do lists. It requires a personalized information strategy which incorporates available technology, time, and work and learning habits. The key word there is “personalization.” These strategies have to be geared towards each person’s information needs, and other variable characteristics.

As Stephen notes, librarians are ideally suited for providing the type of training needed to help busy executives deal with information overload. This is a great opportunity for us, and apparently 2008 is the year for librarians to take the lead in dealing with information overload.

Full post as published by Jason the Content Librarian on January 09, 2008 (boomark / email).