Introduction: Organizing the Internet

THET H E M E O F ‘‘ORGANIZINGTHE INTERNET’’ brings to mind the late 1950s folk-rock singer Jimmie Rodgers’s song titled “The World I Used to Know.”A great many developments have transpired in the world of information science since the seminal works of S. C. Bradford, Claude Shannon, Vannevar Bush, and numerous other pioneers. To those of us who have been in the information science field for several decades, the peek-aboo devices such as Termatrex, Mortimer Taube’s Uniterm cards, and discussion of preand postcoordinate indexing have given way to the world of browsers, HTML, XML, and numerous other ways of coding text and multimedia. The Internet and the World Wide Web have had a profound impact on how we go about storing and retrieving information. Document integrity has become transient, with little assurance that the location, existence, or even the content of a publication will be the same tomorrow as even a few minutes ago. We are often hard-pressed to determine if the failure to retrieve a publication is one associated with network infrastructure or the publisher. The dream of universal bibliographic control seems quite remote. By being able to bypass traditional publication channels, anyone can publish virtually at will. The situation becomes more chaotic when we consider the increasing redundancy of knowledge and the rampant proliferation of misinformation and disinformation, to say nothing of social concerns with pornography, copyright violations, and other flagrant obtrusions into personal rights. Nevertheless, it behooves the information worker and the information user to make some sense of order if good information is to remain the basis of learning and decision making, and if documents are to continue as an archive of human knowledge.