Information Work in the Internet Age: Localizing, Evaluating and Representing Resources

The amount of data on the internet continues to grow. At the same time, funding for professional information work for collection building, quality assessment and content representation is reduced. The Layer Model responds to these challenges associated with the internet. The Layer Model shows how information providers can restrict the information work dedicated to content representation to small collections and, at the same time, allows users to access much larger collections. Transfer modules apply intellectual information work to documents outside a core. This article shows how the Layer Model can be extended in order to integrate automatic quality assessment and automated collection building. 1 Information Services in the Internet Age The explosion of online information and the technological advance offer great opportunities for the information industry. At the same time, however, they paradoxically pose a threat to many business models. The following opinions often expressed by users sum up some of these threats: • Everything is available for free. Why should anyone pay for content, access or intellectual information work? • If something is online, then it must be accessible. Intellectual information work seems unnecessary. • I can find everything by myself. The availability of free information tools and their ease of use makes less experienced users believe that information retrieval and access are solved problems. The availability of free information tools which are based on a large amount of data leads to satisfying results in many cases. One example are internet search engines. However, information professionals have pointed out the low overall retrieval quality of general purpose search engines and the lack of advanced search options they provide. The retrieval quality of these tools seems to be far behind the quality of systems optimized for a specific task, as comparisons have shown (Hawking 2000). The continuing growth of the internet makes information retrieval and access ever more troublesome. The task of Dieses Dokument wird unter folgender creative commons Lizenz veröffentlicht: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/de/