Knowledge Management on the Web: Global Anarchy or Global Standardization?

In the justified euphoria over the Web information retrieval, the extremely valuable experiences of librarian science, accumulated since the most remote antiquity, seem to be utterly neglected. Even the most elementary rules, such as the primary and secondary level of information sources, are often confounded. The spreading of information literacy is very useful, but this process does not necessarily mean that the graduates have acquired all the cultural and scientific knowledge indispensable for efficient information seeking performances. Although information providers cannot assume the whole responsibility of the educational system, but by setting up fully automated interactive communicative search systems that are coupled with the reference librarians’ constant personal assistance, a great deal of search mistakes can be eliminated. In this context, metadata systems should play a more important role because their content and knowledge organizational functions not only help non-specialist Web users to formulate competent queries, but they efficiently overcome paradigmal barriers hindering intercultural information exchange. Web users in their information retrieval attempts are also greatly hampered by the fact that search engines, databases and content providers offer an astonishingly disparate array of search tools and interfaces, despite the existence of the CCL (Common Command Language). Until the time when a genuinely global standardization can take place – encompassing the whole scale and scope of information retrieval, it will be impossible to remedy the above-mentioned detrimental conditions merely by fostering new inventions.