Navigating the Information Society.

N

15

Academic Libraries; Foreign Countries; Futures (of Society); Higher Education; Information Services; Information Technology; Social Change; Sociocultural Patterns

This paper explores the idea of an information society from different perspectives, raises issues that are relevant to university libraries, and offers a way forward to some future developments. The first section provides a sketch of the information society in Australia and presents statistics on readiness, intensity, and impacts from reports released by the National Office for the Information Economy and the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The second section discusses technological, economic, occupational, spatial, and cultural perspectives on an information society. The third section considers an approach to information that identifies three different kinds of information: information-as-thing, information-as-process, and information-as-knowledge. The next section addresses information issues for universities, including new modes of knowledge production summarized in terms of context, disciplinary orientation, organizational diversity, accountability, and quality control. This section also explores the implications of the free flow of information. (Contains 33 references.) (MES)

2001

ED447830