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of the Internet alone navigate, now fairly seamlessly, more than 200 formally elected Internet standards for information transmission each time they send an email message. If we are to understand larger scale classifications, we also need to understand how desktop classifications link up with those that are formal, standardized, and widespread. |
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Every link in hypertext creates a category. That is, it reflects some judgment about two or more objects: they are the same, or alike, or functionally linked, or linked as part of an unfolding series. The rummage sale of information on the World Wide Web is overwhelming, and we all agree that finding information is much less of a problem than assessing its qualitythe nature of its categorical associations and by whom they are made (Bates, in press). The historical cultural model of social classification research in this book, from desktop to wide-scale infrastructure, is a good one through which to view problems of indexing, tracking, and even compiling bibliographies on the Web. In its cultural and workplace dimensions, it offers insights into the problematics of design of classification systems, and a lens for examining their impact. It looks at these processes as a sort of crafting of treaties. In this, a cross-disciplinary approach is crucial. Any information systems design that neglects use and user semantics is bound for trouble down the lineit will become either oppressive or irrelevant. Information systems mix up the conventional and the formal, the hard technical problems of storage and retrieval with the hard interactional problems of querying and organizing. |
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Information systems are undergoing rapid change. There is an explosion of information on the Web and associated technologies, and fast moving changes in how information may converge across previously disparate families of technologyfor instance, using one's television to retrieve email and browse the Web, using one's Internet connections to make telephone calls. Whatever we write here about the latest electronic developments will be outdated by the time this book sees print, a medium that many would argue is itself anachronistic. |
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Conventions of use and understandings of the impact of these changes on social organization are slower to come. The following example illustrates the intermingling of the conventional and the local in the types of classificatory links formed by hypertext. A few years ago, our university was in the enviable position of having several job openings in library and information science. Both the authors were on |
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