From last week's discussion about email overload, which is part of information overload, I went off and did some research about information overload.
A Reuters 1997 study carried out a search of Library and Information Science abstracts and social research databases for articles with the term information overload. The study found a low number of inclusions in the 1970s, slightly more mention in the 1980s and from 1992 a steady rise in the number of information overload articles peaking in 1997 with 47 mentions. The problem is getting worse and is expected to get worse still as the number of information sources i.e., the web continue to grow.
“Do you usually experience information overload?” In a questionnaire given to MBA students from Temple University and the University of Waikato, results revealed 64% of the respondents answered “yes” to this question. This university study identified three primary factors contributing to information overload. Two additional factors identified are the poor utilization of information and the time demand to use information.
The primary factors identified are:
Amount of information
Variety of information
Quality of information
In another study, Reuters Dying for Information (1996), a survey of business managers revealed that in a working environment, managers are most prone to and affected by information overload.
Dying for Information revealed a number of unexpected statistics: Two thirds of managers believe information overload causes loss of job satisfaction, two thirds believe information overload damages their personal relationships, one third believe information overload damages their health and nearly half believe important decisions are delayed and adversely affected as a result of having too much information.
In my mind, information overload is very much a symptom of the huge problem of inadequate resource description. If digital resources were well described, we could overcome problems of quantity and quality of information by filtering. Standards for resource description that reach across resource formats and can handle complex digital resources (such as web pages) would increase the utility of heterogeneous resources by allowing them to be selected/sorted more effectively (and consistently) by content-related factors rather than media or structure related factors. Of course, then we are back to the problem of integrating metadata ontologies - one model for dealing with cross-domain ontologies is discussed in "the ABC Ontology and Model" at http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v02/i02/Lagoze/ A paper that was presented at the Dublin Core 2001 Conference. Another paper at the same conference talks about how RDF Declarative Description (RDD) can integrate metadata languages to increase querying power. The article "RDF Declarative Description (RDD): A Language for Metadata is at: http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v02/i02/Anutariya/
Posted by: Anne Marie on February 25, 2003 12:16 PMIo is also a symptom of increasing expectations with technology to help manage the information.
If you've been able to search for things easily with Google and get results, you might get frustrated when looking for something you know is out there using some other info mgmt method (e.g. online journal databases or Web newspapers).
Posted by: donturn on February 25, 2003 02:32 PM