Distributed Information Management

A review of this sort commonly begins with the observation that current developments in computer technology are radically changing the nature of library science and information management. Widespread digitization of information and the ubiquity of networking have created fundamentally new possibilities for collecting, distributing, and preserving information; just as important, however, as the changing technological and organizational systems themselves, are the repercussions that these powerful world-scale information networks will have on the social and cultural structures that they have been developed to serve. Similarly, the formation and development of these new technologies will, to no small extent, depend on the cultural forces that brought them into existence in the first place, as the shape of information technology and the institutions it serves are in many ways interdependent. To capture the complexity of the interwoven technological and societal forces that guide the growth of information management, then, we will we will need to cast a wide net over the fields of