The key skill for the future is the effective management of information. There are many factors which have led to the present capacity for the creation and distribution of information in electronic form:

• the rise in the number of desktop computers,
• the spread of high-speed networks,
• the availability of software,
• the increase in basic IT skills,
• the exponential growth of a document-based system of information dissemination in the form of the World Wide Web.

However, the tools which have generated this quantitative increase in information, and particularly in document-based information, have not necessarily rendered that information fully usable.

Some people may be unaware of the existence of the information; others are aware of its existence but are frustrated in their attempts to access it efficiently; others feel overwhelmed by the very quantity of the information with which they are confronted.

Some of the problems may be familiar, particularly to regular users of the Web:

• How can I locate information, and ensure that my own information is locatable by others?
• What are the important criteria by which I need to locate information?
• Having located a resource, whether that is a document or a collection of documents, how can I navigate effectively and efficiently within it?
• How can I systematically identify and reference components of information?
• How can I ensure the confidentiality of restricted information?
• How can I ensure the free availability of unrestricted information?
• How can I ensure that a document is genuine?

Perhaps less obvious considerations include:

• Can I access different versions of the same document?
• Do I require different formats of the same document for different purposes?
• When does a document cease to be "current"?
• What happens to a document which is no longer "current"?
• Can I retrieve "non-current" documents?
• How can I ensure the long-term integrity of documents?

Many of the challenges are not specifically "technical" problems, but represent responses to the organisational and "cultural" changes which have accompanied technological developments, and only a few are noted here:

• Who is the owner of a document?
• Does ownership change during the document's life-cycle?
• Should such changes be recorded?
• Who is responsible for storing a document and making it available to users?
• Who is responsible for the creation of "cataloguing" information associated with a document so that others may find it?
• More generally, what are the responsibilities of document ownership in the digital order?
• Under what circumstances should documents be copied, rather than referred to?
• How should the citation of documents be handled?

---