Reading the second-half of the 'time and timing' article brought a lot of thoughts to mind. One of the participants in the organization described the 'old' information as 'slimy' in that it did the members of the organization no good and actually slowed them down in the WPP. Rarely do we, as information professionals, think about information gathering over time. It's true - as we collect more data, we gather more knowledge and therefore our information needs on a single subject change over time. In the beginning of the information seeking process, we have a limited amount of information on a topic - otherwise, we wouldn't be searching for more information. As time progresses and we do more information seeking, we (as information seekers) gain a certain amount of knowledge about the topic we are researching. This knowledge results in some information being of no use to us as information seekers and we need a higher quality or a higher level of information. I have a feeling that the group in Solomon's article did too much information gathering in the beginning so that by the third quarter of Year 1, they were dealing with old information - information that they no longer need. This in effect, lost them a significant amount of time - they lost the time they spent gathering information in the beginning, going through the 'slimy' information, and then gathering more information! While planning is critical to planning projects, we sometimes must remember that project planning could very well cause project creep.
Solomon also mentions that organizations gather more information than they use; then turn around and ask for more. I think big corporations fall prey to 'too much information'. I had an internship at a fortune 500 a couple of summers ago and I got to participate in our bi-monthly meetings where gathering too much information and passing it off to others was all too common. I think that managers should realize that while it is important to share information with co-workers, they do not need to know everything nor do they need to be overwhelmed with information. I'm not saying that managers should hide things from employees; rather, they should only give them what they need to know. I think the employees would be more satisfied in the end and they wouldn't waste 3 hours every other week at a very long, sometimes unnecessary, meeting!
I think when it comes to information and time, the information seeker (and the information professional) needs to take level of knowledge and accumulation of knowledge over time into account. By adding the 'time' perspective to our initial information gathering, we may see early on in the Work Planning Process that this does not necessarily need to occur in the beginning! I also think that taking into account knowledge levels of the information seeker, information professionals can pass on a higher level of information, thus better satisfying the needs of the information seeker.
This issue ties into a concept I explored in Dr. Losee's Information Retrieval class. We were developing our 'dream search engines' without taking into account the mechanics of how to develop them (so as not to stunt our creativity). My ideal search engine would know what I'm doing a search for - work, school, or pleasure. Each of these three categories warrants a different type of knowledge - for work, I need detailed information or perhaps the answer to a very detailed question; for school, I need scholarly information; leisure searching warrants the need of very general knowledge. I think that adding time to this mix would also change how we search and the results we need. If we could design an information system that takes knowledge levels into account, I think that the profession would make a tremendous leap forward and the needs of the information seeker would be more efficiently met.
The second article we read (Solomon's Dynamics article) discussed the idea of the expert versus the novice information seeker. Showing out children's information needs change over time on a certain topic certainly illustrates how our knowledge levels increase as we gather more information. One point brought about in the 'Implications' section was something I hadn't considered but should have: not every information seeker wants or needs to become an expert - some people only need general information. For these people, the ideal system would cut out the details and give them 'Wikipedia' type knowledge - a general overview.
Understanding the current knowledge-level of the information seeker and where they are in the information seeking process would allow systems to better serve the user's information needs. Developing a system that understands this level of knowledge based on search terms and takes the knowledge level into account as it performs a search would effectively deal with changing information needs and knowledge-levels over time.
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