The last decade has seen significant global changes that have impacted the library, information, and learning services and sciences. There is now a mood to find pragmatic information solutions to pressing global challenges. Future Directions in Digital Information presents the latest ideas and approaches to digital information from across the globe, portraying a sense of transition from old to new. This title is a comprehensive, international take on key themes, advances, and trends in digital information, including the impact of developing technologies. The latest volume in the 'Chandos Digital Information Review Series', this book will help practitioners and thinkers looking to keep pace with, and excel among, the digital choices and pathways on offer, to develop new systems and models, and gain information on trends in the educational and industry contexts that make up the information sphere. A group of international contributors has been assembled to give their view on how information professionals and scientists are creating the future along five distinct themes: Strategy and Design; Who are the Users?; Where Formal meets Informal; Applications and Delivery; and finally, New Paradigms. The multinational perspectives contained in this volume acquaint readers with problems, approaches, and achievements in digital information from around the world, with equity of information access emerging as a key challenge. - Presents a global perspective on how information science and services are changing and how they can best adapt - Gives insight into how managers can make the best decisions about the future provision of their information services - Engages key practical issues faced by information professionals such as how best to collect and deploy user data in libraries - Presents digital literacy as a global theme, stressing the need to foster literacy in a broad range of contexts - Interrogates how ready information professionals are for emergent technological and social change across the globe

Digital Information Strategies: From Applications and Content to Libraries and People provides a summary and summation of key themes, advances, and trends in all aspects of digital information at the present time. This helpful resource explores the impact of developing technologies on the information world. Written from an international perspective, the book emphasizes key current topics and future developments. The publication is based on a dynamic set of contents that respond to, and anticipate, what is happening—and what may well happen—in the field of digital information. - Presents a comprehensive overview of the major aspects of contemporary digital information provision - Serves as a useful reference work for the subject area - Features input written from an international perspective - Explores the impact of developing technologies on the information world, emphasizing key, current topics and future developments

COVID-19 is profoundly affecting the ways in which we live, learn, plan, and develop. What does COVID-19 mean for the future of digital information use and delivery, and for more traditional forms of library provision? Libraries, Digital Information, and COVID gives immediate and long-term solutions for librarians responding to the challenge of COVID-19. The book helps library leaders prepare for a post-COVID-19 world, giving guidance on developing sustainable solutions. The need for sustainable digital access has now become acute, and while offering a physical space will remain important, current events are likely to trigger a shift toward off-site working and study, making online access to information more crucial. Libraries have already been providing access to digital information as a premium service. New forms and use of materials all serve to eliminate the need for direct contact in a physical space. Such spaces will come to be predicated on evolving systems of digital information, as critical needs are met by remote delivery of goods and services. Intensified financial pressure will also shape the future, with a reassessment of information and its commercial value. In response, there will be a massification of provision through increased cooperation and collaboration. These significant transitions are driving professionals to rethink and question their identities, values, and purpose. This book responds to these issues by examining the practicalities of running a library during and after the pandemic, answering questions such as: What do we know so far? How are institutions coping? Where are providers placing themselves on the digital/print and the remote/face-to-face continuums? This edited volume gives analysis and examples from around the globe on how libraries are managing to deliver access and services during COVID-19. This practical and thoughtful book provides a framework within which library directors and their staff can plan sustainable services and collections for an uncertain future. - Focuses on the immediate practicalities of service provision under COVID-19 - Considers longer-term strategic responses to emerging challenges - Identifies key concerns and problems for librarians and library leaders - Analyzes approaches to COVID-19 planning - Presents and examines exemplars of best practice from around the world - Offers practical models and a useful framework for the future

This book is an introduction to critical and theoretical perspectives on digital information. It outlines the origins of information management in nineteenth-century humanism, the adoption of scientific perspectives in the documentation and information science movements, and modern theoretical frameworks for understanding the social, cultural and political place of digital information. Digital Information Contexts is the first book aimed at information professionals to give a detailed outline of important perspectives on information and meaning, including post-structuralism and post-modernism. It explores parallels between information management and media, communication and cultural studies. Each chapter includes recommended further reading to guide the reader to further information. It is a comprehensive introduction to theoretical frameworks for understanding and studying digital information. - General theoretical introduction to digital information management - Explores the application of critical theory, communications and media theory to understanding digital information - Historical and critical perspective

The long-term social benefits of building an inclusive information society: a national action plan. As our social institutions migrate into cyberspace, the digitally disenfranchised face increasing hardships. What happens when—in search of quick and cheap fixes—a government office shuts down and is replaced by a public Web site? What happens when a company accepts only online job applications? Inevitably, those most in need of the services and opportunities offered are further marginalized. In Digital Nation, Tony Wilhelm shows us how to build a more inclusive information society, offering a plan that reaps the benefits offered by the new technology while avoiding the pitfalls of social exclusion. Technology, he tells us, isn't the problem—it's the use of technology that can empower or control, unite or divide; we need to recover the ideas of social justice and fairness that have been lost in the rush to make things faster and cheaper. In Wilhelm's vision of an inclusive digital nation, everyone can take advantage of the new technology. With everyone part of the information society, we can revolutionize the way we educate our citizens, deliver healthcare, and engage in productive work. The result will be increased efficiency and productivity that will lead to long-term savings of billions of dollars and an enhanced quality of life as technology expands choice and opportunity. We can begin to bring this about by expanding access to computers and making it easier to acquire digital literacy skills. To do nothing—to turn a blind eye to the promise of an inclusive technology—would cost us socially and economically. Digital Nation's call for action sets the terms for a new debate on bridging the digital divide.

Websites and apps are places where critical parts of our lives happen. We shop, bank, learn, gossip, and select our leaders there. But many of these places weren’t intended to support these activities. Instead, they're designed to capture your attention and sell it to the highest bidder. Living in Information draws upon architecture as a way to design information environments that serve our humanity.

Why we organize our personal digital data the way we do and how design of new PIM systems can help us manage our information more efficiently. Each of us has an ever-growing collection of personal digital data: documents, photographs, PowerPoint presentations, videos, music, emails and texts sent and received. To access any of this, we have to find it. The ease (or difficulty) of finding something depends on how we organize our digital stuff. In this book, personal information management (PIM) experts Ofer Bergman and Steve Whittaker explain why we organize our personal digital data the way we do and how the design of new PIM systems can help us manage our collections more efficiently. Bergman and Whittaker report that many of us use hierarchical folders for our personal digital organizing. Critics of this method point out that information is hidden from sight in folders that are often within other folders so that we have to remember the exact location of information to access it. Because of this, information scientists suggest other methods: search, more flexible than navigating folders; tags, which allow multiple categorizations; and group information management. Yet Bergman and Whittaker have found in their pioneering PIM research that these other methods that work best for public information management don't work as well for personal information management. Bergman and Whittaker describe personal information collection as curation: we preserve and organize this data to ensure our future access to it. Unlike other information management fields, in PIM the same user organizes and retrieves the information. After explaining the cognitive and psychological reasons that so many prefer folders, Bergman and Whittaker propose the user-subjective approach to PIM, which does not replace folder hierarchies but exploits these unique characteristics of PIM.