Reflections on the role of information retrieval for development

In the 1980s, the futurist Alvin Toffler predicted that the Third Wave would lead to an information economy and move away from the agricultural and industrial. Of course, we now accept that the three waves co-exist; but at that time, Toffler’s point was taken to be the cause of the information explosion and its resulting anxieties and depravation. The typical scenario for information retrieval (IR) was a ‘library’ of text documents, indexed by keywords (tags), classified by the same keywords, and retrieved by vector, Boolean or probabilistic combinations of matches between these keywords and user-generated search queries (cf. Salton and McGill, 1983). This was the common world-view held by many in the research community (esteemed and congenial members of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) and predated what we now know as the World Wide Web. And as we now know, it was commercial search engines and content management systems vendors who seized the opportunities of the Internet as well as the initiatives to make a greater impact.

Today, it is a no-brainer that information is the life-blood of modern organisations and economies. But are information scientists and academics also key influencers and stakeholders? This commentary takes the view that academic research in IR, in retrospect, has wasted opportunities to drive impact and direction, ceding the innovation initiative to the likes of content management, information mining and search engine vendors. However, this is not an indictment of the pioneers of modern IR. Even the giants of the computer revolution (such as Thomas Watson, Alan Turing, Grace Hopper, Andy Grove, Bill Joy, Vince Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, to mention but a few) did not foresee the ubiquity of information seeking devices, applications and users. Since the 1980s, information processing speed and capacity has doubled every 18 months at constant prices, an observation known as Moore’s Law. This has opened up an entire suite of affordable information storage, processing and dissemination solutions. Ready or not, the digital era was upon us at the turn of the millennium, and the creation and distribution of digital content soon exceeded (in size as well as impact) all of the legacy documents humanity had collected since historical times (e.g. in the Library of Congress).

Nobody saw this coming. A common notion of information security at that time was to lock up the computer room and switch off all lights! Who could have imagined smartphones and tablets running at the speed of Cray supercomputers, downloading or storing the entire collected works of Rabindranath Tagore in seconds; or using natural language queries to search a worldwide network of user-generated content; or sharing and distributing multi-media information to social networks of more than a billion? When the graduate programme in information studies was established at the Nanyang Technological University in 1993, the Internet was nowhere close to being the ubiquitous necessity it now is. It was then only a conjecture that libraries would become digital and evolve from repositories to information centres. Hence, the need for a new breed of information services professional who looked beyond acquisitions, cataloguing, and abstracting. In hindsight, few foresaw the shift to participative IR. Not Toffler; perhaps not Vannevar Bush; nor even Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg (though the latter three were to profit significantly from the ‘third wave’).

With such a history, it might be foolhardy to look too far into what might have been and to make bold predictions. But there is so much to learn from the past; and this commentary serves to retrospectively highlight three challenges that (with 20/20 hindsight, obviously!) the IR community should have confronted much earlier: 1) keeping up with technology; 2) promoting information literacy; and 3) dealing with globalization. These are in no particular order but that of convenience. To add context to these challenges, a universal mission statement is put forth:

the primary role of IR in society is to inform humanity while at the same time avoiding mis-informing, dis-informing and un-informing.

A positivist interpretation of the presumption from Webster (2014) is that the character of information today is such as to have transformed how we live for the better. In other words, information, as an ideal, exists for the betterment of humanity.

Regarding the first challenge of keeping up with technology, few would dispute that information and communication technologies (ICTs) have ushered in an era of mass production and consumption of (mostly digital) information. Connected, hand-held devices, which are within the means of an increasing number of people, have created a platform for pervasive information production and distribution – namely the Internet (cf. Cerf, 2011). This in turn has created economies of scale and scope – bigger markets mean greater competition, innovation and choice. It is easy to take for granted the impact of ICT – as though improvements in speed, capacity, and costs were inevitable in the post-industrial age. The annual reports of the IBM Center for Applied Insights (IBM 2012) track how business decision-makers and their organizations adopt critical ICTs such as mobile, analytics, cloud and social technologies. But for library and information science, one additional technology may be added – interactive, multimedia documents with advanced computer-human interfaces (cf. Chen, 2011 for an early prototype). In the digital era, the information requirements and retrieval methods of users all over the world will go through nothing short of radical innovation. Going forward, therefore, the key challenge for scholars and practitioners of IR would be to exploit ICT so that improvements in efficiency and effectiveness are a given, while avoiding overload, anxiety, disinformation, piracy and surveillance. Each of these points is worthy of a stand-alone review article. In any case, we in the information research community need to continually remind ourselves that ICTs are not stand-alone solutions but enablers looking for innovation and enterprise.

The second challenge – promoting information literacy – concerns the universality of IR as a fundamental right of citizens. Specifically, this means equipping society with the sort of information literacy skills that will allow each individual to identify an information need, design an appropriate search strategy, and finally evaluate the results of the search in order to retrieve the “best option”. Truly laudable efforts at information literacy have been promoted by the National Forum for Information Literacy (n.d.) for many years with significant development outcomes. Here lies the information paradox: despite the explosion of information and associated technologies for storage and access, only an elite segment of society (mostly in the developed world) is able to exploit information as a commodity. This phenomenon is often labelled ‘The Digital Divide’. But when probed further, the challenge goes deeper than providing digital technologies and user skills. It has to do with empowering individuals so that they can make rewarding contributions to society. Professor Robin Mansell (2004) of the London School of Economics calls this “digital inclusion”, and other scholars refer to this as “digital participation”. It is non-trivial to empower digital communities – natives and immigrants alike. It goes beyond owning smart devices or tablets, using search engines, running applications, or managing data. At the kernel of digital inclusion and participation is a sense of contribution to ideas, content, policy, and so on. If IR is going to achieve its universal mission, it must confront the challenges of promoting digital participation. There is a nascent area of research interest – relegated to the lonely by-ways of information science – that addresses the idea(l) of digital literacies as a means to equitable opportunities and sustainable development. Mary Robinson, a former President of the Irish Republic and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, currently leads a non-governmental organization known as ‘Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative’. She holds that:

Information is our most precious resource, limited only by the constraints of human intelligence, innovation and imagination. However, like most resources, it is not shared equally. I would like to see full and free sharing of information and knowledge, across all sectors and borders, guided by the shared values and universal language of human rights.

It is now in vogue to plan for ‘smart cities’ that would provide the hardware for an information society and beyond. But a situation in which only an elite proportion of a society can exploit the opportunities of data analytics and social networking cannot possibly lead to desirable outcomes such as inclusiveness, participation and sustainability. Therefore, information literacy as a public good is a necessary step in this direction.

The third challenge has to do with confronting globalization. What has IR got to do with globalization? The short answer is – if information is a global commodity and the platforms for moving information are international, it is only a matter of time before large, international, online communities emerge across space and time (Castells, 2009). The role of IR in this digital era would hence be critical to solving so many of society’s global problems, in health, education, security, and the environment. In a recent, path-finding work, Professor Thomas Piketty (2014) of the Paris School of Economics empirically showed the steady rise in wealth and income inequalities across the globe and warned that this is not sustainable. He attributed this mostly to existing wealth distribution, but also to unequal access to social capital, technology and information. It is known that information asymmetry, exacerbated by technology, results in unequal opportunities and returns. This is why many countries have insider trading laws which prohibit such asymmetries. Surely then, a fundamental role of IR (and information science as a whole) must be to help create conditions for what Tom Friedman calls a “flatter world” – a world made up of communities in which literacy skills and ICT are available, affordable and applicable, so that they may engage globally as equals. We may argue about WikiLeaks and the dark side of ICTs, but few would dispute that the Internet as we know it (with mobile connectivity via affordable smartphones, drawing on clouds of information and applications, powered by social networks and crowd-sourcing) gives us a historical opportunity to correct the blatant imbalances we are confronted with. How can we do this as a society? Open Source software, content deposited in the Creative Commons, access to the wisdom of the crowds, and possibly even Massive Open Online Courses, could level the playing field for many of the disfranchised. The large developing nations of China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, and South Africa, with large communities of information professionals, obviously have an emerging (or re-emerging?) role to play in terms of the production, distribution and consumption of information. The developing world has much to learn from the best practices (as well as lessons learnt, for example, from Professor Nicholas Negroponte’s “OLPC”) of the mature economies in harnessing information and technologies for innovation and growth.

So, as we look to the future, we ought not forget the past. The future is indeed un-knowable, as an old Arabic saying goes. Neither Professor Manuel Castells (2009) nor Dr Vince Cerf (2011) are entirely sure of how the network society will mesh with the Internet of Things. Neither are we sure about how global citizens will converge around information, technology and online communities. Information needs will change, as will technology, applications and challenges; but mankind’s need for information will never be redundant. JP Rangaswami (2012) was by no means the first to realise that we as a species are genetically predisposed to information gathering, and treat it much like food. It is true that our well-being depends on seeking and receiving the right types and amounts of information (and calories, for that matter). Here we pay homage to the ancient Alexandrian libraries and the pioneering work in India of Professor SR Ranganathan (1931), which served as expressions of an intrinsic need within their communities. As information scientists, the future is ours to make – for ourselves, our organisations, our societies and humanity at large. We ought to continue to question what a library or information centre means in the context of the digital age. A cluster of buildings and storage contraptions? A hybrid collection of print and digital resources? An eclectic community, consuming, yet producing, digital content and learning from collective information seeking behaviours? If the discipline of information science is to fulfil its calling as the life-blood of the information economy, then it is time we revisited IR scholarship and practice and embraced technology as well as aspirations. And across the globe, such aspirations include IR in the context of digital media, health, education, government and commerce as a means of development.