[Sigiii-l] plaza please post

[VanKoevering at fis.utoronto.ca]

Hello.  This is my contribution to the global information plaza.

Position Statement:

I think that what will change in my professional life, due to globalization, is 
the work load.  The major hurdle that I see in my future career will be 
overload.  There will be so much information available that it will take 
forever just to sort through it all to find the relevant information.  Also the 
technological aspect will be of considerable concern.  There will be a need 
for constant upgrading of my skills just to break even with the amount of 
technology that will be constantly introduced.  One piece of evidence for 
this is computers, basically as soon as you buy one it has become 
obsolete and you need to rush out to buy software to make it compatible 
with the new technological revolution.  As well I will need to upgrade in 
order to learn ever better search strategies to enable me to sift through all 
of the available information.  The information science community (ISC) will 
have to enable information workers to upgrade their skills with, perhaps, 
workshops or liaisons.  Also the ISC will have to provide the up to date 
technology that will be needed in order to do the job.  To help themselves 
they will need to constantly keep in touch with information workers to 
effect communication between the two to provide better services and have 
happy information workers.
The changes to my personal life are less far reaching because I don't 
spend all day now looking for information so I don't feel the changes that 
much right now.  The one thing that I have noticed is my e-mail is getting 
more and more junk sent through it, which I then have to sift through to 
keep the good and delete the chaff.  To cope with the change I need to 
constantly check my e-mail so I don't end up with 100 messages waiting 
for me every time I open my e-mail account up.  The ISC could come up 
with better spam filters, but  at this point that is a minor consideration.  
This is my assessment of globalization and me.  Annette Van Koevering