STRUCTURAL AND CONCEPTUAL CHANGES IN THE INFORMATION LANDSCAPE: THE NEW CHALLENGES FOR INFORMATION PROFESSIONALS

The information space has witnessed phenomenal changes in the last few years. The fast growth of information repositories and trend towards protocol standardisation had completely revised even the conceptual frame work of the ubiquitous platform of internet. In the application domain, need for systems that mine out knowledge from the distributed data and information resources, revealing the hidden footprints in the seemingly unrelated resources is on the rise. The developmental philosophy of the information/knowledge repositories is moving from proprietary standards to the open standards, leading to several issues on the long term management of such systems. All these developments, happening at a rapid pace is posing newer challenges to the information professional involved in the design, development, deployment and management of the information repositories in the cyber space. This paper provides an overview of the developments happening in this area and focuses on the new issues emanating out of such changes. Rather than presenting a chronological review of the specific developments, the paper looks at the short and long term impact o