by Rhonda Spencer
(from a conversation with Kiduk Yang)
January 15, 2003

An explosion! An information explosion! Like the sayings in the old Batman episodes: Pow! KaBoom! A mere 320 million web pages five years ago has suddenly exploded into 3 billion! (NEC Research Institute, Google) And, 25 years ago? There were no Web pages, zero, the year many of our students were born. A true explosion of accessible information has occurred.

Can people find the answers they need on the Web? Sometimes. How do they find what they need? A common human enterprise in the 21st century is "surfing the Web". But like the experience of ocean-based surfing, Web surfing can end unsatisfactorily. Frustration can be the result of Web surfing.

Can the Web be improved? Can we invent new ways to "look up" information? Who will be the information inventors - architects - designers - navigators - leaders of this generation? The answer, well-established in history and practice, is the SLIS graduate.

Library Science + Computer Science = Information Science

This simple and complex equation was offered by SLIS Assistant Professor Kiduk Yang. "Kiduk worked for Lockheed Martin designing web-based information retrieval services for the Environmental Protection Agency immediately before joining IU School of Library and Information Science. He holds a M.S. and a Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill." (SLIS Network, Fall 2002) I asked him a few questions on a snowy day in January. Why did he come to SLIS? What is the foundation or essence of the study of library and information science? How can our field make a difference in the world? What is unique about library and information science?

Part of what drew Kiduk to SLIS was the faculty. SLIS has an interdisciplinary faculty. The field of library and information science draws from every discipline. And, all fields need SLIS graduates to help organize, design, and retrieve information. Kiduk's research deals with Web-based information retrieval, and he welcomes the diverse perspectives that SLIS faculty bring to his area. He sees the future of the Web - and it includes new structures. The web of the future will make "Web surfing" more fun. The Web of the future will make it easier to retrieve the information we need in our lives. And, SLIS graduates will be key contributors to this change.

A little history can help us understand the information explosion - the KaBoom! - of our generation.

There have always been curious people. There have always been teachers and researchers and questions. There have long been information professionals who helped organize, design, and retrieve information. Often called librarians, these knowledge managers provided the tools that people needed to explore the questions in their lives. Up to a few years ago, the information was kept primarily in books and in paper format. Access to these resources was limited to geographical space.

But now -- Zap! Zing! KaPow! -- anyone, anywhere, in the remotest corners of the world can access 3 billion pages of information. History, art, photography, stories, medical research, law -- a seemingly infinite amount of information is available. The curious can be satisfied.

The Web is here to stay. It will continue to grow. People will want answers. SLIS graduates can help organize, design, and retrieve information. They can help create the tools that make information accessible.

Kiduk tells the story of the creators of Yahoo!. Two Ph.D. Stanford students, David Filo and Jerry Yang, came up with a strategy to help people find things on the Web. They pulled together a team of 50 professional catalogers. This team surfed the Web, then cataloged the pages they found. They sorted and labeled Web pages into categories that made them easier to find. They made millions. And Yahoo! was the leader of web searching... for a time.

Google's team of information professionals came later. They added more computer technology tools to the problems of information retrieval and came up with new solutions. Google is now a primary leader in helping people find answers to their problems. But, Google's solutions may not be enough for the next phase of Web growth.

Kiduk Yang sees the future of the Web including a combination of strategies from the creators of Yahoo! and Google, plus additional creative ideas from the field of information science. Library science theory and practice combined with computer science technology = information science. Information science can offer the ingredients to create new solutions for information access. SLIS graduates can be a part of this solution.

In addition to traditional library science, SLIS explores issues in digital information, social informatics, human-computer interaction, cultural preservation, database design, information retrieval, Web design, information management, and more. SLIS explores the hard questions of intellectual freedom and the digital divide... Special courses in strategic intelligence, metadata, information visualization, organizational informatics, and evaluation of information sources can all contribute to an interesting career in information access. The School of Library and Information Science has strong ties across the Indiana University campus. We offer numerous joint degree programs. Our students have held internships, for example with UITS (University Information Technology Services) and with the IU Libraries. Digital Library projects are options. Courses on rare books, manuscripts, and art librarianship are available. Students from almost every unit on campus -- Informatics, Public and Environmental Affairs, Instructional Systems Technology, Telecommunications, Music, Journalism, Latin American and Caribbean Studies -- take courses in SLIS.

SLIS alumni are at Lexis-Nexis, Medline, the Baseball Hall of Fame, and numerous libraries and information centers (including the Library of Congress, the Art Institute of Chicago Library, Dow Chemical, etc.) They are librarians, Web managers, database specialists, cultural preservers, teachers and more.

Our focus is on people, their information needs, and how to bring the two together.

What's ahead for the SLIS graduate? Excitement, Change, KaBoom!

Brief Web History offered by Kiduk Yang

1989	Tim Berners-Lee introduces the "Web" proposal (technology to enable collaboration in physics community).
1990	Web goes "online" at CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics).
1992	50 Web servers exist in the world, mostly in universities and research centers.
1993	Mosaic, first GUI Web browser, introduced by Marc Andreseen (then an undergraduate at the University of Illilinois at UC, later the co-founder of Netscape with Jim Clark).
01/1994	David Filo and Jerry Yang (Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University) start building Yahoo! as a hobby.
Fall 1994	Yahoo! use reaches 1 million hits, 100,000 unique visitors.
04/1996	Yahoo! goes public with 49 employees.
1997	Yahoo! has 25 million users in the U.S.
12/1997	Lawrence and Giles, NEC Research Institute - state that there are 320 million publicly accessible Web pages.
09/1999	Google is officially launched (founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 09/1998).
02/1999	Lawrence and Giles -- there are now 800 million Web pages, 3 million Web servers.
12/2002	Goggle has 3 billion Web pages.

Helpful Links:

Internet History Links by the Internet Society:www.isoc.org/internet/history
For Yahoo history, see www.akamarketing.com/yahoo-feature1.html
For Google history, see http://google.blogspace.com/archives/000621
NEC Research Institute:www.neci.nec.com

Kiduk Yang, SLIS faculty Web page:http://ella.slis.indiana.edu./~kiyang/index.shtml
SLIS Joint Programs:www.slis.indiana.edu/degrees/joint

To apply to SLIS:www.slis.indiana.edu/admissions/apply_online.html

Posted Jan. 24, 2003