Information overload has been long been an issue that I'm interested in. For me, it's the true occupational hazard of being a librarian - especially being a reference and electronic services librarian. I get a paper cut once in a while, I pick up my share of colds from the reference desk and I've received minor cuts and burns from troubleshooting printers and photocopiers, but none of these things compare with the persistence of information overload. This brief article - Kathryn Hensiak, Too much of a good thing: Information overload and law librarians, 22 Legal Reference Services Quarterly 85 (2003) - was a helpful contribution to the subject. You can view an abstract of it here - otherwise you could ask your academic or public library for an interlibrary loan. Some articles on information overload seem to be saying, "gee-whiz, ain't it cool that this is a problem!" This article spends some time showing why it's a real problem ...
Although Hensiak touches on some of the technological solutions to the problem, such as better email filtering and management, her article's strength lies in stating that the solution is more mental than technological. "Often, librarians are reluctant to make judgments about information. Our tendency is to produce long bibliographies and pathfinders for our patrons that list every feasible resource on a particular topic." (p. 94) These days, being a reference librarian is as much about filtering out information as finding information. Hensiak mentions that we "should trust our expertise to make judgements about the quality of the information we distribute to our patrons." (p. 94) Another mental strategy to combat information overload is just being more focused about how open we are to receiving information. This leads to "eliminating useless information". In some ways, this flies in the face of traditional library values - although it's one thing for me to get purge all the useless information which clogs up my own professional and personal life (which I think is that Hensiak is referring to here), and it would be very different to design a library based on this principle.
Hensiak concludes by saying that "[w]e need to change our attitude towards information. Information can be bad if there is too much of it and the mechanisms that control the influx of information break down. Although this is a challenge for law librarians who are trained to value all kinds of information, we must learn to limit our intake." (p. 95) As mentioned previously in this blog, and elsewhere, information overload is as real problem as obesity is a health issue.
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