The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century Thomas L. Friedman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005 Thomas Friedman is a widely-acclaimed journalist, foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, and author of four best-selling books that include From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989). His eminence as a journalist is clearly demonstrated in the way he prepared for The World is Flat. He traveled throughout the world, interviewing in depth the political and business leaders who have the most direct, hands-on knowledge of the truly incredible developments occurring in the business structures and technology of globalization. Only a journalist who moves freely at the highest levels could interview the likes of Sir John Rose, the chief executive of Rolls-Royce; Nobuyuki Idei, the chairman of Sony; Richard Koo, the chief economist for the Nomura Research Institute; Bill Gates of Microsoft; Wee Theng Tan, the president of Intel China; David Baltimore, president of Caltech; Howard Schultz, founder and chairman of Starbucks; Nandan Nilekani, CEO of Infosys in Bangalore - and many others, each of whom gave him the inside story of how, specifically, the barriers of time and space separating economies, workforces, sources of capital, and technical abilities are crumbling. The result of this unfolding story, already far along but with much farther to go, according to Friedman, is that "the world is flat." With some notable exceptions in sub-Saharan Africa and the Islamic swathe, everything is connected with everything else on a horizontal basis, with distance and erstwhile time-lags no longer mattering. Friedman describes in detail the galloping globalization that has unfolded in even so limited a time as the past five years. Under the impetus of a worldwide network of interconnectivity, the world economy is much-changed from what it was at the turn of the century a mere half-decade ago. Friedman quotes the CEO of India's Infosys: "What happened over the last [few] years is that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables," while (Friedman paraphrases him) "computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of software - e-mail, search engines like Google, and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore, and one part to Beijing...." Microprocessors today have 410 million transistors compared to the 2800 they had in 1971. And now, "wireless is what will allow you to take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere." The effect on productivity is revolutionary: "It now takes Boeing eleven days to build a 737, down from twenty-eight days just a few years ago. Boeing will build the next generation of planes in three days, because all the parts are computer-designed for assembly." The most strikingly informative aspect of this book, however, is not about technology. Most especially, Friedman explores the rapidly evolving global business systems, each constantly regenerating itself to keep ahead of the others. These are systems that span the continents seeking the lowest-cost providers of everything from expert scientific and engineering work to the lowliest grunt work. Friedman points out that India produces 70,000 accounting graduates each year - and that they are willing to start at $100 a month. It is no wonder that Boeing employs 800 Russian scientists and engineers for passenger-plane design when "a U.S. aeronautical engineer costs $120 per design hour, a Russian costs about one-third of that." Friedman describes a call center in India where outbound callers sell "everything from credit cards to phone minutes," while operators taking inbound calls do "everything from tracing lost luggage for U.S. and European airline passengers to solving computer problems for confused American consumers. …

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

Three meanings of “information” are distinguished: “Information-as-process”; “information-as-knowledge”; and “information-as-thing,” the attributive use of “information” to denote things regarded as informative. The nature and characteristics of “information-as-thing” are discussed, using an indirect approach (“What things are informative?”). Varieties of “information-as-thing” include data, text, documents, objects, and events. On this view “information” includes but extends beyond communication. Whatever information storage and retrieval systems store and retrieve is necessarily “information-as-thing.”

These three meanings of “information,” along with “information processing,” offer a basis for classifying disparate information-related activities (e.g., rhetoric, bibliographic retrieval, statistical analysis) and, thereby, suggest a topography for “information science.” © 1991 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Information as Thing

Editor's Note:  In July, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) released a major position paper that examines the strategic roles institutional repositories serve for colleges and universities.  What follows are excerpts from the paper (footnotes omitted) that introduce the concept and describe the essential elements of an institutional repository.  The full paper is available on the SPARC Web site .

The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper

This article presents the methodology that has been successfully used over the past seven years by an interdisciplinary team to create the International Committee for Documentation of the International Council of Museums (CIDOC) CONCEPTUAL REFERENCE MODEL (CRM), a high-level ontology to enable information integration for cultural heritage data and their correlation with library and archive information. The CIDOC CRM is now in the process to become an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard. This article justifies in detail the methodology and design by functional requirements and gives examples of its contents. The CIDOC CRM analyzes the common conceptualizations behind data and metadata structures to support data transformation, mediation, and merging. It is argued that such ontologies are property-centric, in contrast to terminological systems, and should be built with different methodologies. It is demonstrated that ontological and epistemological arguments are equally important for an effective design, in particular when dealing with knowledge from the past in any domain. It is assumed that the presented methodology and the upper level of the ontology are applicable in a far wider domain.

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The CIDOC conceptual reference module: an ontological approach to semantic interoperability of metadata

RT: brief, extract, scope and contents note n. ~ 1. A concise summary of the key points of a larger work, often used to assist the reader in determining if that work is likely to be of use. – 2. ART · A genre of painting and other arts that originated in the 20th century, characterized by structures and patterns, rather than representational images and forms. ACA ABBR: Academy of Certified Archivists, Association of Canadian Archivists academy file n. ~ A series, often found in Congressional records, which includes applications for admission to a United States service academy, often with letters of recommendation from the member of Congress.

Glossary of Archival And Records Terminology

The Power of the Principle of Provenance

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David Bearman

Papers

The Power of the Principle of Provenance

Electronic Evidence: Strategies for Managing Records in Contemporary Organizations

Reality and Chimeras in the Preservation of Electronic Records.

A Common Model to Support Interoperable Metadata: Progress report on reconciling metadata requirements from the Dublin Core and INDECS/DOI Communities

Social Terminology Enhancement through Vernacular Engagement: Exploring Collaborative Annotation to Encourage Interaction with Museum Collections