ABSTRACT
It has been proposed that hypermedia and hypertext systems may have much to offer the information age (Neilson 1990; Nelson 1987). The idea that access to information will determine the success, or failure, of an organization is not new. Indeed, the initial ideas behind hypermedia can be traced back to a muchquoted article printed in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1945 by Vannevar Bush entitled “As we may think.” Bush argued that the access to, and communication of, knowledge had made a significant contribution to the outcome of the Second World War. He argued further that traditional methods of transmitting the information (e.g. scholarly journals and books) were inadequate for the task. This observation was based upon Bush’s task of orchestrating some six thousand American scientists in the application of science to warfare. He found problems associated with information management that could not be resolved by available systems. This led to his rather radical (in its time) proposal for the MEMEX system:
Bush was able to foresee this device as tool for augmenting human activity. However, there are two main problems of information management. The first problem is one of physical management — making the information easy to handle. Piles of books, reports, and scientific articles are not easy to use in quantity. Each is designed to be used as a stand-alone source. Whilst it is very easy to read one book and one article, problems occur when the numbers increase. The second problem relates to the way in which information is accessed and retrieved. This problem is different from the first because it refers to the user getting the appropriate information from a document in a timely manner, rather than the physical management of a large number of documents. It would seem that paper-based documents are relatively easy to use, in the sense that a shelf full of books of assorted sizes and colors makes it easy to identify the one required and, once selected, the chapter, section, page and paragraph are easy to locate. However, this assumes one knows effective mechanisms for retrieving the book (e.g. books shelved according to
content) and accessing the material (e.g. contents listings and indexes). These retrieval mechanisms relieve the user from knowing the entire contents and precise positions of all of the books.
