Data Inflation and Professional Developments
If there is one area where technology has contributed greatly to changing professions, it is knowledge management. For nearly three decades, information professionals have argued that some of their traditional skills have been taken over by computer tools.
They found that their mediation function was challenged by the adoption of internet-related technologies by the general public.
The advent of big data has shaken the world of information even more, but it also presented great opportunities.
The contributions that make up this pole show whether professions are affected by this new digital context, between classical functions and innovative stances. It outlines the possible future of the IT professions.
Many factors contribute to the evolution, emergence, disappearance, transformation of trades and professions.
There is more to the transformation of occupations than the development of social innovations, needs and uses. It is clear that technological development is a very important driving force of these changes.
It is studied in a professional field where it plays an important role in the shaping and metamorphosis of the materials studied. This is both physical and intellectual. This is the case for IT professions in general today, but this was not always the case.
Considering, for example, the early mechanographic works of the sixties, the fact that the machine helps to process (unencrypted) information is a recent phenomenon.
Filing and retention processes consist of intellectually identifying the information material contained in the analyzed or stored documents. Intellectual, scientific work is considered secondary.
Professionalization Movement
IT professions as a whole are highly technical today. This is at all stages of the information processing chain, from identification to consultation on media and documentary support.
As a minimum, it requires a screen. It is necessary to know how to use interfaces, control systems, visualization tools. There is a case where we can show that they are rarely intuitive and transparent.
At the very least, an information culture is also required to decipher, understand and analyze how documents and information are structured, marked and formatted for reading by machines and humans.
You have to give the most effort yourself: mark, program, specify, develop, etc. What needs to be mobilized should be as much or as technical knowledge.
For example, knowledge or skills develop spontaneously among digital natives who create new behaviors of accessing, consulting and navigating the knowledge corpus.
This, of course, is structured and stabilized from the point of view of users as well as professionals, before a profession or specialization. We observe somewhat the same phenomenon for bloggers.
The recurring question arises in this professionalization movement:
• Are these really new occupations or variations of existing occupations?
Knowledge Professions
Over the past three decades, various phenomena have contributed to the change of IT professions and the blurring of the boundaries between the specialties that make up them. But retracing their history here would be too long and complex.
The first notable phenomenon has been reserved for the field of intellectual work, and especially for manual labor, proletarian work, hitherto. It is the human processing of information, that is, the application of machinic processes.
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Where the machine takes the place of the hand in the first place, it takes over, if not the brain, at least certain intellectual operations that suddenly escape the judgment and control of the individual.
Annotation, enrichment, and indexing help tools partially replace the annotation and indexing activity.
On the other end of the spectrum, search engines “automate” the search for information in their most modern versions with features such as discovery tools, autocomplete or directional navigation.
The second phenomenon concerns the increasing digitization of resources. The three “classic” knowledge management professions are archivists, librarians, and documentarians.
Outside the document production chain, finished material is studied, the processing of which responds to different requirements: heritage preservation, historical memory and culture, cultural offer, information analysis, etc.
Today, documentary applications can be directly linked to streams that are broadcast regardless of the intended medium (books, newspapers, records, etc.).
Documentary contributions are then placed both upstream (publisher-provided metadata) and downstream (inserting specific metadata about location or sampling) of the chain.
When it comes to electronic archiving, the records manager can intervene in process elements from the design stage. Or, the archivist can identify both content metadata and data associated with the document’s lifecycle.
