Can we face the information explosion?

‘Information management will be to the next half century what steam, coal and electricity were to the 19th century.’ This quotation, which admittedly appeared as an inducement to buy a book, carries I am sure more than a modicum of truth. We have all heard, far too often, of the so called information explosion of the post war years, although there are many who deny that there is any such explosion and who say that it is merely a natural exponential growth which has taken place over possibly hundreds of years. Whether it is a ‘big bang’ or an expansion phenomenon does not alter the fact that we are faced today with a mass of information of a size which could not be envisaged a generation ago. Until the advent of on‐line systems the size was possibly no problem to most people, in that the majority of the information was inaccessible or completely unknown, but we are now faced with a situation where the mass can be made accessible and known to all at the pressing of a switch or the lifting of a telephone. To continue the explosion analogy—up to now we have only seen the explosion, now we will feel the blast.