Review Paper : Information technology and work

I am not aware of a body of literature covering the future work prospects for information scientists. However, an article appeared in this journal suggesting that &dquo;... by the year 2000, the information scientist and the librarian will have gone the way of the brontosaurus&dquo; [46]. In proposing courses of action to avoid extinction, the author suggested that there were wider areas in which information scientists could become involved. The fact is that the ‘ knowledge professions’ are becoming a part of the ‘information industry’ which is being subjected to powerful forces. Like it or not we shall be carried along by them. This article is about the mechanisation of work. Within it reside the smaller areas of Information Technology and its ill-defined intellectual accomplice Information Science, and these are also dis-

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