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Knowledge dissemination is somewhat different from the other tracks of the 1999 ASIS Annual Meeting in that knowledge dissemination, broadly defined, encompasses all the services and products discussed in the other tracks. I think of knowledge dissemination as all the processes necessary to communicate information from its creators to its users. Note that Linda Smith has made a distinction among data, information, knowledge, understanding and wisdom. Here I take the "fuzzy" approach letting information serve as a generic term for data, information and knowledge. However, I will limit the discussion to recorded information because ASIS members tend to be largely concerned with communication processes involving recorded information. I will also give some examples from scientific scholarly publishing because I have recently been involved in an analysis of trends related to print and electronic journals. [Sources of citations and data may be found in: Towards Electronic Journals: Realities for Scientists, Librarians and Publishers. Carol Tenopir and Donald W, King. Washington, DC. Special Libraries Association (in print).]
Communication processes basically deal with two primary components:
information content and form and
the media used to convey the information.
Information content conveys the meaning of messages. Information form is described by format or type of information (for instance, text, mathematical models, numeric data, coded data, imagery, graphics) and structure or expression of content (for instance, language, syntactic and semantic structures, type of model, type of graphics, structure of tables). As mentioned, a number of processes have evolved to add value to communicated information or to be provided in required forms. These processes might be characterized as a composition of the information, such as writing articles, formulating mathematical models, coding data;
transformation of information content (changes through subject and text editing), format (e.g., preparing a text description of a map, converting a mathematical model to a database or table) and information structure (for instance, translation of language, converting one mathematical model to another);
a description and synthesis ranging from HTML coding, indexing, cataloging and abstracting to preparing synopses and state-of-the-art reviews;
logical access through reference and retrieval; and
evaluation and analysis of information such as article manuscript selection and refereeing and that done with library collection development, screening and annotation of search output.
All of these processes serve to improve...