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Article Name : INFORMATION IS A DIAMOND IN THE CLOSET


You’ve heard the old question, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Today, imagine a different version of this.

Suppose there’s a large diamond in your closet. It’s the size of your thumbnail and it’s worth a fortune.

Unfortunately, however, the diamond is completely out of sight. Somehow it got wedged between a shelf and the wall. You can’t see it, and you don’t know it’s there.

The question is, if you don’t know about it, does the diamond make you rich?.

Interestingly, the Federal Government is up against something similar, and surprisingly, so are each of us. We are all owners of an extraordinary source of wealth. The trouble is, like the diamond in the closet, we don’t know it’s there.

This source of wealth is government information. Bob Willard from the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS) believes that, today, information resources are just as important to national wealth as natural resources, human resources, or financial resources.

Martha Gould, Chair of the Commission adds, “Information content is to wealth generation in the Internet Age as raw materials were to wealth generation in the Industrial Age.”

To see why information is valuable, imagine any of the following:

• You’d like to move from a low job opportunity area to a high job opportunity area, and you need to know just where those high opportunity job areas are.

• You need authoritative advice on health, diet, safety or security.

• You want to know about Social Security or Medicare or educational assistance regulations that apply to you. .

• You care deeply about the environment, and you’d like to know what you can do to help.

There’s information that can help you with any of these situations. The problem is, the information is like the diamond in the closet. You may not know it exists. Or if you suspect it exists, you may not know how to find it, or you may lack the Internet skills needed to get to it.

Or let’s say you find what seems to be exactly what you’re looking for. Even then, what you’re reading may be inaccurate or incomplete, and you may not be sure you can trust the source.

Those are obstacles an individual faces when making use of the incredible stores of information that are available today. officials may not know about it. Willard estimates that possibly a billion dollars in government research is duplicated because people didn’t know it had already been done.

“The Federal government spends $80 billion a year on research and, without a centralized data base for on-going research,” he explains, “it’s reasonable to expect a 1% to 2% overlap.”

Fortunately for all of us, the people at NCLIS are working to strengthen and coordinate the processes we have for disseminating information. The nine staff members together with dozens of volunteers are dedicated to doing this.

They’re working with librarians, scientists, government officials, and private sector specialists to help the nation do a better job of making use of one of our most valuable resources. The potential benefits for each of us are beyond price.

Interestingly, our government faces the same problem.

There’s information available that government officials need, but the The cost of NCLIS is less than two cents per citizen per year. It’s got to be one of the best investments we make with our tax dollars.

For more information visit http://www.nclis.gov/ END