Related Experiment Videos
Things to come: postmodern digital knowledge management and medical informatics
1Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA.
Summary
The future of knowledge management involves creating digital systems to organize and share scientific information. Medical informatics and libraries must collaborate to build these systems for medicine, advancing global knowledge and health.
Area of Science:
- Information Science
- Medical Informatics
- Knowledge Management
Background:
- Libraries historically served as society's collective memory.
- Digital knowledge management systems are poised to become the future repository of human knowledge.
- The current decentralized model of duplicated resources will transition to specialized, sole-source servers.
Purpose of the Study:
- To address the grand challenge of creating comprehensive knowledge management systems.
- To advocate for all scholarly scientific knowledge to be in the public domain.
- To propose a collaborative effort between medical informatics and libraries to develop advanced medical knowledge systems.
Main Methods:
- Conceptualizing the evolution from traditional libraries to digital knowledge repositories.
- Defining the characteristics of future digital knowledge management systems.
- Outlining the collaborative organizational structure needed for development.
Main Results:
- Future knowledge management systems will centralize information on specialized servers.
- Scholarly scientific knowledge should be publicly accessible, managed by scientists.
- A new organization integrating medical informatics and library science is proposed.
Conclusions:
- The integration of medical informatics and libraries is crucial for developing next-generation medical knowledge systems.
- These systems will contribute to the 'world brain,' facilitating scientific discovery and global welfare.
- The transition to digital, public-domain knowledge management is essential for the 21st century.