We understand the nuances of quality information, of data structure, and of human thought patterns as they relate to the research process. The virtues of the culture of information professionals have become mainstream. Things I took for granted 25 years ago are now part of commonly accepted wisdom. Ordinary people talk about going online, about finding information, about data quality. Sometimes this is frightening for information professionals.
Information is ubiquitous but no one is in charge.
The first two generations of online stressed control. The military precision with which we could deploy command languages belongs to those earlier eras. The Dynamic generation of online recognises that answers are not necessarily the result of a carefully thought-out search strategy. Sometimes they come, spontaneously and synchronistically, from peripheral materials, from visualisation, or from inferences. The Intuitive generation will stress solutions rather than answers, value people connections more than published articles, and emphasise knowledge creation over information retrieval.