Historically, information has been treated as a public good, freely available to citizens. That model is coming under pressure, as the full economic and social significance of information becomes apparent. In many developed nations, the information sector is among the fastest growing segments of the economy. The emergence of a dynamic global information industry has created a wealth of opportunities for appropriately educated information professionals, but it has also helped throw into relief a raft of complex public policy issues, such as privatization of government-held information resources, the management of intellectual property rights, and the possible emergence of an information underclass, all of which call for rigorous and informed policy analysis.

The signs of a new age are everywhere: personal computers in the classroom, interactive media in the home, global communication networks, electronic publishing, digital libraries. The statistics are irresistible; the amount of information produced in the last decade alone is greater than all the information created in past millennia. Public awareness of the importance of information has never been stronger, as is evidenced by national debate on issues such as the emerging Infobahn and censorship in cyberspace. The rhetoric of the Information Age has finally become reality. And that reality translates into unprecedented career opportunities for information professionals who know how to organize, manage, and exploit information assets; who combine analytic and technical skills with a sense of the strategic value of information to organizations of all kinds.

The economic and social well-being of nations depends increasingly on their ability to generate and access new knowledge. Hence, a need exists to create information-literate societies. Being information literate means knowing how information is created, stored, transmitted, and used. The ‘‘informatization’’ of society is creating demand for specialists who will function as information resource managers and act as guides, interpreters, mediators, brokers, and quality controllers for the ultimate user, who might be a corporate executive, a scientist, or a schoolchild. Today’s information professionals do not merely store and locate information, they also analyze and synthesize raw data to produce customized, value-added services and products for a diverse clientele. The field offers a kaleidoscope of career tracks from which to choose, as the mass of position announcements in both the professional and generalist press makes abundantly clear: information systems analysis, database design and marketing, information brokering, medical informatics, systems librarianship, competitor intelligence analysis, Web design. In a sense, the opportunities are limited only by the imagination.

On one issue there is widespread agreement: the effective management of information systems and resources is critical to successful organizational performance. That is as true of a Fortune 500 corporation as of a hospital or a small liberal arts college. Information resources include, but are by no means synonymous with, the materials held in libraries, archives, and documentation centers. In the Information Age, organizations of all kinds are waking up to the fact that intellectual capital is one of their most important resources—the basis of comparative advantage and superior service delivery. It is this awareness, as much as the highly visible information technologies, which is responsible for transforming the ways in which business, commerce, professional affairs, and contemporary scholarship are being conducted.