Roland Hjerppe Liblab - Dept. of Computer and Information Science Linköping University Go with the flow, or abide by the side, or watch the waves? Challenges of Change for Knowledge Organization. Abstract: Internet itself and the dynamic and diffuse nature of documents and collections on Internet are discussed. Some previously obscured assumptions of current and past modes of knowledge organization, based on a rejection of change, become apparent against this background. Three types of consequences found in the examination of these assumptions are outlined: that knowledge organization is a matter for everyone, there is a need for a re-definition, and for several partial re-orientations of aims, for knowledge organization. A number of proposals on areas for reflection, research and action are presented and the three types of responses to the challenges of change are briefly discussed. The future of the Internet is a real-time future. We’ll see a vast shift from static sites today to a much more dynamic world with information always changing with real-time streams of media - audio, video and data. (Nova Spivack, 1996) Preamble The aim of this paper is to indicate trends, expose hitherto obscured assumptions, discuss implications of these findings, and propose directions for future action. The title could also have been something like: From static to dynamic, from use to user, from principled systems to ad-hoc principles. It is more focused on the bases of knowledge organization and external factors than on current practice. Three types of responses (there are others) to the challenges of change are discussed at the end. Some the challenges of change for libraries and archives have been outlined in a companion paper (Hjerppe, 1996). In order to cover more ground than the limits imposed by the context, a keynote paper for a conference, usually would permit, some the traditional rhetorics have been sacrificed. It is thus not a traditional scholarly paper, focusing on a specific, well defined issue, with all the proper references to prior literature etc. Most of the pointers provided are to electronic resources, i.e. URLs, and many of them are to collections of resources rather than primary material. A search for traditional literature on knowledge organization and change yielded surprisingly few results, most of them recent, e.g. (Lockenhoff, 1994; Schipper, 1994). We are at the juncture where the new modes of communication and expression enabled by distributed hypermedia - Internet, are being tested and experienced but where scholarly communication still (with some experimental exceptions) operates in the traditional mode - writings intended for printing on paper. The writing of this paper has hence been persisted experiences of frustrations and impatience. Foremost among these have been the need to linearize the presentation of subjects that form networks, internally and between each other, and the inelasticity and passivity of pointers on papers compared to the immediacy and reach of links in the hypermedia environment of Internet. (An interesting question on the side is what form conference presentations will have in the future when the conference papers are integrated into the web at submission, which perhaps consists of a URL?) 1. Introduction