Overcoming Barriers to Effective Information Use: Challenges and Solutions

Every day, more research papers, reports, datasets, and articles are published than any single person could ever read. Yet despite this abundance, getting the right information to the people who need it remains surprisingly difficult. A medical student in Delhi might struggle to access a journal locked behind a paywall, a policymaker might miss a crucial study because it was written in a language they don’t read, and a non-specialist might abandon a useful document because the jargon is impenetrable. These obstacles, known in library and information science as barriers to the use of information, sit at the heart of why information consolidation and repackaging exist as a discipline. Understanding these barriers is the first step toward dismantling them.

The information explosion and the problem of time 🔗

The single biggest barrier to information use is simply how much of it there is. The phrase “information explosion” describes the rapid, sustained increase in published information and the difficulties this abundance creates. It is not a new idea. The term appeared in print as far back as the 1960s, but the scale of the problem has grown enormously since.

Scientific literature in particular has been expanding at an exponential rate. Researchers have noted that more than 60% of all published research has appeared since the year 2000, with output continuing to multiply year after year. The volume now arrives faster than anyone can process it.

Why volume becomes a barrier 🔗

Here lies the core tension. Information can be accumulated endlessly, but time cannot. A scholar studying a focused topic still cannot keep pace with the new publications appearing in their field, and traditional methods of manually screening and sorting literature simply break down under the load. The result is a paradox: more information is available than ever before, yet effectively using it has become harder, not easier.

This overload affects students directly. When a college student searches for material on an assignment topic, they are often confronted not with a shortage of sources but with thousands of results, many of them duplicative, outdated, or only loosely relevant. Sorting signal from noise consumes the very time that should be spent on understanding and applying the information.

How information services respond 🔗

This is precisely where information consolidation and repackaging come in. Tools such as abstracts, reviews, digests, and curated bibliographies exist to filter the flood. Abstracts, for example, were designed so that researchers could quickly grasp the contents of an article instead of reading it in full. By repackaging large bodies of content into manageable, evaluated forms, information professionals help users overcome the time barrier the explosion creates.

Interdisciplinary information and the specialist trap 🔗

Knowledge rarely stays neatly within one subject anymore. A study on climate change might draw on biology, economics, public policy, and statistics all at once. This interdisciplinary spread is good for solving complex problems, but it creates a serious barrier to information use.

The difficulty is that each discipline develops its own vocabulary, theories, and frameworks. A specialist trained deeply in one field often finds it hard to access information from another. A biologist may struggle to interpret an economic analysis of environmental policy, while an economist may find a genetics paper unreadable. The information exists and may be highly relevant, but the lack of common ground prevents it from being used.

The cost of fragmentation 🔗

As knowledge branches into ever more specialised sub-fields, an organisational and institutional separation grows between those who generate information, those who document it, and those who need to apply it. This tension between branching specialisation and the need for integrated overviews means valuable insights get trapped within disciplinary silos. A finding that could transform another field never crosses the boundary because nobody on the other side knows it exists or can decode it.

Bridging the gap 🔗

The practical answer is to build bridges between specialists and generalists. Interdisciplinary teams that deliberately bring together experts from different domains can translate findings across boundaries. Information professionals contribute here too, by creating cross-disciplinary indexes, subject guides, and consolidated reviews that map how a topic connects across fields. The goal is to make information findable and intelligible to people outside the discipline that produced it.

Language and accessibility 🔗

Information is useless to someone who cannot read the language it is written in. This sounds obvious, yet it is one of the most underestimated barriers in the global flow of knowledge. Today, an estimated 95% of all scientific papers are published in English, even though English is the first language of only a small fraction of the world’s population.

This dominance creates problems in both directions. Researchers who do not speak English fluently face obstacles in accessing the bulk of published knowledge and in getting their own work published and cited. At the same time, valuable research produced in other languages gets overlooked. Studies have found that over a third of new scientific documents in some fields are published in languages other than English, meaning a significant body of knowledge remains invisible at the international level.

When language barriers cost lives 🔗

The consequences are not merely academic. There have been cases where critical findings went unnoticed by international bodies because they were published only in a local language. Reports of avian flu infections in pigs in China, for instance, initially escaped the attention of the WHO and the UN because they appeared in Chinese-language journals. When the language barrier blocks information, the result can be delayed responses to genuine threats.

For a multilingual country, this issue is especially relevant. A great deal of useful local knowledge, field reports, and regional research is produced in languages other than English. If it is never translated or indexed, it stays locked away from both national and international users who could benefit from it.

Multilingual solutions 🔗

Information professionals and publishers can reduce this barrier in several ways. Journals can accept translations of abstracts or full texts as supplementary files so that key findings reach a wider audience. Creating indexed databases of non-English research and encouraging authors to provide summaries in multiple languages also helps. The aim is to move toward a more multilingual ecosystem of knowledge rather than relying on a single dominant language.

Technical jargon and comprehension 🔗

Even when information is in a language someone reads, it can still be incomprehensible. Specialised fields rely on technical terminology, formulas, and assumed background knowledge that make sense to insiders but baffle everyone else. This turns otherwise useful documents into closed boxes for non-experts.

Consider a government health report packed with epidemiological terms, or an engineering specification dense with acronyms. The information may be exactly what a journalist, administrator, or ordinary citizen needs, but if they cannot parse the language, they cannot act on it. Jargon, while efficient for communication among specialists, becomes a wall for everyone outside the group.

The role of plain language 🔗

The most effective remedy is simplification. Creating plain-language summaries of complex material, where experts translate technical concepts into accessible terms, allows information to reach a far wider audience without losing its essence. Visual aids, worked examples, and clear definitions all help. The popular science genre demonstrates how rigorous findings can be communicated to general readers in an understandable way.

This is a central function of information repackaging. Taking a dense primary source and producing a clear, faithful version for a different audience is not “dumbing down” the content. It is removing an access barrier so that the people who need the information can actually use it.

Restricted access and quality control 🔗

The final set of barriers concerns who can reach information and whether they can trust it once they do. Not all information is freely available. A large share of academic papers, industry reports, and specialised databases sits behind paywalls or requires institutional subscriptions that individuals and smaller institutions cannot afford.

This is a well-recognised problem. Libraries have long held that financial barriers should not stand between users and the resources they need, and that even small charges or fines can deter people from accessing services. For students at under-resourced colleges, the inability to read a paywalled study is a direct barrier to learning and research.

A national-scale solution 🔗

One large-scale attempt to dismantle this barrier is the One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) scheme, operational since January 2025. Instead of thousands of institutions separately negotiating expensive subscriptions, the government centrally negotiates and funds a single national subscription. The scheme is designed to give nearly 1.8 crore students, faculty, and researchers across roughly 6,300 government higher-education and research institutions access to more than 13,000 journals from 30 major international publishers. Coordinated through INFLIBNET, it is a deliberate policy effort to remove paywalls as a barrier to information use.

It is worth noting, though, that such schemes have limits. Critics have pointed out that students and independent researchers not affiliated with covered institutions may still face significant paywalls, so access barriers are reduced but not entirely eliminated.

The quality and reliability problem 🔗

Access alone is not enough. The flip side of the information explosion is that a great deal of what circulates is unreliable, outdated, or simply wrong. With so much content available, especially online, users face the difficult task of judging what to trust. Poor information literacy makes this worse, and the inability to evaluate sources directly affects the quality and productivity of research.

Some information also suffers from restricted circulation in a different sense. Confidential reports, internal documents, and grey literature may never reach the people who could use them, not because of paywalls but because of limited distribution. Here, quality control and access control intersect: the information must be both reachable and verifiable to be genuinely useful.

This is why evaluation is a core part of information work. Repackaging is not just about reformatting content; it involves selecting reliable sources, filtering out the unreliable, and presenting evaluated information that users can act on with confidence. In an environment overflowing with content of uneven quality, the act of vetting and curating is itself a valuable service.

Bringing the barriers together 🔗

These five barriers rarely act in isolation. A single user might face all of them at once: too much information to sift through, content scattered across disciplines, written in a language or jargon they cannot follow, locked behind a paywall, and of uncertain reliability. Each barrier compounds the others.

The unifying response is the deliberate work of information consolidation, repackaging, and evaluation. By filtering volume, bridging disciplines, translating across languages and reading levels, expanding access, and applying quality control, information professionals turn an overwhelming and fragmented mass of content into something usable. The barriers are real and persistent, but they are not immovable. Each one points toward a specific solution, and addressing them is what transforms raw information into knowledge people can actually use.

What do you think? Which of these barriers do you find most limiting in your own studies or research, and how do you currently work around it? If you had to redesign one information service to remove a single barrier completely, which would you choose and why?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_explosion
2. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.00788
3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11019984/
4. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259645939_INFORMATION_EXPLOSION_AND_THE_CHALLENGES_OF_INFORMATION_AND_COMMUNICATION_TECHNOLOGY_UTILIZATION_IN_NIGERIAN_LIBRARIES_AND_INFORMATION_CENTRES
5. https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/1134
6. https://globaldev.blog/removing-language-barriers-better-science/
7. https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/languages-still-a-major-barrier-to-global-science-new-research-finds
8. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2268932/
9. https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpretations/economicbarriers
10. https://www.psa.gov.in/oneNationOneSubscription
11. https://news.careers360.com/cabinet-launches-one-nation-one-subscription-for-research-journals-access-over-13000-e-journals
12. https://www.deepeshdivakaran.com/post/one-nation-one-subscription-onos-india-s-research-revolution-or-just-another-expensive-patchwork
13. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=13427&context=libphilprac