The Evolution of Information Consolidation: From Data Overload to Usable Knowledge

Every student, researcher, and policymaker today faces a familiar problem: there is too much information and too little time to make sense of it. Reports, journals, databases, and websites pile up faster than anyone can read them. This is not a new problem. Decades ago, information scientists recognised that simply giving people access to documents was not enough. People needed information that was selected, evaluated, and packaged for actual use. This realisation gave birth to a powerful idea in Library and Information Science called information consolidation. Understanding how this concept evolved helps explain why modern information services look the way they do.

Early challenges in information utilization 🔗

The core problem that information consolidation set out to solve was the gap between availability and use. A subject might have a surplus of literature, yet the vast majority of people who could benefit from that literature were unable to use it. The value of information, scholars argued, does not lie in its mere existence or even in the systems that make it accessible. Value comes from acceptance and actual use.

This challenge was felt most sharply in developing countries. Information consolidation was defined as the process of evaluating and compressing relevant documents so that defined user groups in developing countries could receive reliable, concise information in a usable form. The concept grew alongside two related ideas of the time: appropriate technology and technology transfer. The thinking was simple. If countries were importing technology, they also needed information adapted to local needs, capacities, and conditions.

Why raw documents were not enough 🔗

Consider how decision-making actually works. A pile of documents on a manager’s desk has little value to the decision they need to make, even if every fact they need is buried somewhere inside. Summaries add a little value. Merging excerpts from several documents adds more. Evaluating and synthesising the information increases value sharply. The most useful product of all is a clear set of options summarised from many sources, along with recommendations.

This insight reframed the role of information professionals. Traditional libraries and retrieval systems handled the bibliographic control of large volumes of documents. But they typically did not perform critical evaluation, so the information they delivered was often non-evaluated. A new kind of service was needed, one that emphasised the evaluation of content, condensing it, and repackaging it into a usable format for a specific target user at the right time.

The role of UNESCO and UNISIST 🔗

The concept of information consolidation did not emerge in isolation. It was shaped and promoted by global organisations, with UNESCO playing the leading role. UNESCO and other international bodies advanced the idea by providing guidelines and supporting pilot projects across the developing world.

The foundation was laid by UNISIST. Realising the need for a greater worldwide flow of scientific information, UNESCO and the International Council of Scientific Unions jointly formed a committee in January 1967 to study the feasibility of a world science information system. The committee’s report was published in 1970 and discussed at an intergovernmental conference in Paris in October 1971. At the 17th session of UNESCO’s General Conference in Paris in 1972, a long-term intergovernmental programme named UNISIST (United Nations International Scientific Information System) was launched to facilitate the transfer of scientific and technical information for the social and economic development of nations.

From a model of communication to a programme for development 🔗

UNISIST was proposed as a model of the social system of communication, made up of knowledge producers, intermediaries, and users. It classified information services and products into primary, secondary, and tertiary categories, giving the field a shared vocabulary. Importantly, UNISIST was a conceptual framework rather than an operating system. It envisaged an international network of information services and set out broad goals: improving the tools of system interconnection, strengthening the institutions in the information transfer chain, developing trained manpower for information work, encouraging national information policies, and assisting member countries to build their own capacity in information handling.

The launch of UNISIST, along with the formation of UNESCO’s General Information Programme (PGI), marked a new phase in the organisation’s work in libraries, documentation, and information. It was within this framework that the more focused idea of consolidating information for specific users took shape.

Key meetings that defined information consolidation 🔗

Ideas in this field were refined through a series of expert meetings and symposia. These gatherings moved the concept from a broad aspiration to a working definition with agreed terms.

The Colombo symposium and a working definition 🔗

A defining moment came at the UNESCO Symposium on Information Analysis and Consolidation, held in Colombo, Sri Lanka, from 12 to 15 September 1978. This meeting produced a clear definition of information consolidation activities as the responsibilities exercised by individuals, departments, or organisations for evaluating and compressing relevant documents in order to provide defined user groups with a reliable and concise new body of knowledge. Crucially, the Colombo symposium also gave the field a structural unit: individuals or groups performing these activities would each constitute an Information Consolidation Unit.

Building on the framework in Paris 🔗

The conceptual base for these meetings traced back to the Paris conferences that launched and shaped UNISIST. The intergovernmental conference of 1971 and the General Conference of 1972, both in Paris, established the principles that later meetings applied to the specific challenge of consolidation. UNESCO continued to refine the programme at subsequent sessions, expanding its scope from the pure and applied sciences to wider fields. The work done in Paris set the agenda; the regional meetings in Asia turned that agenda into practice.

These discussions fed directly into UNESCO’s published guidance. The key handbooks of the period, including the work by Saracevic and Wood on the consolidation of information and Saracevic’s later course on information consolidation, were produced under the General Information Programme and UNISIST and published by UNESCO. This connected the conceptual meetings to practical training material that information professionals could actually use.

The role of information consolidation units 🔗

The Information Consolidation Unit, or ICU, became the operational heart of the concept. Rather than treating consolidation as a vague goal, the field defined a specific actor responsible for carrying it out. An ICU could be a single specialist, a department, or an entire organisation dedicated to refining and organising information for a defined clientele.

One of the most cited definitions came from Saracevic and Wood in 1981. They described consolidated information as public knowledge specifically selected, analysed, evaluated, and possibly restructured and repackaged to serve the immediate decisions, problems, and information needs of a defined group who would otherwise struggle to access and use that knowledge in its original form. The criteria for selecting and repackaging this knowledge are drawn from the needs of the potential clientele themselves. In short, the goal is the right information, for the right person, in the right form, at the right time.

What an ICU actually does 🔗

The work of an ICU follows a structured chain of activities rather than a single step. The major stages are:

Selection: Choosing the most relevant and reliable sources based on a clear selection policy that states who the users are, what subject is covered, and what materials are eligible. Selection always involves evaluation, so it relies on tools like reviews, peer assessment, and citation analysis.

Analysis: Isolating the most important information in a source and separating it into its constituent parts using predetermined evaluative criteria. This is the work of information analysis centres, which deal with extracting, sifting, and filtering the quality of information in the literature.

Synthesis: Condensing and combining analysed information from several sources into a new structure that carries an interpretive or evaluative point of view, resolving conflicts between sources along the way.

Restructuring: Reshaping the synthesised content into a form users can absorb easily, deciding on the depth, level of technical detail, sequence, and language most compatible with the user’s situation.

Repackaging: Arranging the physical medium and form in which the information is presented so that it is tailored to a specific clientele. The aim is to improve acceptance, use, assimilation, and recall.

Dissemination and marketing: Delivering the product through suitable channels and viewing the whole service from the user’s point of view, beginning with their needs rather than the product.

The products of this process are varied. They include critical reviews and state-of-the-art reports, assessment and market reports, alerting bulletins and newsletters, data compilations and statistical abstracts, technical manuals, handbooks, and on-demand briefings prepared for decision-makers.

Early success stories and pilot projects 🔗

The concept of information consolidation moved from theory into practice through pilot projects supported by UNESCO and through national institutions that adopted these methods. The benefits became visible in fields where good decisions depend on reliable, digestible information, such as public health, agriculture, and industrial development.

UNESCO’s contribution through guidelines and pilots 🔗

UNESCO’s main contribution was twofold. First, it produced the guidelines and handbooks that standardised the methodology, ensuring that an ICU in one country could follow the same logic as one elsewhere. Second, it supported pilot projects that tested whether consolidated information products actually improved outcomes for their intended users. This combination of guidance and field testing was essential, because consolidation demands a real commitment of resources, and organisations needed evidence that the investment paid off.

The role of Indian institutions and TERI 🔗

In the Indian context, information analysis and consolidation work has been carried out by several national-level centres and research and development establishments, particularly in science and technology. A notable example is The Energy and Resources Institute, whose Library and Information Centre was established in 1974 as a Documentation and Information Centre. It has grown into a pioneering research library in South Asia focused on energy, environment, and sustainable development.

TERI’s library work illustrates consolidation in action. Its professionals do not simply store documents. They collect, collate, and disseminate knowledge products and services, develop web content, contribute to publications, and set up specialised information centres on focused themes such as transport, renewable energy, and climate change. The institute even runs a specialised library devoted entirely to climate change. This is consolidation by another name: taking a vast and scattered body of literature and shaping it into focused, usable resources for researchers and policymakers.

Other Indian bodies reflect the same approach. The National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources, formed in 2002 from the merger of two premier CSIR institutes, gathers, organises, and disseminates science and technology information. Its abstracting journals, such as Medicinal and Aromatic Plants Abstracts, scan hundreds of primary journals and many languages to produce concise, subject-grouped abstracts for researchers, entrepreneurs, and policy planners. The Indian Council of Agricultural Research uses Agricultural Technology Information Centres and a wide network of Krishi Vigyan Kendras to repackage research into handbooks, digests, and films for farmers and extension workers.

These examples show that information consolidation is not a universal cure for every information need. It is one important approach among many. But it has proven its value in information transfer, especially for highly specialised users like scientists and managers, as well as for the general public who may rely on non-print channels to receive information they can actually use.

What do you think? If the core problem of information consolidation was the gap between availability and use, do you believe today’s search engines and AI tools have closed that gap, or simply created a new version of the same overload? And in a country with India’s diversity of languages and literacy levels, how should an Information Consolidation Unit decide what counts as the right form for the right user?

References

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0306457386900099
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/international-information-systems
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNISIST_model
4. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/lisp12/chapter/information-analysis-repackaging-and-consolidation/
5. https://www.teriin.org/library/index.htm
6. https://teriin.org/index.php/research-paper/energy-environment-and-sustainable-development-knowledge-center-teri-lic-case-study