1. Introduction

One of the visions almost excessively quoted in current discussions of what the information infrastructure of the WWW may ultimately turn out to be is Vannevar Bush‘s article “As we may think“ written in 1945, and thus quite some time before the advent of computers as we know them today. In fact, Bush‘s vision concerns the organization of information much more than the technical means and instruments used for that goal. Bush has often been quoted, because some of the technical ideas developed in that context seem to be excellent guesses at what later architectures for information automation turned out to be - and this especially concerns the famous Memex metaphor, prefiguring to some extent some of the basic technical principles underlying the information architecture of the WWW. Still, the article actually is mainly concerned with the organization of information, with modes of accumulation, aggregation and selection of information.

And the striking fact, in that respect, is Bush‘s primary concern, which is information selection (rather than accumulation) - long before the advent of the tremendous amount of trash and pearls we continuously are confronted with when using the information space of the World Wide Web. After discussing the rapidly increasing means for content production and accumulation Bush states

The prime action of use is selection, and here we are halting indeed. There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene.

- to continue, however, in a later section stating

The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a lag in the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of development of devices for their use. Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing.[ 1 ]

This last statement on the crucial role of information organization in the context of efficient selection of organization leads Bush to the famous Memex metaphor and thus to the vision of a new, networked information paradigm, in which information is organized not so much in taxonomic tree structures but in networked threads of associations.

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