Information and knowledge transfer through archival journals and on-line communities

Computers, networks, and on-line information have obviously affected many aspects of our lives. In addition, the exponential increases in computer performance make it nearly impossible to predict the future. The convergence of archival journals and on-line communities, however, has already begun to occur and will dramatically change how scientific and engineering information is disseminated. The merging of on-line communities and archival journals will be especially interesting in high-technology disciplines such as aerospace engineering. Marshall McLuhan said "the medium is the message," and this will be even more profound in the future. We will see the same technology that we discuss in our technical papers being used to deliver the information. These changes will also have important effects on the traditional professional societies and publishing organizations. The rapid advancement of technology requires greater specialization but also requires greater collaboration. As the half-life of knowledge keeps getting shorter and shorter, we will need more and more on-line communities. It is very difficult to make sense of the knowledge in traditional technical papers, as they are an attempt to take someones highly complex tacit knowledge and make it explicit knowledge. This tacit knowledge, made explicit, is thus an information source in an archival journal. This information source must be consumed by others, made sense of, and turned into their own personal tacit knowledge. The majority of tacit knowledge is usually transferred and made sense of, through human social interactions. An on-line community coupled to an archival journal can be used to make sense of this explicit knowledge by creating venues for social interaction amongst those that are passionate about a topic.