Data organization is an area of research and development, which has, oddly enough given that this is the Information Age, stagnated almost entirely in the library field. With the massive addition of virtual collections and the steady expansion of print and multimedia publications, the desperate need to develop more efficient indices handling the organization of ever-larger amounts of data is mandatory for continued progress in any meaningful way of collection development. This field has been dominated by non-library organizations, such as governments and corporations, leaving libraries woefully behind. Eventually, massively joint collections developed in a mostly virtual environment, accessed mainly through networked portals such as through the Internet, must come to grips with a truly universal index that spans both the physical and virtual material. The days of LOC are gone—it is a labor intensive system totally unprepared to harness today's and tomorrow's information technology. The new indices must be primarily automated and user friendly, harnessing all levels of traditional inventory control—balancing each level’s weaknesses with their inherent strengths. We have the levels, we just need to re-formulate them into a stronger matrix, scalable to current and future information technologies. Outlined here is one such indexing technology: the KATIE Universal Indexing System. Surveyed in this chapter is a review of this driving technology and its applications, covering the NITA Methodology Stage-I, Stage-II, and Stage-III in its developmental process.
Sensors and “Smart” Molecular Nanostructures: Components for Future Information Technologies