Still working on Information Governance and did a search earlier on ‘Caldicott’. Of course this returns a lot of stuff, much of it from the same source, regurgitated in slightly different flavours and brands. A lot of the repetition is pretty pointless and simply duplicates the same content over and over again but with the logo and colour scheme of particular organisations.

This is confusing and slightly (?!) frustrating for the end user. I can’t find a top level resource for Caldicott (there is something on NHS Information Governance but it is password protected - why I’m not sure). What I do get is endless lists of websites repackaging the same content.

Trying some lateral thinking, I thought I would try using different search strategies, one of them being ‘news’. Then I tried ‘Caldicott’ in the Gruaniad website and got this excellent article . But I could easily have missed it altogether.

At one point I started to get a bit sceptical of rigid classification of information - just type a word in Google and it will present enough useful material of a certain standard. I’m moving rapidly away from that position again. Increasingly Google is not meeting my information needs. There is too much the same, too much rubbish (try looking for cheap accomodation in Northern France and see what a lot of gunge comes up), and not enough useful relationships between information resources being identified.

Google have famously declined to work with metadata (apart from some use of the description element); it’s going to be interesting to see how much longer that can continue.