I have been thinking a lot about the Standing Reserve. This is a concept Martin Heidegger wrote about in relation to the Greek notion of aletheia, or a disclosure, according to Heidegger. Disclosure is an unconcealing of the World. In relationship to information, what is disclosed is data, or “things given.” I had been writing about Heidegger in relationship to my LIS 889 class in order to define “knowledge.” In a nutshell, data is what is disclosed, information is the conditions under which it is disclosed and knowledge is the version of truth that arises from particular knowledge structured a particular way.

Applying Heidegger to information science got me thinking about the Standing Reserve. As Heidegger explains it:

Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be called upon for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing reserve.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 1927

This got me to thinking about the way we talked about the transporting of data across the Internet. The information on the Internet IS the standing reserve for information. The technology of the Internet creates more information than can possibly be accessed. It is then up to the reason of the librarian to do the work of revealing that allows information to be accessed in a way that brings forth knowledge.