Text mining and information professionals: Role, issues and challenges

Information explosion and availability of information in various forms has changed the shape of information centres and nature of information profession and professionals. Information profession and professionals have been impacted by the exponentially increasing volumes of information available - as well as with changing attitudes and behaviour of information seeker toward electronic resources. It is very difficult to find the required pieces of information in the bundled of scattered information. The task becomes more challenging, when we find that over 90% of the information available is in unstructured and semi-structured forms, which is very difficult to search. Here text mining has come as a tool to help Information professionals to find the relevant information and deliver to its users. Text mining is used as a technology for analyzing large volumes of structured/unstructured textual documents. Text mining has very high knowledge and commercial values. The aim of Text mining is generally to strengthen decision making and internal operations processes of any organisation and generation of new domain of knowledge. These technologies help to increase the utilization of Knowledge Management (KM) systems and pro-actively help information professionals to improve their competencies and thus productivity of the organization. This article discusses the basic concept of text mining, its framework and text mining products and tools. It also discusses the benefits and challenges of text mining and examines the role of Information Professionals in Text Mining.