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AUKML meeting |
Professionals and Neophytes
Ian.watson@glasgow.newsquest.co.uk
Librarians, End Users and online information
Ian Watson, Head of Rights and Information, Newsquest (Herald & Times)
Nov 2004
Outline
This paper is based on a talk given at a meeting of AUKML on 24 November 2004. The purpose was to stimulate discussion on the role of the informational professional in managing and developing end-use access to information.
It does not purport to present a thorough review of all information on offer nor of the relative merits of competing services. Rather the intention is to draw attention to come factors to be taken into consideration when choosing services for end user consumption.
If you would like to comment or share your experience in this area, please send responses, opinions etc. to the AUKML mailing list: aukml@ brighton.ac.uk
To join the list, send the following message to majordomo@brighton.ac.uk History In the 1970s online information hosts such as Dialog and Data Star began the creation of a quite separate electronic information world, this one inhabited mostly by librarians and information specialists who acted as intermediaries.
The arrival of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s forced these two worlds into collision, thrusting online information into the mainstream of popular culture and changing for ever the nature of the information business.
The Web has given end users simple and cheap access to a wealth of information undreamed of a few years ago. Information professionals see this new ease of access as, on the one hand, a great boon to service delivery while, on the other, a possible threat to their existence. If information is easy to find who needs a specialist? Will the neophyte replace the professional? Will be you be disintermediated?
This evening we will be discussing how to roll out online services to end users and the implications for librarians and information professionals.
Leave it to the Knowbots 'the controller of information, the person who understands its labyrinthine trails, its iterations through the media, its evolution into "objective" facts in an archive which can inform the next journalist who needs help, the next consumer who will pay for "knowledge", is to be valued'.
The eulogy climaxed with 'these information people bring value beyond measure, or any intelligent agent, to an organisation. They bring non-artificial intelligence'.
Comparative Advantage DIY stores abound, but that does not mean that we can all be instant plumbers. DIY might be fine for simple everyday jobs, but if your project is complex, say re-wiring the house, then you might benefit from a little specialist help.
Vicki Raeburn [2] offers support for this view: 'For the average corporation or professional organization, it is far more cost effective to have trained research professionals locating materials than turning neophytes loose to track down the information.'
This state of affairs might not last because children will be taught how to retrieve and evaluate information and as they join the workforce they will be able to do the job that information professionals are currently relied upon to do.
Faced with a user group keen to use information the librarians might have to do some hard running to stay ahead.
They need to work in partnership so that the end-user can concentrate with the job in which they have the comparative advantage - getting and writing the story. Working in partnership they will not only undertake research but will also provide training and support in the use online sources.
More importantly they will be managing information flows and resources to ensure that information is available when needed and within budget.
Figuring out the Price In the 1990s the late FT Profile employed a charging method based on connect time plus a charge per line of information downloaded. This was a budgetary disaster in the hands of a neophyte.
Reuters Business Briefing arrived in the mid 1990s offering all-you-can-eat within 20 hours of connect time per month: more budget-friendly but users were liable to starve during the last days of the month. More hours could be purchased, at twice the rate, unless you were willing permanently to commit to a higher level of consumption.
Dialog launched Newsroom (then Newsline) in the late 1990s as truly an all-you-can-eat service. A new version launched in March 2004 was favourably reviewed by FreePint VIP but its design has been criticised in some quarters. The SmartTerms indexing can also be rather eccentric or sometimes completely missing.
The professional may find that Dialog does not allow the kind deep searching they require. With Factiva and Lexis-Nexis, Boolean commands are not far from the surface.
Factiva has countered Newsroom with iWorks which is competitively priced but is hampered, possibly fatally, by a back file of only 3 months.
Factiva.com and Lexis-Nexis retain a pricing models based on regular reviews of usage levels (document downloads). When there are more and more versions of the same item in news archive it is sometimes necessary to look at many documents to find the 'right' one.
Moreover claims to able to replace Lexis Nexis and Factiva but in fact is a current news monitoring service.
Since we rolled out end user access to Newsroom about two years ago the library deals with fewer routine searches and tends to work on more extended research. The librarians have taken responsibility for user education and training. The information department manages the contractual relationship with Dialog.
Web browser problems Although the internet is built on open standards the last few years have seen the arrival of online services that restrict the user's choice of browser.
For example Dialog Newsroom requires IE 5.5 as minimum. Because Microsoft stopped developing IE for Macintosh at 5.2, Macintosh users are required to use Netscape 7, which requires a minimum of MAC OS10. But many Mac users are still on OS9 as the upgrade to OS10 is big jump. Further, if we upgraded to OS10, other applications would cease to work, including the newspaper publishing system!
Factiva.com does not support Netscape.
In many corporate environments the user does not have a choice of browser and IT departments may be reluctant to support more than one.
End User Management None of these cause insurmountable problems but you do need to put systems and policies in place to ensure compliance with the contract.
Final thoughts There are, however, many products and librarians should be well placed to evaluate, manage as well as educating users. Add to that a role in service delivery through intranets and librarians ought to be at the centre of an organisation's information strategy.
It is necessary, however, to balance the budgetary and technical considerations against the quality of information and the interface through which it is delivered.
A key role suggested by information architect Nicholas Carroll [6] is in interface design: working with information architects to create intranets, or in-house information systems.
Let the users go where they will and shape information into knowledge in their own way. As in the physical world, electronic information comes down to two choices: open stacks or closed stacks.
References Links
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Until the early 1990s the internet was a world inhabited by scientists who had access to expensive mainframe computers
In 1997 new media consultant Robin Hunt told the annual conference of AUKML that search tools such as Ask Jeeves would make the librarian redundant. He got a bit of a mauling and year later [1] he revisited the question of why information managers, librarians and researchers did not just pack up and watch as robots and intelligent agents replaced them. This time he concluded that human information managers, far from disappearing, had become more important than ever and were well placed to take centre stage in the post-revolution publishing process:
Economists talk about the principle of comparative advantage: if the best lawyer in a company is also the best typist, it is more efficient if lawyer specialises in the activity in which s/he is comparatively the best, i.e. the practice of law.
A pricing model that suits the needs of the user while ensuring an acceptable revenue stream to the supplier is rather elusive.
In the mid nineties the Web browser looked like delivering the holy grail of a genuinely user-friendly and platform independent interface, something the traditional online hosts long sought, with little success.
Consideration needs to be given to managing and authenticating users:
Information of all kinds is available at the click of mouse. But doctors and lawyers are not going out of business as a result of sophisticated medical and legal information sources on the web.
[1] Hunt Robin. News information and value, Aslib Proceedings, Vol 50, No 8, 1998 pp215-220.
[2] Raeburn Vicki. Six trend that will shape the financial information industry, Business Information Review, March 2000, vol 17, No 1, p vii p25
[3] Nicholas D., Williams P., Martin H., and Cole P. (2000) The impact of the Internet on information seeking in the Media Aslib Proceedings 52(3), 98-114
[4] City University. UK Media in Cyberspace Survey 2000. www.net-media.co.uk/survey
[5] Review: Dialog Newsroom. Freepint VIP Issue 11 October 2004: www.vivavip.com/vip
[6] Carroll, Nicholas. The future of end users and info pros. IN Searcher, June 2003.
Also Watson, Ian. Professionals and Neophytes. Contrasting approaches to the Web. IN Business Information Review, Vo 17 (3). September 2000
www.factiva.com
www.lexis-nexis.com
www.dialog.com
www.moreover.com
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