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Dire predictions regarding the end of online and the end of the traditional intermediary role of the information professional abound. The death of online as we knew it 25 years ago is a reality. The constant evolution of online has been one of its most exciting and stimulating aspects. Online is a technology constantly in motion. Information professionals pioneered personal computing, networking, cross-border communications, and just-in-time research. Will the innovative advances of the Internet knock librarians and information specialists out of the picture? Will the mantle of information specialist move to people without the information infrastructure background that we have?
I chose this apocalyptic theme on purpose — not to shock you, but to be fashionable. The number of book and journal article titles using the words ‘end’ or ‘death’ is staggering. Usually they’re used in a rhetorical, not literal, sense. Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history in a Fortune article in 1990 and followed it up with a best-selling book a year later. Frances Cairncross has a book out titled the Death of Distance. As recently as 26 October 1998, in an Infoworld article, Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com, wondered if the Internet was dead. The idea of the death of the Internet was also bruited about when AOL bought Netscape. I’ve noticed skepticism among librarians contributing to online discussion groups as to whether traditional hosts such as Dialog and LEXIS-NEXIS can survive when they’re competing with free and low-cost Internet search services. The (non-rhetorical) demise of Newsnet did nothing to calm information professionals.
The end of life as we know it and the death of our favorite technologies — what a cheery subject to open a conference with.
I do not intend to go into details concerning Fukuyama’s or Carincross’s books. Frankly, I found the titles so evocative that I prefer to focus on what those titles might mean in the information environment.
What first comes to mind is the lack of historical perspective on the part of the younger generation busily creating Web sites. I actually had a 24-year-old (he volunteered his age) tell me that no-one other than he and his business partner had ever put corporate financial information online. I think we know better.
I am also distressed at the number of search-engine developers who have never studied the basic research conducted at a number of graduate schools of librarianship in universities all over the world. Thankfully, this is changing. Some of the newer search engines are not only firmly rooted in quality research but also revolutionary in their methodologies.
The end of history may not be a totally negative thing. How many times have you heard someone espouse a wonderful new idea only to be told, ‘We tried something like that once and it didn’t work. So we’re not going to try it now.’ That’s a type of remembering history that is not conducive to moving forward.
I firmly believe that the Internet has killed distance. Well, not totally. I’m standing here in front of you having travelled a very long distance — and I have the jet lag to prove it — rather than presenting this keynote address via streaming video to each of you as you sit at your desks in your individual libraries and information centres. I think I prefer to retain this type of distance. It’s much more enjoyable to be here in Australia with all of you than simply recording this talk and not being able to experience the sights and sounds of Sydney.
Still, the rise of discussion groups has gone a long way towards making distance irrelevant. When an information specialist in Canada can ask a question about business practices in South America or Europe and have it answered, within half an hour, by a colleague in Australia, you know distance doesn’t matter. It’s not totally the Internet. By my reckoning, online technology is a bit over 25 years old. Online gave us a common vocabulary. We shared the same command languages, experienced the same frustrations with certain databases, and welcomed new features. We still do, but we do it closer to real time than we could have dreamed of 25 years ago.
Now here’s an interesting concept. Considering that there are a significant number of people in the world who have never made a telephone call and countries where the electricity supply is problematic, it’s incredibly cheeky to declare the Internet dead. Metcalfe noted that telephone company executives want to replace the Internet we know with the telephony network they know. Metcalfe did admit that a totally free Internet was likely to become less common, replaced by the pay-as-you-go model. The comment about the death of the Internet as it applies to the AOL–Netscape merger refers to the end of a democratic Internet, where anyone with a computer could become a publisher. The new fear is that all sites on the Internet will be branded, that AOL will ‘own’ the Internet.
Let’s look at the end of online. Traditional hosts are struggling. Most are adopting a Web strategy. Some, such as Dow Jones, are opting for a Web-only product line. No more dial-up, no telnetting. Others, such as Dialog, are providing customers with many access choices. The key point here, I think, is that the distinctions between the Internet and the traditional hosts no longer have much meaning. Convergence is a fact of life.
We are now beginning the third generation of online. The first was the Batch era. Perhaps you remember entering a query (maybe you even remember IBM punch cards) and waiting a day — or more — to receive results. To some extent, batch searching is still with us. Now we call it ‘offline prints’.
The second generation of online was the Interactive era. Roger Summit did name it Dialog for a reason, you know. It’s really the Interactive generation upon which we base our notions of ‘online’. At the beginning of the Interactive era, for example, Online Inc. was formed and ONLINE and DATABASE magazines began publishing. Instead of sending off our queries blindly, we could communicate with our data. Do a search, get an immediate answer, refine the search based on that answer, then repeat the process until an acceptable answer was obtained. You were encouraged to think online, to form a relationship with the search service, and to communicate with the data. In spite of added bells and whistles, that basic notion still informs the searching habits of most information professionals — just as it lies at the heart of traditional online hosts. Even some of the newer search services, such as Northern Light as a generalist or Internet Securities as a specialist, use this person–machine communication model for interactive searching. Online searching during its second generation was an exercise in question-answering by a one-on-one communication between human being and machine-readable data.
I think the third generation of online will be called the Dynamic era. Characterised by a multiplicity of sources, various channels of communication, mutability both of information and of access to that information, and constantly changing definitions of even the most basic building blocks of information. What’s a journal? What’s a newspaper? When an electronic version differs from its printed counterpart, which is the ‘right’ one? Which article is from the journal or newspaper of record? This raises a related question. When is a journal? If the electronic edition is available before the printed one, at what date was the journal published? What’s a document? XML coding can change something information professionals wouldn’t consider as a document into a document. What’s an answer? Data mining, and its close cousin text mining, analyses data and suggests relationships. In the Dynamic generation of online, answers are not of the straightforward ‘two plus two equals four’ variety. Rather, they are suggestive. Boolean searching gives exact answers — to the question posed — but fuzzy logic has its place as the search engine of the Dynamic generation. Researchers find things on the periphery of an answer as useful as a definitive answer.
I am not talking merely about rhetoric here. I confess that Push technology seemed to me Selective Dissemination of Information (a.k.a. Current Awareness Services, a.k.a. Alerting Services) dressed up in a tuxedo. Online hosts became search engines became portals — and who knows what the term will be next year. Is LEXIS–NEXIS a portal? Or is it Netscape’s NetCenter?
With the Internet, obviously, comes mutability. The Web site you found yesterday isn’t there today. Or, it is there, but it doesn’t look anything like the one you saw yesterday. Many information professionals decry this Web tendency. Others find opportunity. The ability to track changes in Web pages can be of strategic value. Look, for example, at NetMind (http://www.netmind. com) or products from Ingenious (http://www.ingetech.com).
Visualising information is another key characteristic of the Dynamic generation of online. I find this a very exciting development. Putting information not just into graphical or chart form, but also into maps is very far removed from ASCII text. Companies such as Semio (http://www.semio.com) and Cartia (http://www.cartia.com) have some interesting approaches to mapping both results of online searches and the Internet in general.
The Dynamic era is also characterised by relevance ranking. Sometimes you need information in chronological, or reverse chronological, order, but a dynamic view of the information universe suggests that relevancy ranking is more appropriate.
I think we actually entered the Dynamic generation of online three to four years ago. Most of our vendors haven’t realised that. Unfortunately, that means they’re not equipped to embrace what I foresee as the Fourth Generation of Online: the Intuitive. This will be marked by software that learns from our searching behaviour, by blended technologies, by collaborative techniques, and by knowledge creation.
Today there are technological inklings of this new generation of online. Agent software and preference engines are just beginning to figure out how people think. Natural language search engines model how people conceive of the information they request. Today, these technologies need electronic commerce to give them validity. Going forward, research will be a driving force. Virtual communities will become increasingly more important as information sharing vehicles. Search Bots will bring information to us before we know we need it. It will be recognised that knowledge creation occurs when published data is combined with visual representations and unpublished information lurking in the brains of other people.
Wouldn’t you love a search engine that understood why a question was being asked, not just how it was being asked? A search service that could interpret the nuances of the research at hand? One that mind-melded to you? One that knew the difference between Shell Oil and a shell on the beach? Without you telling it so? That is the essence of Intuitive online.
Is it really the end of the world as we know it? Yes and no. We, as an information community, planned for this end of the world. I think that information professionals have always been ahead of the curve. Other professions are just discovering things that we take for granted: networking, virtual communities, collaborative filtering, and information sharing. We know that there is a relationship between data and knowledge. We understand the nuances of quality information, of data structure, and of human thought patterns as they relate to the research process.
The virtues of the culture of information professionals have become mainstream. Things I took for granted 25 years ago are now part of commonly accepted wisdom. Ordinary people talk about going online, about finding information, about data quality. Sometimes this is frightening for information professionals. Information is ubiquitous but no one is in charge. The first two generations of online stressed control. The military precision with which we could deploy command languages belongs to those earlier eras. The Dynamic generation of online recognises that answers are not necessarily the result of a carefully thought-out search strategy. Sometimes they come, spontaneously and synchronistically, from peripheral materials, from visualisation, or from inferences. The Intuitive generation will stress solutions rather than answers, value people connections more than published articles, and emphasise knowledge creation over information retrieval.
I think many of us already understand this. We’re just waiting for the technology to catch up. Mentally, we’re living in the future. We won’t be surprised when, 25 years from now, online will again be seen as ending. Online is always ending. Online as we know it is dead. Online as we know it is also just being created. It’s the end of the world as we know it. And I feel fine.