E-LIBRARIANS AND E-COMMERCE: RECAPTURING THE INITIATIVE

Dr G E Gorman

Some who call themselves librarians like to maintain that information management, knowledge management and e-commerce are all spin-offs of the decades-old practice of librarianship. Indeed, to this observer it appears that information management is just another word for librarianship, and knowledge management just a trendy phrase for information management - or, as one of my students said recently, �an information manager is just a male librarian�. As for e-commerce, this is merely putting into practice the kind of intermediation skills that librarians have practised for the past thousand years or so, albeit in a possibly more sophisticated guise (a point that might be argued).

Some would say that it is fruitless to enter into debate on this issue, but we beg to differ for three reasons. First, it is time that information technologists/information managers gave due credit to their origins and stopped behaving as though they have just invented the wheel. Second, if the various manifestations of librarianship recognised their roots they might better understand what it is they are doing and begin, for instance, to bring logic and order to such areas as the Internet. Third, librarians need to understand what their cognate professions are saying so that they can contribute to the development of these emerging professions.

Let�s take the field with the most tenuous links with librarianship, e-commerce, and see if there are meaningful connections to be made. A recent paper by Janssen and Sol (2000) provides an ideal opportunity for an investigation. This paper discusses the role of intermediaries in e-commerce, which is precisely what librarians are, and always have been - information intermediaries. As electronic access to information increasingly becomes normative in developed countries, it is essential that librarians recapture their place as information intermediaries for obvious reasons, survival being one, and quality of service another. Using roles first proposed by Bailey and Bakos (1997), Janssen and Sol discuss two kinds of agents, organisational and intermediating, and it is the second type that is derived most directly from librarianship.

Intermediating agents exist in several manifestations, of which two are closest to the roles of information professionals working in libraries: information agents and content agents. The first of these is remarkably similar to what has traditionally been the role of a librarian. An information agent, according to Janssen and Sol�s interpretation, is an information aggregator that collects information; the agent requests, searches for and stores data in an (electronic) catalogue, and then uses the catalogue to search for and recommend information - note the emphasis on recommending, which is perhaps where information intermediaries in e-commerce surpass the traditionally neutral role of the librarian. We would argue that, given the volume of information available in electronic and traditional formats, it is essential for the librarian to �get over� the fixation with neutrality and exercise professional judgement in recommending the best or most suitable resources to clients. We have the professional skills to do this, and we have the experience, so let�s stop being so diffident, and remind our e-commerce colleagues that we can be as opinionated and aggressively customer focussed as they are.

The second category, a content agent, �processes information from various sources and tries to extract useful features and elements about its content�. (Janssen and Sol 2000) Does this sound suspiciously like the knowledge organisation skills of librarians, also known as classifying, indexing and abstracting? You think not? Then consider this description:

The techniques used in content-based filtering can vary greatly in complexity. A keyword agent uses one keyword or different combinations of keywords to match content. A more advanced form is extracting semantic information from a document�s contents using associative combinations of keywords. (Janssen and Sol 2000)

Well, if this is not a description of something akin to pre- and post-coordinate indexing, I�d be willing to eat a (very small) hat.

There are several other types of agents discussed by Janssen and Sol, but our comments on each would be similar to the above - been there, done that. Isn�t it time we stood up and were counted? Or do we want others, under the guise of the newness of all thing �e hyphen�, to continue to capture the limelight, and leave us to moulder in their wake? I suggest we start showing them journals such as The Electronic Library and Online Information Review, journals by and for librarians, but with considerable potential for followers of IM, KM and e-commerce.

References

Bailey, J.P. and Bakos, J.Y. (1997) �An Exploratory Study of the Emerging Role of Electronic Intermediaries�. International Journal of Electronic Commerce 1, 3: 7-20.

Janssen, M. and Sol, H.G. (2000) �Evaluating the Role of Intermediaries in the Electronic Value Chain�> Internet Research 10, 5: 406-417.

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