59 Squeezing the Info-Broker - Searching as Industry (Information Research)
Description
This article is from the Information Research FAQ, by David Novak david@spireproject.com with numerous contributions by others.
59 Squeezing the Info-Broker - Searching as Industry (Information Research)
I was reading an interesting article by Anthea Statigos in ONLINE [1]
that stirred me to thinking about the future of Information Brokerage.
The article in question outlined the shift of information brokers into
the marketing department, towards new roles in negotiating information
access licenses, helping people understand and select appropriate
resources - and oddly, in overseeing the intranet development process
so as to deliver the information people need.
The article premise is rather accurate - as far as it goes. But I
wonder if the true message behind this shift is the decline and death
of information brokering as a profession? If information brokers (also
known as information professionals) are moving to new roles, are they
vacating the old roles, the traditional roles in the research process?
In my library, I reach for the Information Broker's Handbook [2] for a
relevant quote:
"The heart and soul of the information broker's job is information
retrieval. But many individuals offer information organization services
as well."
So, Information Retrieval, and Information Organization. Anyone who has
seen the simple information retrieval options incorporated in recent
information packages can be in no mind that the information retailing
industry is certainly minimizing the need to reach for an intermediary.
Technology is certainly closing the gap - but this development has
always been in the cards.
A central difficulty for information brokers is a simple maxim: provide
better results than clients doing the search themselves. Often working
in unfamiliar territory, a researcher may find it very difficult to
excel. There are two dilemmas here. Firstly, while we may pride
ourselves in accomplishing unique requests, we have expensive costs
associated with one-off searches. There is little likelihood someone
else will ask a similar question. There are simply no possible
economies of scale.
Secondly, our search difficulty is not shared by the client. The client
has difficulty with the technology - certainly. The client does not
have difficulty with recognizing the wheat from the chaff, the gold
embedded in the articles and at a basic level, the search words you
will need to get to the right stuff.
There is a very good reason why university students are pushed to learn
basic and sophisticated search technologies.
There is another take on this story.
Creating Value in the Network Economy [3] includes a chapter by Philip
Evans and Thomas Wurster.
"emerging open standards and the explosion in the number of people and
organizations connected by networks are freeing information from the
channels that have been required to exchange it, making those channels
unnecessary or uneconomical."
"Newspapers and banking are not special cases. The value chains of
scores of other industries will become ripe for unbundling. The logic
is most compelling - and therefore likely to strike soonest - in
information businesses ... All it will take to deconstruct a business
is a competitor that focuses on the vulnerable sliver of information in
its value chain."
And in the back of my mind comes the thoughts that maybe the
information retrieval function we have been providing is just one such
information business. This business, attempting to be the pinnacle of
the research process, is ripe for unbundling. Not only can our function
be incorporated directly into the advertising and technology of the
information resources we use, but our skill can also be coded into
simpler and simpler guides and resources like my work on the Spire
Project.
Perhaps as an industry we never managed to secure our captive market.
Initially, this will affect that mainstay of information brokerage:
commercial database retrieval. And like the newspapers that will begin
lose the profit center of classified advertising (ripe for unbundling
and delivered electronically,) additional pressure will be applied to
the business of providing information research services.
Eventually, we retreat to other areas as information professionals:
Information Organization, Research Education and Training.
Somewhere in amidst this story lies a new role for researchers. The
need for research certainly exists and is forecast to grow dramatically
as the information age develops. What is lost, sadly, is an
understanding of the ease at which this work will be done. This is
certainly destined to move away from being an industry for
professionals working at $50/hr to $150/hr + costs! Others can provide
this work, easier than now. People we will most likely call researchers
- and not information brokers.
This is more than a push towards specialization. There is another way
to see this transformation. The information broker was a retail point
for wholesalers who are now firmly selling directly to the consumer.
There is much less of a need for an intermediary between database
retailers and information consumers - and there is a firm trend in this
direction.
Information brokers defined their role in the information industry as
masters of the difficult technology of research, capable of finding
most anything. Come to us when you are lost and we will find the
answers - for a price. We know the technology, the meta-resources, the
tricks used to find information. We routinely retrieve a higher quality
of information, far faster, than you can yourself. The standard model:
a library run service offering primarily database search & retrieval
for their patrons.
This business model is coming to an end.
Yes, perhaps the information broker is dead. Soon to be replaced with
low-wage researchers and research assistants, and high-end information
executives and research trainers. Like it or not, most of us will
incorporate a little more research into our current work, and reach for
a little more intelligible research resources. Everything else will be
accomplished by true specialists.
[1] Online (a periodical with some coverage of library & information
research. July/August 1999 p71-73, by Anthea Statigos of Outsell Inc.
[2] The Information Brokers Handbook p.21, by Sue Rugge and Alfred
Glossbrenner. Windcrest/McGraw-Hill. 1992.
[3]Creating Value in the Network Economy, Edited by Don Tapscott.
Chapter 2: Strategy and the New Economics of Information by Philip
Evans & Thomas Wurster. p.18 & 25. A Harvard Business Review Book.
Continue to:
My Books
