Invited Talk at Australian Law Librarians Conference 2007 (http://www.alla.asn.au/conference/2007/index.htm)

1. The Effects of Cross-Pollination :
How Non-Library Mass Market
Services Are Changing Library User
Expectations and Behaviours
Baden Hughes
Enterprise Information Architect
The University of Melbourne

2. Overview
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• Introduction
• Information Access c.2007
• Properties of Extremely Converged Information Environments
• Trends
• Impact Analysis

3. My Perspective
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• Not a traditional information science professional
• Background in web systems engineering, particularly applied to publishing
applications
• Research in language processing, information retrieval and digital libraries,
contributions in language identification, scalable language processing, text
encoding, cross-language search, minority language technology support
• Observer of trends in information access and usage, particularly in corporate
environments (not exclusive of libraries)
• Current role focus on leveraging information assets to maximum benefit, in
the broadest sense

4. Extreme Convergence
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“The Machine Is Us/ing Us”
Mike Wesch – Kansas State University
http://youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g

5. Extreme Convergence Dissected
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Fundamental Assumptions …
• pervasive online access
• collaboration as the default
• “free” (or “compromise cost”) services
• generic service instances, individually customised
• extremely scalable architectures
• federated collections
• location independence
• device independence
• unmediated information access

6. Trends in Extreme Convergence
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Shifts towards …
• users as creators and consumers
• DIY information services and toolchains
• reduced engagement with print materials
• collective intelligence
Obvious flow on effects for libraries …

7. Trend: Users as Creators and Consumers
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8. Trend: DIY Information Services
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Modularisation …
• Small re-usable components and data sources
• Large range of providers, open competitive market
• Integration-oriented and standards compliant
• The best of “All You Can Eat” and “BYO” ☺
Low-tech Service Composition
• Point & Click, Drag and Drop
• Hosted environments
• Embedded service intelligence
• “Zero” cost

9. Trend: Reduced Engagement with Print
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Metamorphosis …
• Electronic collections growing, but still dominated by print collections in many
ways
• in volume, owing to longer term collection development
• often not in rate of acquisition, owing to cost
• evidence suggests about equal in terms of access
• Print to digital conversion (local, global) is motivated more by access
flexibility than by a fundamental problem with the object and contents
• Reduced engagement with a communication as a medium is likely to take
several generations, it will not happen in a single generation (consider radio
…)
Paradigm Resilience
• Processes developed around print publication remain intact
• Fundamental information architecture is tied to print (publication/article
model, page numbers, indexing, authoring conventions)

10. Trend: Collective Intelligence
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The benefits of sharing …
• A long established trend (since 1600’s)
• Information availability increases approximately exponentially in proportion to
the number of consumers, and has for hundreds of years
• General tendency to work more collaboratively
• Increasing awareness of cross-pollenation as net beneficial
• Major difference in the internet age is the is the synchronicity of sharing
The risks of sharing …
• Bigger isn’t always better (cf web site hits vs visitors)
• Collective opinion - the wisdom of the crowd or mass hysteria ?
• Information availability increases approximately exponentially in proportion to
number of consumers (sharing increases precision, not recall)

11. Trend Effects
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Flow-on effects in library-like environments
• collections and information repositories
• access mechanisms and preferences
• resource usage models
Differential impacts
• public libraries
• academic research and reference libraries
• special libraries

12. Page Title / vs Them goes here
Us heading
Consider the traditional library …
• an inventory / catalogue / loans system
• a physical collection
• an electronic collection
• reference desks / service points (either physical or virtual or both)
• a work space
Consider the information hub of the future …
• federated holdings, with multi-use as a default
• predominance of electronic collections
• unmediated information access
• non-local delivery services
• location independent

13. The Empire Strikes Back
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Recent features in library systems and services
• user profiles and preferences
• (shareable) personal virtual collections
• (shareable) record annotations
• federated collections including non-curated collections
• mass digitization
• mashups / plug and play services

14. Challenges
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The library under threat …
• as a collection ?
• as collections become highly federated and predominantly virtual, collection
custodian is less of a defining characteristic, except for approximately unique
items
• as a service ?
• as information delivery is diversified, libraries no longer have a competitive
advantage as a default supply channel
• as a place ?
• as access to collections is decoupled from physical location, the need to
visit the collection itself is reduced

15. Opportunities
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Imagine …
You’re in a large collection of books, journals and other scholarly resources.
You’ve never been here before (although maybe somewhere like it).
You decide its most efficient to browse the shelves looking for what you’re
interested in.
There’s not much to guide you apart from a cryptic encoding scheme.
The collection isn’t systematically maintained and so you quickly discover that
its going to take you a while to find what you’re looking for.

16. Opportunities
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Imagine …
Perhaps you’ll ask some other users about where to find things.
Perhaps you’ll wander about a bit more and it will become clearer.
Perhaps you’ll use what you can find, regardless of whether its entirely
relevant.
Perhaps you’ll give up.

17. Opportunities
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Imagine …
Perhaps you’ll ask someone who works here.

18. Retaining Competitive Advantage
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The library revived as a centre of excellence …
• an increasingly complex information environment
• traditional source and content analysis in even sharper focus
• obvious need for efficiencies in information need fulfillment

19. © Copyright The University of Melbourne 2007