The personal journey view of information provision

Citation

O’Beirne, R. (2007), "The personal journey view of information provision", Reference Reviews, Vol. 21 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/rr.2007.09921aag.001

The personal journey view of information provision

Many universities are now carrying on their library websites details of new information sources such as blogs, wikis and RSS feeds which might be of use to students. For many who manage a reference library or who are charged with collection development in a learning resource centre there is the growing realisation that such information sources need to be considered within the overall strategy of service provision. The key question that presents itself is: how far should our attention move from traditional search and retrieve activities towards the emerging trend of pushing content to the user?

Sometimes we read in a popular glossy magazine or perhaps a Sunday newspaper supplement an interview with a well-known celebrity. The format can be free-form or, to please readers like me who live life in a hurry, highly structured with typically just a dozen piercingly blunt questions such as “Which person would you least like to be stuck in an elevator with?”. Often the celebrity, keen to make a political point, will say for example George Bush or Fidel Castro. Or, perhaps in an attempt to sustain their celebrity status by appearing enigmatic and mildly philosophical, might answer “myself”. These scenario-based questions are usually mixed with ones that are almost childlike. “What is your favourite ice-cream flavour?”. However, the best question of all, in my opinion, is “What is your favourite journey?”.

This question rarely elicits a good answer from celebrity types, who almost always recount tales of an exotic destination. But of course it is the journey in which we are interested. It is fascinating to get a glimpse of the journeys people make; sometimes epic, sometimes short, yet always interesting. And not just the journeys made by celebrities; those journeys made by everyday people, for whatever reason, can offer insights into their personal worlds.

Over ten years ago, when the web was young, the journey was the most common metaphor used to explain the phenomenon. We were introduced to a new information landscape through which the information superhighway blazed a trail. There was a sense that a new frontier had been crossed and that we had discovered the land that lay beyond with its rich fertile soil waiting for the plantation. In this landscape there was the opportunity to build, shape and fashion a new order. Depending on which metaphor you subscribed to, that landscape could dissolve into a seascape, where surfers caught waves of hypermedia, yet the result was the same, information was now free. Released from the confines of print on paper, it was now possible to publish, at the touch of a button, material for the whole world to see. And not just to see but to store, edit, copy, distribute and ultimately delete.

During these times as librarians we were concerned about structure and form and access and retrieval, while many of us were also worried that the web sounded the death knell for the library profession. Yet while few realised the enormity of the change, even fewer saw the many benefits. The technology in those early days was all pull. We sought out information using the “scarcity model”, we assumed that because information was a scarce commodity in the analogue/print world, the same approach would suffice in the digital world. We were wrong. So now we have moved to push technology and are adhering to the “abundance model” where we no longer seek out information but instead it finds us.

A large part of the effort made today, in terms of managing information in a digital environment, is not based on the premise that there are information users seeking information. Rather, it centres on the individual and, at a superficial level, on their information needs. More emphasis is placed on the individual’s profile – their perceived needs or on their potential wants. This we are calling personalisation and when we build information portals we are merging or blending the push with the pull technology. Is there anything wrong with personalisation? Well no, not really. I love it when the national supermarket chain rewards me for shopping online with them for a whole year by sending me a box of Belgian truffles for my birthday. I am quite impressed when the Liverpool Philharmonic mails me its autumn programme because I bought tickets to a show there two years ago – how do they remember? And the people at Amazon seem to know more about my private reading habits than I do. All of these “services” are easy to escape from if their approach encroaches on my personal information space. One of the obvious dangers is that we have not yet developed a consensus on how far personalisation can go before it becomes intrusive.

As librarians, seeking out the appropriate piece of information, are we, in this world of instant gratification, being too honest if we tell the user that it will take a journey to get to that point? We must believe that the journey itself is worthwhile – we cannot simply arrive at the destination; some experience of the journey is necessary. Receiving information via an RSS feed can be useful, the push technology, in this instance being a consequence of an original information request.

A less obvious, and perhaps more general danger of personalisation, lies in our right to a journey: the right to roam and to stray off the superhighway so that the sound of the digital traffic fades in the distance; the right to surf the web anonymously, to overturn our own stones, to stride off on a whim in the wrong direction and discover something, anything. In a word, our right to serendipity.

Rónán O’BeirneInternet Column Editor, Reference Reviews, and Principal Libraries Officer, Bradford Libraries, Archives and Information Service, Bradford, UK