David Tebbutt

Some people argue that, because information is free and widely available through the internet, no one need bother with information professionals any more. They may well be the same people who think that all music and software should be free.

The flaw in their argument is that while masses of information on the internet are indeed freely available, the recipient has to be able to discriminate between good information and bad information.

Most of the time, this is not a particularly tricky problem, but sometimes it is. I was with a computer whizz the other day who was roundly slagging off Wikipedia for its widespread errors – I don’t suppose it occurred to him to put them right. The truth is that some Wikipedia stuff is probably incorrect, either through malice or ignorance, but that doesn’t invalidate it as a fine starting point for research. And, by looking at the edit history, you can get a good idea of what’s going on and who’s grinding which axe.

Of course, what this means is that more investigation than just a quick visit to Wikipedia is needed. Before the poor enquirer knows it, they are up to their eyeballs in time-consuming searching and filtering. It’s meat and drink for information professionals but a pain in the backside for most people.

I wonder if there’s a service role that responds to questions like ‘give me a profile of the most promising solar energy start-ups in the last year’. I’m guessing that the cost of the seeker’s time would more than compensate for the cost of the information professional’s. A net gain to the organisation.

But having located what a customer wants, how does the info pro get it to them in a usable form? If we’re talking about web pages (which is quite often the case), then a new family of free bookmarking services has materialised recently which might interest you.

Unlike Del.icio.us, which is undeniably useful, these services are a bit more friendly and leave less to the imagination. They grab web page images and turn them into a slide show. They let you create a trail of useful stuff, add your own comments and share it with your client.
I’ve used a couple of these tools recently and both seemed to go down well with my colleagues. One, called JogTheWeb, worked exactly as I’ve just described: you collect web pages, add comments, then publish.

Another, called Diigo, has a strong social dimension to it which includes friends and groups and is much more geared to friendly collaboration. But its WebSlides option is more like JogTheWeb. Both provide links back to the original web pages.

If your research turns up material that is in digital form but doesn’t live on the web, then you would need to use something which works with local files. At this point I would urge caution. The provenance of the material you share is important, as is the location it’s stored in.

I’m thinking here of programs like Freepath and MyFreepath, which are good for assembling and presenting a mix of local and web-sourced material. But they are stored locally, or remotely if using the MyFreepath extension. Both can include video, PDFs, Word files, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets and so on.

The point of all this is not to pick out any particular programs, but to suggest ways you might have of introducing new value into the information professionals’ world. ‘Storyboarding’ the found information can make clients’ lives much more productive.

We’ve heard this ‘information is free’ mantra for far too long. And it can only ever be true if people don’t value their time.

And that, of course, can never be true in a commercial environment.

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