Information Services and Use

The number and types of information sources accessible through the Internet are ever increasing. Billions of documents including text, pictures, sound, and video are readily available for both scholarly and every-day uses. Even libraries and information centers with sizable budgets are having difficulties in coping with this increase. More developed tools and methods are needed to find, filter, organize and summarize electronic information sources. This paper is an overview of a wide variety of electronic information management issues ranging from infrastructure to the integration of information technology and content, from personalization of information services to “disintermediation”. It discusses the issues of description, organization, collection management, preservation and archiving of electronic information.

This paper provides an overview of the continuing evolution of scholarly publishing, leveraged in the last decades by the tremendous potential of Internet technology. It introduces “self-archiving”, the broad term often applied to the electronic publishing of author-supplied documents on the World Wide Web without commercial publisher mediation, and examines its impact on scholarly communication along with the Open Access Movement. The intensity of self-archiving and its pivotal role in scholarly communication is put into perspective through reference to some self-archiving initiatives set in motion in several countries. Finally, the paper concludes by outlining the challenges for information managers in developing the full potential of Open Access.

As the life cycle of information products has become increasingly digital from “cradle to grave”, the nature of electronic information management has dramatically changed. These changes have brought new strategies and methods as well as new issues and challenges. At the bottom line the services are increasingly delivered to a desktop from distributed publishers or information providers. Information organizations act either as primary information providers or as brokers between the user and the primary service provider. This paper covers developments in the factors and strategies affecting collection management and access. It discusses major trends in electronic user services including electronic information delivery, information discovery and electronic reference. Finally, it addresses the challenges in user and personnel education in response to this electronic environment and an increasingly information literate user population.

Metadata serves several purposes. It supports resource discovery, locates the actual digital resource by inclusion of a digital identifier, organizes electronic resources bringing similar resources together and distinguishing dissimilar resources, provides administrative information for controlling the digital library, and provides technical, preservation and rights management information needed to support immediate and long-term permanent access. There are a variety of metadata schemes that serve different purposes for different object types, subjects and audiences. With disparate metadata schemes, ensuring that information collected in a specific scheme by one organization for a particular purpose can be exchanged, transferred or used by another organization for a different purpose becomes an issue. Metadata frameworks, crosswalks, and registries are ways to achieve interoperability. Controlled terminologies add more precise meaning to metadata. The integration of controlled terminologies and metadata schemes is key to the development of the Semantic Web.

The rapid growth in the creation and dissemination of electronic information has emphasized the digital environment's speed and ease of dissemination often with little regard for its long-term preservation and access. But, electronic information is fragile in ways that traditional paper-based information is not. Many projects, worldwide, have contributed to the growing collection of best practices and standards in areas such as metadata creation and format standards. These best practices are increasingly reflected in system software that can be tailored to local needs. However, these systems are still in development and for local implementations more than one approach may be needed. These systems provide an indication of the trends and issues remaining in the area of digital preservation and permanent access to electronic information resources.

The paper examines the idea of copyright and how it functions for both digital and non-digital publications. Various different interpretations of copyright and its application are discussed. Ideas such as databases, fair use and exceptions are explored in their relationship to technological measures used to control the use of copyright material. Examples from the CITED, COPYSMART, IMPRIMATUR, and COPICAT projects of the European Union are described briefly. The impact of the latest EU directive on copyright and the information society is explained and the need for co-operative planning and implementation of technical measures throughout the information industry is emphasised.