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From the The Australian, January 22, 1993, page15.

This article may contain the occasional scanning error.

ELECTRONINC JEWEL IN THE GLOBAL COMMUNICATION CROWN

by Padraic P. McGuinness

"NETWORKs dissolve geography." This was only one
of the many fascinating remarks made at a conference which has
been going on in Sydney over the past few days on
information on-line and on-disc-or the revolution in human
conununications.

The quote is from the opening speaker Dr Clifford Lynch,
who is director of Library Automation at the University of
California, in the office of the president of that
university. Dr Lynch looked a bit like an ageing product
of the 60s at the Berkeley campus of that university but
spoke with the articulateness of an angel.

He was speaking about the enormous growth and future of
data transmission over the telephone lines from one
computer to another which is making huge amounts of
information available instantaneously and increasingly
cheaply, and also creating networks of
communlcation between individuals all over the world who
gossip just as easily (perhaps more so) as if they were
nextdoor neighbours. The truth is now that it is just as
easy and, if You have access to the educational networks
in particular, just as cheap to talk to someone anywhere
in the world as it is to someone on the other side of the
same country.

Voice communications are still not so easy. But I have an
old mate atthe Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru,
in Lima, with whom I can correspond (through the
Compuserve/Interlink connection) just as easily as if he
were in Katoomba.

The implications of this for social and family relations
are immense.But so are the implications for business and
our general intercourse with the rest of the world.

If I wanted to I could chat daily with journalists in the
United States or Europe, or anywhere else served by
Compuserve. If I were a university employee, l could,
through Aarnet (the Australian Academic Research network)
and Internet, correspond with any university employee in
most countries of the world.

But more than that, I could swap documents, research, and
even publish anything I wanted over the network. I could set up
my own publications-for that matter, I could, for
virtually nothing, file my columns into the network so
that anyone who missed the precious words in
The Australian could simply tap into them on
Aarnet/Internet. As the capacity of these and similar
networks grows, huge quantities ofresearch and data can
be swapped all around the world.

But the subject of the conference organised by the Australian
Library and Information Association, was the
huge growth in more formal provision of information on-
line, which can be accessed by the public through the
growing numbers of libraries and librarians who are
trained to handle the techno]ogy, as well as by businesses
research institutions, consultants and just about anybody
who is sufficiently curious. The remarkable thing is that
access to the huge and growing world database is becoming
easier snd cheaper every day - though, of course, unlike
the reformed hippies and nerds who have created Internet,
most of the services are operated for profit.

(The conference also provided a showcase for the nearly
as interesting area of compact disc information, like the
marvellous Oxford English Dictionary on CD-Rom about which
I wrote a couple of months ago.)

It was a conference which should have warmed the heart of
any feminist. For the interesting thing was (and it
reflects the original composition of the menial occupation
of librarian as book trolley) that about 80 per cent of
the attendance was female. Also interesting (though
this probably reflects the relative seniority of those who
are specialists in online database searching) is that the
majority were over 40. I would expect that the sex balance
would be more even among the younger librarlans, as in all
other occupations. Perhaps we need affirmative action
programs for male librarians, to make sure that the
proportion of males in senior librarian positions reflects
their proportion in the population as whole.

But the reallty is that the once humble job of librarian
is now becoming something much more important - they are
the experts on accessing the huge body of information,
that is the libraries and information databases of the
world, which is abolishing geography in the intellectual
as well as the personal sense. However, many of them
have to learn, as indeed many have learnt, that a request
to provide information on a subject which results in a
lengthy blbliography and nothing else is not going to be
much use to anyone except an academic with plenty of time
on his or her hands.

So what the new techndogy, which is becoming more and
more powerful every year, is producing is a new breed
which can be called, fairly pretentiously "information
professionals" or, better information brokers. These are,
in effect, the people who can deal with huge chunks of
wholesale information and break it up, package it and on-
sell it in a useful form to customers, business or
consumers. The analogy holds even in its origins, of course,
since the proliferation of brands and types of
retail goods and services requires that expert advice
on choice.

This is of course what consumer bodies like the
Australian Consumers Association do very well when they
forget their ideological prejudices and stick to their
last; it is also the function of critics of all kinds.

The packaging and retailing of wholesale information is
also what the newspapers and journalists do often very
effectively - the incoming cables basket of a newspaper
(these days that is an electronic, not a physical,
concept) contains huge amounts of news, comment and
analysis which has to be selected and edited. Such is the
wealth of information that often it still overwhelms the
reader.  But at their best, journalists are the
information brokers par excelience.

People who taik about electronic newspapers often forget
just how much judicious selection and presentation goes
into the production of that medium - newspapers are seliing
this function just as much as the news itself. Comment and
analysis are always there, but the more explicit
it becomes the less it appears as mere bias (as with the
ABC) and the more it adds value to the commodity of news.

Radio does it less well - these days radio is mainly a form
of therapy - and televislon of course presents compelling
images which often cater for the semi-literate or the
print-handicapped but at their best add a dimension which
the newspapers cannot. But if you don't like any of this,
It is now easy to tap the contents of many of the great
world newspapers direct. (You cannot yet tap into The
Australian, except for The Business Australian, for
technical reasons which I hope, will not last long.)

So far, online information in Austraila has been a
relatively well-kept secret. It is a time-consuming
business, and its bibliographic rather than full-
information bias for years confined it to libraries. (It
has to be added that Telecom has until recently not been a
great help and the specialist software it provides is a
positive obstacle.) The subsidised academics have thebestofthings- but it is amazng how many of them do
not realise what a jewel they are sitting on.

It real iy is a huge, new world--and it is as near as the
nearest telephone connection.  Geography is being
dissolved.