The Library Association represents a significant human component of the
underlying structure of e-commerce.
E-commerce is critical to the competitiveness of the United Kingdom economy,
and to its continuing leadership in innovation; it is also critical to the
widest and most equitable participation in society. It will require an actual
leap in the acquisition of information literacy across the entire population, if
it is to be delivered in the time-scales indicated in 'Smoke...'
People need access to stores of skill in information seeking and information
handling, they need safe and trusted places to explore the full range of
services available to them, and the contextual information which will add new
value to both commercial and political transactions. Those stores of skill are
professional librarians and information scientists, those places are the
libraries and information centres throughout the public, education, voluntary
and private sectors in the United Kingdom. This is not just about e-commerce,
this is about e-government.
Let's be clear about what e-commerce means: commerce is generally regarded as
the activities surrounding the sale and purchase of goods, but it also denotes
social relations. E-commerce has already led to a de facto combining of those
definitions into a more flexible definition of any transaction between parties,
and the services and systems which support those transactions. But e-commerce is
not synonymous with e-retailing and e-business.
E-retailing, e-shopping is happening. I buy stuff on the Internet all the
time - and the UK is losing out because I'm buying from American companies who
have already invested in European warehousing so I don't have to bear the tax
and import charges. More people like me have learned to assess the risks of
e-shopping and found out how easy it is. The following is taken from the NOP
Research Group web site: '3.3 million adults in Britain have bought something
over the Internet in the last four weeks, according to an NOP survey published
today.
The Internet User Profile Survey found that a quarter of those who had used
the Internet in the last four weeks had shopped online, with the total number of
online shoppers having more than doubled since this time last year. Half (51%)
of those who had shopped online had bought something from a website they had
bought from before.
Over nine out of ten online shoppers (94%) say that they intend to shop
online in the future, a claim reinforced by the fact that the overall level of
dissatisfaction with the experience of online shopping to date is only 3%. 75%
of online shoppers expect to be spending more money on online shopping by the
summer of 2001.
Against the background of the continuing debate on the security of financial
transactions over the Internet, the survey found near-universal use of plastic
as the online shopper's method of payment, with 90% having given their credit or
debit card details online.
Richard Somerville, Internet research director at NOP said: "In four
weeks, Britain's 3.3 million online shoppers shopped via the Internet 10.11
million times and made 18.2 million purchases. They are generally very satisfied
with the whole experience of online shopping and the average online shopper's
expectation is that they will be spending more than twice as much online by this
time next year."
NOP screened a nationally representative sample of 25,000 British adults,
aged 15+, and conducted 1603 follow-up telephone interviews with Web users
between 1 June - 8 July 2000.'1
E-business maps isomorphically to all the functions of society. The confident
society is achieved and sustained in large part by the active consumer actively
engaging in an energetic economy. The active consumer is also an active citizen
and the relationship between these facets of the individual's participation in
society presents opportunities to make democracy more immediate, but it also
comes with significant dangers. The dangers are polarised: deriving either from
excessive controls and monitoring of communication and transactions - both
commercial and political, or from a progressive over-articulation of e-commerce
systems which will leave them fragmented and difficult to navigate: placing the
burden of management on the individual.
E-commerce is as complex as the traditional functions from which it will
evolve. So the trick is to keep the discussion on e-commerce grounded in the
here and now, without losing the ability to anticipate the enormous societal
shifts it will entail. There are general strands which affect every scale of
involvement in e-commerce: intellectual property rights, (IPR), data protection
(DP): issues of ownership and identity. E-commerce is highly scaled: from the
most trivial impulse purchase to payments of utility bills by e-cash, through
on-line registration of companies, web-based SME purchasing consortia, to the
establishment of virtual corporate 'nations' with quasi-political powers. We
might look at three simple characterisations of e-commerce scale.
The individual has two needs which are not new but are now more emphatic;
they may even be thought of as 'new rights': a secure identity and the best
achievable access to information. They are, of course, intertwined. The
citizen's commercial and political identity will be hard to keep separate:
access to technology and the means of identifying and acquiring the information
needed for wise participation in society happen in the same conduit as the
assessment of products for purchase. There may be a temptation to create new
classes of intermediaries to teach, assist and mentor the 'information citizen'.
Those intermediaries already exist, in schools, post offices, and several other
official agencies - as well chemists and corner shops - but the most rapidly
modernising information intermediaries work in libraries.
The small organisation has traditional strengths, typically in customer
relationships, which translate well into e-commerce values; as the Gartner Group
says in 'Hot Web-Based Customer Service Technologies': "Customers are loyal
to sites that provide product breadth, information, ease of use and good
navigational capabilities. Sites that cannot provide a full suite of e-service
components due to technical or resource limitations must focus on baseline
functionality and best practices"2 - a web site with a few good pictures of
the product and a telephone number can be the right small business strategy
right now. But this will change, and it is already an issue for organisations
whose purpose is not sales and profit, but not-for-profit services to defined
communities - like patient support groups. Their traditional strengths have
focussed on networking, expertise and lobbying: as such their e-commerce
strategies will need to feature high levels of interaction, and this has a
technology and bandwidth overhead which needs to be managed.
In the Association's response to 'Our Competitive Future: Building the
Knowledge Driven Economy' we proposed that 'information professional 'commandos'
should be made available to SMEs to advise on the best use of all freely
available business information resources and how external information can be
combined with their own internal resources to gain competitive advantage.'3 We
believe that, combined with initiatives like the Small Business Service, new
intermediary roles for information professionals can help to turn increasing
amounts of undifferentiated information into exploitable resource.
The large organisation does not know what to do. The impact of size and
complexity at this scale make it almost impossible to offer better than educated
guesses about what sort of internal structures they should adopt, and how these
will affect their business relationships. This is a time of experimentation.
More experiments will secure benign but irrelevant changes than do actual
damage. A few will be successful. However, they all require certain conditions
in society which pertain regardless of whatever business architecture is
implemented internally: a stable, free society, with steady economic growth, and
informed consumers. Informed consumers are critical for a competitive
e-commerce-based economy: but the behaviours and habits attached to becoming
informed are still not embedded in people's day-to-day lives. Librarians are
professionally and ethically committed to helping their users become their own
'information professionals'.
Corporate organisations are just coming to terms with the need for an overall
'information architecture' to provide connectivity and efficiency across their
workforces, moreover, extranets are already providing continuous communication
along the supply chain; a carefully designed information architecture is a
pre-requisite for managing a successful e-commerce strategy; ironically, many
corporates already have trained information architects in their corporate
library.
Understanding the nature of information, and how to exploit it is an
e-commerce issue at every level: in the knowledge economy, e-commerce is the key
to transforming business processes. We cannot over-stress the importance of the
information profession in giving structured and speedy access to knowledge. We
are very happy to continue working with the DTI in this area.
Mark Field Professional Adviser, Workplace Libraries and Information Services
mark.field@la-hq.org.uk
Appendix A: The Library Association
The Library Association is the professional body for library and information
personnel. It has 26,000 members working in all sectors of the economy. Under
the terms of our Royal Charter, awarded in 1898, The Library Association has,
amongst other duties, responsibilities to:
- Promote and encourage the maintenance of adequate and appropriate provision
of library and information services of various kinds throughout the UK
- Promote the better management of library and information services
- Promote the knowledge, skills, position and qualifications of librarians
and information personnel
- Maintain a register of Chartered members, qualified to practise as
professional librarians and information personnel
- Represent and act as the professional body for persons working in or
interested in library and information services
It achieves the above by awarding professional qualifications, promoting
continuing professional development, supporting a network of geographical
branches and subject specialist groups, and advocating the cause of libraries
and librarians to government and other bodies.
Appendix B: 'In the year 2525' - Some thoughts on scenarios
ARTIST: Zager and Evans
TITLE: In the Year 2525
Lyrics
Perhaps the folk-pop lament 'In the year 2525' wasn't a great song but it was
an unusual chart entry in 1970. Some of its dire predictions seem scary even
now, but they are mostly wrong, in the wrong order, or show concern for things
which no longer worry us. Scenarios are a useful tool for planning but they are
not innately predictive. They can be used to present complex ideas in an
easily-grasped vignette, but they are more useful as a means of eliciting
attitudes and ideas from groups - by getting them to create their own scenarios.
Appendix C: References
[note: some of these are news-type URLs, as such they
will persist for no more than two weeks from the date of this document].
1 url: http://www.NOP.co.uk/survey/internet/internet_item20.htm
2 url: http://gartner5.gartnerweb.com/public/static/hotc/00092286.html
3 url: http://www.la-hq.org.uk/directory/prof_issues/ocf.html
