THE TRANSFORMATION
IN CONTEXT (con't.)

Another area of technological change relates to the dynamic nature of information products. Like consumers, public libraries must make judgments about investing in products and related equipment that might soon be overtaken by the latest product and equipment (e.g., tapes and cassette players vs. CDs and CD players). For the individual public library, the question is complicated by the ongoing need to make available a range of equipment that allows users to access any information product already in the library's collection. Thus, the archiving function of public libraries, as Hal Varian pointed out, is made more difficult.

Further, as Brian Kahin, Director of Harvard University's Information Infrastructure Project observed, technological change brings with it a type of paradox: "It overcomes barriers of distance, and overcomes personal handicaps." Kahin also noted that the technology seems to "create new barriers of skill and the kind of equipment you can afford. It recreates very visibly a problem of information haves and have-nots."

Finally, the relative ease of creating a home page on the World Wide Web enables virtually anyone to be a publisher or distributor of information, and thus a competitor to more traditional publishers and distributors.

Institutional/Market

Many of the technological advances described above are distorting what William Arms of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives calls the "strange equilibrium" of "complex motivations" among authors/creators, public libraries and members of the information industry. This equilibrium is in danger of breaking down, Arms asserted, because technology reduces the cost of distribution and the marginal cost of reproducing information to nearly zero.

In referring to the consequences of this unraveling of institutional and economic relationships, many symposium speakers used the term

Increasingly, success in the information marketplace may depend upon "re-intermediation"; that is, adding value to services rather simply focusing on producer/distributor chains.

Social

George Needham, Executive Director, PLA (a division of the American Library Association), observed that the "technology revolution is creating a whole new way of looking at our society." Echoing this theme, Jorge Schement identified "three overwhelming tendencies" facing public libraries in an information society: interconnectedness, fragmentation and community.

Increasingly, Schement pointed out, interconnectedness is achieved through impersonal interactions mediated by some form of communications technology. The typical household now has many types of devices designed to receive and/or process information, but no way to integrate the separated bits which stream into the home. Consequently, the information received is fragmented and without organic unity. Further, citizens know names and details about politicians in other cities or parts of the country (for whom they cannot vote), but know little about politics in their own community. The threat, said Schement, is that these three forces will move citizens away from informed democratic participation.

Political

Public libraries are generally perceived as being institutions of local concern. However, the cornerstone document of the Clinton Administration's National Information Infrastructure Initiative, Agenda for Action, implicitly pushed public libraries onto the national policy agenda. Kahin noted that the document appeared to merge the longstanding policy of