Accountability of information providers

[Stu Weibel]

The recent discussion concerning web search services  confuses a
fundamental point about what motivates the provision of information
services.  I believe what is lurking behind this confusion is the
unfortunate notion most often promulgated in the form of "Information
wants to be free".  If your information is free, you wear a white hat,
if its not, your committment to access to information is somehow called
into question.

Providing stable, useful information systems costs money, whether its
the Library of Congress, OCLC, or Yahoo.  Stop the payroll checks or
don't pay the telecom bills in any of these organizations and see how
quickly they cease to function.

What *IS* different among these three organizations is the governance
and means of funding activities, and the accountability of the
organizations to their constituents.

Lycos, for example, gets about $0.02 from their clients each time the
client's ad banner is displayed to a user (a penny per eye).  Note that
the customer (an advertiser) is entirely different than the user (a web
seracher).  It doesn't take a rocket scientist, or even an information
scientist, to figure out who's interests will be served first.

The Library of Congress and OCLC are very different organizationally,
but among the things they share is a committment to a public mission,
and each can be held publically accountable for serving or failing to
serve that mission.  LC is held accountable by Congress (witness the
recent GAO report on LC if you don't think they feel the scrutiny of
congressional accountability).

OCLC is a membership organization held accountable by its governance:
a board of trustees and various representative committees that oversee
its programs, services, and fee structure.  Librarians provide the
greatest share of  that governance.  It is certainly true that OCLC
is not at liberty to indefinitely support services that do not generate
revenue.  Rather, the cost of services is spread over the institutions
that use those services (though in the case of end-user services such
as FirstSearch, the end user generally sees them as "free").

None of these organizations is free to operate in a vaccuum. Each
responds to a constituency, and no one should be surprised (or even
critical) when commercial organizations follow their perceived
commercial interests.   Public Trust is one of the great assets that
the Library Community has in the traditional information market, and it
will, if anything, be more important in the electronic information
market where violations of privacy can be so much easier.  This is a
great opportunity for our community.   Libraries cannot, perhaps, act
and react with quite the same alacrity that a high tech start-up can,
but what we can do is defend the same principles that have made us a
cornerstone of our civilization.    

Stuart Weibel
Senior Research Scientist
OCLC Office of Research
weibel at oclc.org
(614) 764-6081 (v)
(614) 764-2344 (f)
http://purl.org/net/weibel