Community Information:. an overview
| Published date | 01 January 1992 |
| Pages | 4-9 |
| Date | 01 January 1992 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb040466 |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
Community
Information:
an overview
Introduction
Intuitively, most people have a mental pic-
ture of community information systems,
generally conforming to the vision of those
services provided
so
well for so many years
by the public library services eg leisure pur-
suits,
society names and addresses and
other locally useful information such as
names and addresses of local government
officers, where to go for consumer advice
and so on. And indeed many community in-
formation systems
do
just that.
However, there is substantially more to the
subject as a
whole.
Community information
systems come in all shapes and sizes - some
with specific functions, others with
a
wide
range of general facilities. Some attempt
will be made here to outline the nature of
community information in broad terms and
the available methods of automated dis-
tribution.
Some definitions
Public community information systems are
those typically offered by public libraries as
part of their general services. They have
been around in automated form for several
years now and the traditional vehicle for
their transport has been either videotex/tele-
text systems or, more recently, 'on-line' sys-
tems - often incorporated in automated li-
brary housekeeping
systems.
The term
'on-line', generally adopted to describe the
latter species, tends to be somewhat perjora-
tive when it comes to considering the
for-
mer: both types of system may be on-line
and both may be interactive.
Definition number 1
For the purposes of
this
article DBMS
(Data Base Management System) shall be
used to describe 'on-line' systems, ie those
accompanying library housekeeping or in-
formation retrieval systems, as that
is
essen-
tially what they are.
Definition number 2
Videotex is the generic term to describe
those systems which use a modified televi-
sion set to display information held in a
computer and transmitted by various means
eg
broadcast television, cable, telephone. It
is also a generic term for a text and graphics
presentation standard covering both interac-
tive and broadcast (ie one-way) services.
Definition number 3
Viewdata is two-way videotex transmitted
by telephone line.
Definition number 4
Teletext is videotex transmitted as part of
ordinary television programme transmission
eg BBC's Ceefax, ITV's Oracle. Teletext is
one-way and therefore cannot be interactive.
Videotex systems
Videotex has been around for ten years or
more, originally as little more than an elec-
tronic publishing medium. Probably the
best-known example in the UK, if not
necessarily the most successful in commer-
cial terms, is Prestel. Throughout the rest
of Europe, including the Republic of
Ire-
land, the French Minitel system is becom-
ing fairly ubiquitous.
The videotex systems known by most are
4
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VINE
86 (March 1992)
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