E‐Commerce and the Librarian
| Pages | 3-5 |
| Date | 01 March 2000 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb040755 |
| Published date | 01 March 2000 |
| Author | Karen Neal |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
E-Commerce and
the Librarian
by Karen Neal, Researcher, LITC
and Mark Kerr, Manager of
London ASPECT, South Bank
University
Librarians need to embrace some of the
practices of
E-commerce,
particularly in
relation to marketing their service, satisfying
user needs and exploiting non-exploitative
methods of generating revenue for
under-
funded services.
This article emerged out of
an
interview
discussion between Karen Neal and Mark Kerr
on how E-commerce may affect the way
librarians
work.
Introduction
Libraries and information centres are taking an
ever-increasingly commercial approach to the way
they deliver their services and handle their admin-
istration. Some more conservative professionals
may see this as 'a bad thing' since many librarians
have spent their careers avoiding or resisting
commercialism in favour of a more unsullied
approach to information management, retrieval and
dissemination.
Commercialism need not imply that we have sold
out however, but simply that we have the wisdom -
and even the courage - to pick those elements of
the commercial world that serve our needs - and
those of our user groups - without compromising
the core mission or ethos of
the
information
service. The crucial element of marketing affects
the service, both in terms of attracting new users
and of satisfying the needs and expectations of
internal and external stakeholders. Applying
modern commercial practice to the running of an
information service is not particularly new for
librarians: many services have had to respond to
increasing demands in a time of reducing resources
by learning new methods of satisfying that de-
mand. The difficulty is perhaps finding the balance
in the perceived conflict between the demands of
commerce and the mission of the library.
E-Commerce and libraries
E-commerce has evolved rapidly over a very few
years,
hand in hand with the development of the
Internet and the World Wide Web. Although our
sector has been aware of
the
Internet for many
years,
it was the advent of the Web in 1990 and
the Mosaic browser in 1994 that really started to
change the information environment for the end
user. As the Web has changed in the last four years
from an information source to a market
place - for entertainment, retail and information -
so the librarian has had to reassess the potential
of this medium to help in the delivery of the
service.
There are ranges of business models on the Web
that affect the library environment. Retail, market-
ing, and Web portals are three of
the
most
prevalent, and are easily applied to a library
environment.
The retail approach
The most challenging approach, that of retail by
credit card payment, is one that has a number of
implications.
Acquisitions by credit card may provide
access to otherwise inaccessible out-of-print
items in some subject areas by using the
Bibliofind (www.bibliofind.com) or Bibliocity
(www.bibliocity.com). Some of the more
mainstream online bookshops such as the
provincial bookseller Country Bookshop
(www.countrybookshop.co.uk) and Amazon
(www.amazon.co.uk) offer quite substantial
discounts for bestsellers, although less startling
bargains for low volume academic and scientific
titles.
Provincial here refers only to location, not
coverage.
At the very least, Amazon offers a saving for those
bibliographic searchers needing simple informa-
tion on new titles - based on the Book Data listing
of UK books in print, Amazon can offer a free and
fast alternative to monthly CD-Rom installations.
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