Luc Mertens
| co-NEXUS project | Biblioteca Isolotto | Finnish Public Libraries | Malmi Library |
Since the days of Dewey, Otlet, and Lafontaine¹, libraries have more than anything else promoted
the rapidity of the spread of knowledge and access to information, by using international rules
and standards, in a classic manner or by means of information technology and telematics. Those
library rules and standards are – just like Taylorism or Fordism – the products of an industrial
production environment. In a post-industrial environment speed is no longer enough to pump up
the production process and to increase intellectual and material wealth. More and more emphasis
is being placed on the need for a more human-centred interface, and for intelligent production
and reproduction systems.
The collective wealth of industrial society has been mainly the result of efforts on behalf of
engineers and technicians. After the dwindling and dismantling of the secondary sector, it is
now principally the practices of the tertiary sector which influence the production apparatus.
Within the industrial production environment, the emphasis lay chiefly on the rationalisation –
speeding up – of the production and reproduction process. To an important extent, the product
determined the internal and external organisation of the production environment. The post-
industrial production and organisation culture, on the other hand, is much more user-orientated.
Within the library sector, the need for a more user-driven organisation culture first manifested
itself when librarians started to rearrange shelves for user convenience in Britain and Germany
in the mid-1970s. These were the first, so-called, “user-friendly” libraries. Although these
efforts may appear clumsy to us now, the future of libraries without Dewey – which had already
been predicted at that time Life without Dewey – is increasingly becoming a reality today, thanks
to the rapid development of information technology.
The classification, search and placement systems which were developed around the turn of the
century, were to use the jargon of the day, pre-coordinated. The library which is slowly taking
shape today – unfortunately, mostly in the margins of what we count among our sector using out-
of-date criteria – has in the meantime clearly passed the Boolean post-coordination stage, and
has developed into an intelligent system which archives and directs the searching processes of
the users by means of user profiles, in order then to offer them an à la carte service.
Intelligent libraries are self-educating systems. Their accessibility system is generated in an
interactive way in co-operation with the user.
The co-NEXUS project is an Internet project. It is part of the Esprit program, and to be more
precise a part of the “i3” network, which stands for Intelligent Information Interfaces. The
research and development started on 1 August 1997 and is scheduled to finish on 31 October 1998.
The co-NEXUS consortium will develop – using an Agent Like Device (ALD) – an intelligent
environment which consists of the interconnection of:
The database consists of the formal information which 1) is supplied by local organisations and
institutions: libraries, educational institutions, local government services, cultural centres,
museums, etc. and 2) information relevant to the local community which originates, among other
sources, from the WWW.
The ACF is an intelligent set of accessibility tools. It regulates traffic between 1) the users
and the database, 2) it links users with comparable interests and finally 3) it facilitates
communications between users.
The multimedia production tools facilitate the production of non-formal information, which is
then added to the local search, communication, and production environment.
The final goals of co-NEXUS are, thanks to the development of an intelligent environment, to:
To guarantee the maximum accessibility of this intelligent environment, a set of instruments will
be developed and tested among users with low levels of education (students from adult education
programmes). After the fifteenth month of the project, adult education will have at its disposal
an intelligent search, communication, and production environment. Finally, the development and
research results of the project must contribute knowledge for the construction of a more complex
environment, which will make the entire educational and socio-cultural working sectors
accessible.
co-NEXUS is a cross-library project. It is intended to develop an intelligent environment for
the needs of local communities, which consists of:
>From the late 1980s, this cross-border concept has gradually been taking shape in Turnhout. IT
is the result of 1) a critical analysis of the still-prevailing library and culture policy, 2)
the most accessible user-friendly library model – Gutersloh, and 3) a sustained discussion with
the local socio-cultural community and external experts in the field of information technology
and new media.
>From the early 1990s onwards, it became clear to this discussion and co-operation platform that
the disruption, which was expected by the socio-cultural community as a result of
de-industrialisation and the rapid advance of information technology, could not be resolved from
the existing disciplinary allocation.
Today’s challenge is of a nature that prevents any discipline, corporation or institution from
being capable of resolving the situation on its own. There is not only a need for the product-
based organisational culture to be transformed into an access-based organisational culture – one
that takes the end-user as its starting point, but there are also determining developments in the
field of the information carrier itself, its exploitation and use, which require a
multidisciplinary approach.
It is this new multimedia production process, being the pattern of expectation and the new
attitudes brought about by the use of the computer with the public, which 1) must be incorporated
into an intelligent meeting space which has yet to be constructed, and 2) must manage and direct
the reorganisation of the educational and socio-cultural working field.
Conclusion
In contrast to existing libraries, in which accessibility is regulated by a set of fixed rules
and parameters, the intelligent library will be run using a dynamic environment that encompasses
it – a Living Architecture or collective memory - which will utilise the interests of the
users, their search processes, the informal contacts that users make, and the information which
they produce themselves, in order to provide better-targeted answers to the specific needs of
individual and collective users. Finally, the intelligent library is no longer self-referencing.
Library information will be seamlessly and silently linked to non-library data, formal to
non-formal information, and so on.
¹ Dewey, Otlet and Lafontaine: the authors of resp. ‘Dewey decimal classification’ and ‘Universal
decimal classification systems’.
² Lyn Dobroski, Life without Dewey: “reader interest” arrangement of stock in East Sussex County
Library, in: Catalogue index 1980, p.55.
¹ Dewey, Otlet and Lafontaine: the authors of Dewey decimal classification and Universal decimal
classification systems