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Foundation of Library and Information Science

Notes In the Western society, every sector of social activity is potentially a candidate for
industrialization. This has long been evident in the tertiary services sector of the economy. The
personally owned horse and buggy is replaced by trains, buses, aircraft, owned by large corporate
enterprises, or by cars manufactured by similar enterprises. Coal fires, oil lamps, and garden
wells are replaced by services from electricity, gas, and water utilities.

Example: The cobbler is replaced by the repairs division of a large department store.
The electricity, water, and gas services, for example, centralized and reorganized into public
plants, directly service millions of consumers. However, the countless apparatuses which mediate
these sources of energy to the final consumer, in turn, demand individual repairmen, plumbers,
electricians, and tradesmen to fulfil their functions. These intermediate agents may later be
centralized in turn. Large repair enterprises tend to displace the individual plumber, just as
department stores push out the small shopkeeper. We may see analogies of these developments
in the information fields.

Industrialization involves a number of characteristics. First, of course, is commercialization –
monetary payment for services, access related to ability to pay, the need for cost recovery and
profit margin, competition for a market. Driven by competition, commercial firms seek to
widen their markets, to capture a greater proportion of potential customers, to spread into new
geographical areas, to discover new specialized groups of customers, to diversify their products
to match these specialized markets. All this means a perpetual drive to innovate as regards
products, methods of production, and ways of presenting or ‘packaging’ products and this
innovation involves the introduction of mechanization – to cheapen products and expand
production. This, in turn, involves a constant tendency for production to increase in scale – by
general expansion or by mergers between similar firms or firms in related areas.
All these tendencies are already present in the quaternary information sector of the economy
and can be identified within libraries and information services – debates on library charges,
outreach to new user groups, automation to cut costs, merging of services in the public and
academic sectors. What is at issue here is this:

Are these trends likely to be accelerated by a shift towards the electronic provision of
information?
What may be the consequence for LIS and their users?

3.2.3 Economics of Information Provision

‘Information’ is a very unusual economic ‘good’. One peculiar attribute is that it can be given or
sold by one person to another, without the giver or seller losing continued use of it (although a
particular physical embodiment of the information – books, pamphlets, magnetic tape, or
whatever – may have been handed over to the recipient).
Equally important is the fact that ‘information’ is not the name of a well-defined product with a
clearly specified area of use. Information is relevant to almost every human activity; its contents
and uses are as diverse as the activities to which it may contribute. To talk of the economics of
information in general may not be very illuminating. Here we are concentrating on the economics
of services that provide, or are based on, recorded information (whether printed or electronic).
A third characteristic arises from the second – because of its universal relevance, information
transfer is often not an autonomous activity but is contributory to some other activity. We buy
food or medicines to keep alive and healthy, but we do not necessarily buy books just to ‘keep
informed’. There is certainly a proportion of information transfer for this purpose, but often the
information is ancillary to solving a problem, taking a decision, working out an idea, helping a
practical task.

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