Information wants to be free-bullcookies!

Information Outlook, July, 2004

Our work and value have been attacked on many levels, but nothing has been more damaging that the misquote of Stewart Brand that "Information wants to be free!" This phrase has served as a clarion call to devalue information, information work, and librarianship--which are anything but free. Here's the real quote:

At the first Hackers' Conference in 1984, Brand put his finger on a central paradox about digital information that is causing us so much trouble today. "On the one hand," Brand said, "information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."

This quote is lifted from page 120 of David Bollier's must-read book, Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of our Common Wealth (Routledge 2003). Bollier lifted it from the Whole Earth Review May 1985, p. 49. You can also see a history of this quote's attribution at "Information Wants To Be Free" at http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/IWtbF.html.

Aha!!! I said to myself as I read this in David's book (not free) on a plane (not free) on my way to a conference (not free). There it is. It's just like that old misquote: "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it." What Santayana actually wrote in Reason in Common Sense was, "Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it".. As Voltaire said, "Common sense is not so common."

Why is this quote so compelling--even as a misquote--and why did it get such currency in the modern age? Remember that a hacker's conference in 1984 was pretty much on-the-edge.

Free means many things. It is especially vital to the practice of librarianship.

"Free" in its narrowest meaning can mean "without cost." And often from the user's perspective, library services are without cost. More important, it means freedom to think, freedom to research, freedom to write, freedom of expression--those values central to our professional beliefs. "Free" also can mean a kind of shorthand for democracy and democratic principles. The democratization of information has been a movement since at least the invention of the printing press and publishing. "Free" can be used in the context of free time--freedom from obligation, duties, and responsibilities. Libraries' recreational collections certainly fall into this "free" space. Finally, "free" can mean unconstrained--running free, thinking free, having the free rights of citizenship.

Making information free is very powerful because of all those other meanings. If there's anyone who knows that information wants to be expensive, it has to be librarians. We manage this to ensure cost-effectiveness.

Unfettered

My opinion is that the best meaning of "free" is "unfettered."

There are many ways to unfetter information and even more ways to fetter it. Cost is only one of the ways in which we can deal with the fettering of information. By buying information at the enterprise level in our organizations we unfetter it and make it free, de facto, to the end user. It isn't free of cost by any means, but it will appear free to the user. Therefore, the user does not need to leap the hurdle that is the "buy" decision to use critical information that can underpin his or her work.

We can also fetter information by making it costly or adding hurdles of payments to obtain the information transaction we want. Sometimes fettering information with a cost improves the end-user experience--free movies can be overcrowded, free information can be rough and poorly edited, free can cause quality lapses because you get what you pay for. Therefore, some users prefer to pay to get the assurance of a better information experience and to remove the risk of additional processing fetters.

So, in what other ways is information unfettered?

Libraries unfetter information--make it flow freely--by:

Good information design -- Increasing simplicity and assuring use of good interface principles makes the acquisition of information more satisfying. If we don't simplify it, it can be pretty rough. We can all name information systems that were abusive--some of the first generation Boolean online systems were far too complex to teach to typical end-users.

Making it easier to find -- Users hate to search like us; they just want to find. By using simple tools like federated search and adopting appropriate standards like Z39.50 we make life for users much easier. Federated search removes the barrier to not knowing where to search in the first place. And, especially by adopting tools like link resolvers that employ the OpenURL standard, we make exploring the information ocean seamless when content is identified and full text links become simple and seamless.

Pruning information -- Our collection development and content identification skills are non-pareil. Our adherence to selecting high-quality information to meet our users' real needs and to avoid duplication, false paths, and false drops generates real value. Just searching the groups of content that match the domain I am searching is very powerful.