Luc Mertens
Openbare Bibliotheek Turnhout
Obturn@innet.be

Since the days of Dewey, Otlet, and Lafontaine (1) , 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 the part 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 hard, 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 re-arrange 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 (2) - 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taking shape today - unfortunately, mostly in the margins of what we count as our library sector, which still uses out-of-date criteria - has in the meantime clearly passed the Boolean post-coordination stage, and has developed into an intelligent system which archives and directs the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 cooperation with the user.

co-NEXUS is a cross-library project. It is intended to develop an intelligent environment for the needs of local communities, which consists of:

• a database/library
  
• a communication environment
• convenient production tools

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) a critical analysis of 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 cooperation 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 which prevents any discipline, corporation or institution from being capable of resolving the situation on its own. There is not only a need for the productbased organisational culture to be transformed into an access-based organisational culture - that is, 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.

1) Since sound, images, and text have had a shared carrier, thanks to information technology, and have been able to interweave with each other to form a single artistic whole, the old, strictly delineated production and reproduction lines can no longer be maintained.

2) Previously separate actions or functions such as: searching, communicating, and producing, which have until now mainly been facilitated by physically separate organisations and institutions, will henceforth take place more or less simultaneously, thanks to information technology.

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.

In December 1996, Turnhout’s public library, the "Openbare Bibliotheek Turnhout", Linc (Leuven), and ACS-i (Amsterdam) presented a research and development program to the European Commission in order to lay the foundations for an intelligent meeting space which 1) does justice to the multimedia character of the information culture and 2) gives local communities low-threshold access to the entire array of services: search, communication and production, of the knowledge and information system.

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 01 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:

1. a database
2. an Automated Collaborative Filtering system (ACF)
3. multimedia production tools

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. 1) It regulates traffic between 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:

1. make access to relevant information for local communities considerably easier
2. promote communication between citizens themselves, and between citizens and local associations and local government
3. offer citizens the possibility of expressing themselves in a creative way within this new communication environment

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.

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.

Useful addresses and information

The partners of the co-NEXUS consortium are:

• The Turnhout public library, performing the role of coordinator;
• ACS-i (Amsterdam), responsible for building the Agent Like Device;
• LINC (Leuven), which is developing the methodology.

The environment in which the Agent Like Device will be tested and refined consists of: the Openbare Bibliotheek Turnhout; the Centrum Basiseducatie Kempen (Kempen Centre for Basic Education); Elcker-Ik Turnhout; the Projectencentrum (Project Centre); Dinamo (CC De Warande).

ICATT (Amsterdam) is responsible for the technology behind the Agent Like Device. The High School for Arts in Utrecht, MA interactive multimedia, is responsible for the interaction design.

The progress of the project can be monitored on the co-NEXUS website: http://www.conexus.org

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