Global Information Flows.

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Author: Ojala, Marydee marydee@xmission.com

We'd all like to believe that information flows effortlessly around the globe, traversing national boundaries with the ease that water flows downhill. Increased Internet access has opened up an enormous number of resources that come in many languages and are sourced from many countries.

It's become obvious that a worldview is necessary. Not looking beyond your national boundaries is an invitation to incomplete--and sometimes disastrous--results. The field of competitive intelligence has long known this and thinks globally when assessing competitive risks. The task of obtaining business information has become vastly easier with the addition of what librarians refer to as "gray literature," the uncataloged, often ephemeral pieces of information floating around in print form. Now they're being digitized or at least referenced on Web pages found by Internet search engines.

Here's one example: The Wall Street Journal reported on Jan. 25, 2006, that Research in Motion, Ltd. used Norwegian Telecommunications Administration reports published in the mid- to late 1980s and housed at a Trondheim university (I hope in the library, although the article doesn't specify) in its patent dispute with NTP, Inc. over Blackberry technology. The article also does not specify how RIM's "tipster" found the Norwegian documents. A Google search? WorldCat? A marketing research reports database? Was it through freely available Web sources or a subscription database offering premium content? Regardless of how RIM surfaced the information, the fact remains that the resources to discover those Norwegian reports have expanded considerably in the past decade.

Yet there are parts of the world that lack the rich information resources North American searchers, and their European counterparts, take for granted. Sometimes the problem is infrastructure, sometimes it's financial, and, on more occasions than information professionals would like, it's geopolitical.

I asked several business library managers if they had encountered any problems with their global contracts. None could recall an instance where an information provider told them that one of their libraries couldn't have access to part of the data. This begs the question of having an information professional in the U.S. search, say, Dialog File 103, and send the results to a colleague in Japan.

Does information flow across national boundaries with the ease that water flows downhill? Not entirely, but there are fewer man-made dams than there used to be. Some naturally occurring snags, created by downed tree limbs, storm debris, and wildlife, still exist. Particularly for business researchers, access to international information is getting easier all the time. That means it's getting easier for your competitors as well. If RIM can find documents in Trondheim, your company will expect you to be able to find something even more obscure in a more remote part of the world

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By Marydee Ojala

Marydee Ojala [marydee@xmission.com] is the editor of ONLINE: The Leading Magazine for Information Professionals.