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.

Infrastructure is the easiest to understand. Without a reliable source of electricity, computers do not function. Battery power will take you only so far; then you need to plug the machine into a wall socket to recharge it. As wireless technologies become more widespread--and if laptops that can be recharged by cranking, as the Negroponte $100 laptop promises to do, catch on--some of the infrastructure barriers to information access will decline. However, the availability of a constant, reliable electricity source remains essential to most online information access today.

It's not just technical infrastructure. Common sense tells you that some organizations need information that others don't. A financial institution library will probably not subscribe to a patents database, while a chemical company has little need of a banking information database. A company such as Knovel, with its emphasis on scientific data, is not particularly appealing in a general business environment, although it is highly desirable in scientific circles.

Geographic restrictions also play a role. If I only do business in the U.S., I won't subscribe to a service that provides information exclusively on Asian companies. The keyword here is "subscribe." For occasional use, subcontracting or payment by credit card for one-search or 1-day access are options. It's that worldview again, remembering that information is available on a pay-as-you-go basis. For company research, it's also important to remember that even a local company may have international reach. It might own a subsidiary, distribution center, or sales office in another country. Those entities could come under scrutiny by the local press in that country or cause the company to file some type of financial report there that contains valuable information.

Recognizing that differences exist among even professional business searchers, LexisNexis did some clever design work when it created its "new Nexis" interface. Although the underlying data is exactly the same and sits on a common platform, the search screens are tailored to individual country search patterns. It's tabular in design. Across the top of all the search screens are tabs for the major search categories: News, Company, Industry, Public Records, People, Country Profiles, and Legal in the U.S. The U.K. version's tabs are News, Companies, Industries, Countries, and People. Why does the U.S. prefer the singular Company while the U.K. wants the plural Companies? I don't know, but the difference probably stemmed from the extensive customer interviews LexisNexis did in the respective countries.

Click on a tab and the search screen that appears is optimized for that type of search. A company search, for example, has a box for Company Name(s) and a name lookup facility, plus a search box for free text terms to which LexisNexis SmartIndexing can be added. Another box restricts the search to specific sources. Date restrictions are available via a drop-down box. The U.S. version has a box for Ticker Symbol; the U.K. one doesn't. Related Links, on the right-hand side of the page, link to mini-tutorials on topics such as "How do I search by company name?" or "How do I use the company name lookup option?" Similar tutorial questions, tailored to the topic, appear on the other subject search screens.

Money is another barrier that is easily understood. The great appeal of the Internet is free information. In many parts of the world, library budgets won't stretch to pay for premium content. Creative solutions to the fiscal issues have emerged from both content producers and customers themselves. Regardless, at some point, even researchers in well- funded organizations can bump up against a source that's simply unaffordable.

Sometimes just knowing that a resource exists, even if you can't afford it, provides valuable information. Take standards, for example. Thomson's TechStreet [www.techstreet.com] can tell you what international code books are current as of 2006. So if you need to know the latest building, plumbing, mechanical, or fire codes, TechStreet is happy to sell you the book or CD. Unless you have an ongoing need for this, you're better off finding it in a nearby library and looking at the relevant pages.

It's the geopolitical aspect of global information flows that really grabs people's attention. It's become apparent that Web search engines are inconsistent in the answers they give to search queries. If I'm traveling outside the U.S., I am sometimes unable to connect to Google.com. Instead, in Paris Google insists on showing me Google.fr; in London, it's Google.co.uk. Identical search statements return different results because the search engine knows where I am. Since the search engines glean most of their revenue from advertising, this geographical pinpointing aligns with advertisers' desires to sell me things where I physically am. This is an entirely different scenario from that of traditional online information companies.

This is antithetical to what information professionals expect. If I do a search on Factiva, I'm confident that I will receive the same information regardless of my geographic location. According to a Factiva spokesperson, "Factiva's philosophy is to provide our customers with full access to the content for which they have contracted, regardless of their location. We have never encountered a situation where the laws of a particular jurisdiction have required us to filter the database, edit an article, block access to anyone, or provide any legal authorities information about any of our users."

What Factiva, LexisNexis, Dialog, EBSCOhost, and ProQuest offer subscribers is very different from what Web search engines do. They search structured, fielded databases. Index terms are applied from a controlled vocabulary. It's possible to determine the number of records in bibliographic databases. In contrast, Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and other Web search engines are not searching a "database" in the same sense as traditional online services. Web search engines spider Web sites to create their databases.

Legalities can be another sticking point. The Web search engine companies must follow the law in each country. This means not selling Nazi memorabilia in France, but it also means censoring searches on terms such as freedom and democracy in China. Google, Yahoo!, and MSN all admit to censorship in China. Internet companies have to deal with regulations that affect their business in other countries as well, even in the U.S., which has the PATRIOT Act, according to Yahoo! cofounder Jerry Yang during the JMP Securities Research Conference [http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595%5f22-6047606.html]. "There is no 100 percent clean, no matter what country you're talking about."

Surely there is no comparable censorship among traditional online companies--or is there? If you are a U.S. company (and the bulk of information professional stalwart provider companies are), then U.S. government sanctions on countries in which you can do business apply. It was only in early 2004 that the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) ruled that the IEEE could include its members in Cuba, Iran, Libya, and Sudan, countries sanctioned by OFAC, in the association's peer review and publishing activities.

Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) was recently named International Company of the Year by the Columbus Council on World Affairs. It does business in 88 countries, but Cuba is not one of them. A CAS representative points out that infrastructure is a major barrier to access in many countries but that the service in Japan is actually enhanced, with the addition of a Japanese lexicon.

EBSCO Information Services "does business in every country (more than 200) with the exception of those that have commerce restrictions as dictated by the State Department." Interestingly, the company is allowed to sell the databases everywhere, but there are some countries where on-site training is prohibited. In a WebEx world, that's not a serious deterrent. EBSCO "has a national license with Cuba for all universities and we have national licenses with Iran, Iraq and many other countries, including a large number in Africa."

According to a Gale spokesperson, "There are no countries where Thomson Gale does not do business." That's pretty hard to believe, given the U.S. government's trade laws--and my question about restrictions on data was ignored. More realistic are the companies that channel relationships with U.S.-sanctioned countries through a subsidiary headquartered outside the U.S.

None of the traditional online information companies believe that their databases are being censored in any way in China. Dialog, for example, has about 1500 customers in China and has never had complaints about missing information. CSA is one of the few companies that actually maintains data on a server in China, but it is managed from the U.S. Again, the company has had no complaints about missing data.

Individual database producers, however, do balk at having their information available in certain countries. Dialog is very transparent about these terms and conditions, which are imposed by the database producers. NTIS' World News Connection, File 985, has geographic restrictions (unavailable in Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, or North Korea) as does the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Science and Technology, File 103, which lists on its Blue Sheet the countries in which it is available (only 54 countries: Spain but not Portugal, Italy, or Greece; Nigeria but not South Africa; South Korea but not Japan). This reminds me of D&B's refusal to sell its data in South Africa during apartheid.

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.