The concept of the end-user, as employed by the information industry, is an outmoded and deceiving piece of dogma that has seriously misled a number of companies attempting to develop products for the digital marketplace. As part of my yearlong campaign of challenging the status quo, I am devoting this column to the manner in which we target electronic information products and the reasons why that approach is increasingly inappropriate. The idea of the end-user arose out of the bibliographic instruction movement in librarianship. This movement emphasizes the role of the "expert novice" and suggests that people outside the profession should be moderately to extensively schooled in using information resources. Bibliographic instruction predates electronic information and, in earlier manifestations, stressed education in the intricacies of paper indexing and abstracting services. What characterizes bibliographic instruction is an emphasis upon the nuances of information tools and the belief that interested non-professionals are motivated to gain high levels of expertise in using information tools in their areas of expertise. Bibliographic instruction has molded our concept of the end-user as a person who is willing, even motivated, to seek out the correct sources of information and to endure any number of interface abominations that publishers decide to install. DEVELOPMENT OF THE DIGITAL END-USER From the 1970s through the middle 1990s, there was an extensive proliferation of information databases. Starting in the mainframe environment with access through acoustical modems, database access exploded with desktop access through the growth in availability of the PC in the early 1980s and the CD-ROM in the mid 1980s. By the mid-1990s, databases were making a migration to the Internet, revolutionizing issues of access and licensure.
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