Information Professionals as Intelligent Agents--Or When Is a Knowbot Only a Robot?

With the explosion in information resources being developed by computer scientists, subject specialists, librarians, and commercial companies, the challenge for the information professional is to keep abreast of the most significant developments and to distill the information for a wide range of users. This paper looks at some of the developments in electronic libraries on both sides of the Atlantic and the impact on the information professional. New projects involve multimedia, hypermedia, user interfaces, and other aspects of the integration of diverse libraries, and show that methods of research are also changing. Information professionals must continually keep aware of new techniques and sources if they are to contribute to their usefulness. Intelligent agents are beginning to replicate some of the tasks which are familiar to librarians, such as current awareness, but intelligent agents can also act as a tool for the librarian. The challenge for the researcher and developer, and also for the librarian, is to make an efficient transport system for the information superhighway. Knowledge robots and 3D visualization are tools to simplify the increasingly complex and diverse information world. However, pooling skills and resources between information professionals will become ever more essential. (Contains 41 references.) (Author/SWC)