Open access and the last-mile problem for knowledge

Peter Suber, a thoughtful essay, as always:

In telecommunications the "last-mile problem" is the problem of connecting individual homes and businesses to the fat pipes connecting cities. Because individual homes and businesses are in different locations, hooking up each one individually is expensive and difficult. The term is now used in just about every industry in which reaching actual customers is more difficult than reaching some location, like a store or warehouse, close to customers.

We're facing a last-mile problem for knowledge. We're pretty good at doing research, writing it up, vetting it, publishing it, and getting it to locations (physical libraries and web sites) close to users. We could be better at all those things, but any problems we encounter along the way are early- or mid-course problems. The last-mile problem is the one at the end of the process: making individualized connections to all the individual users who need to read that research.

The last-mile problem for knowledge is not new. Indeed, for all of human history until recently it has been inseparable from knowledge itself and all our technologies for sharing it. It's only of interest today because the internet and OA give us unprecedented means for solving it, or at least for closing the gap significantly.

The problem is not that librarians "warehouse" knowledge in the pejorative sense of that term. On the contrary, they go out of their way to help users find and retrieve what the library has to offer, and often do the same for much beyond the library as well. The problem is to make individualized connections between knowledge, wherever it lies, and users, wherever they are. Even a well-stocked and well-organized library staffed by well-trained librarians can only solve a subset of that problem and connect a subset of users with a subset of knowledge.

Read the whole thing - it is excellent and thought-provoking.