Equilibrium and opportunism : information strategies and the new environment

The substance of this article was prepared for and delivered as the keynote address at the Joint Information Systems Committee's Electronic Libraries Conference, Information Ecologies: The Impact of a New Information Species, December 2-4, 1998, York, UK. With a prefatory warning about the useful limits of metaphor, the ecological principles of equilibrium, opportunism, symbiosis and ecological succession are applied to the information economy. The potential implications for publishers, libraries, and new information types are explored.