The Step-by-Step Guide to Information Consolidation and Repackaging

Every day, libraries and information centres face the same challenge: there is simply too much information, and most users have too little time to sift through it. A researcher does not want fifty articles dumped on their desk. A policymaker does not want a 300-page report when a four-page summary would do. This is where information consolidation and repackaging step in. They turn scattered, raw, and often overwhelming information into a clear, usable product tailored to a specific group of users. The process is not random; it follows a logical sequence of well-defined steps. This guide walks through each stage, from understanding what users actually need to gathering feedback that makes the next product even better.

What information consolidation and repackaging mean 🔗

Before looking at the steps, it helps to be clear on the concept. The idea was formalised by Tefko Saracevic and others, who in a landmark 1981 handbook described consolidation as the evaluation, restructuring and repackaging of scientific and technical information for a defined audience. In their definition, consolidated information is public knowledge that has been deliberately selected, analysed, evaluated, and possibly restructured to serve the immediate decisions and information needs of a specific clientele who otherwise could not easily access it in its original bulky form.

A useful way to remember the goal: it is about providing the right information, to the right person, in the right form, at the right time. Restructuring deals with the content or substance of information, while packaging deals with the form in which it is presented. The two work together. The core processes Saracevic identified include selection, evaluation, analysis, synthesis, restructuring, packaging, dissemination, and marketing. The five stages below group these processes into a practical workflow.

Step 1: Understanding user needs 🔗

Everything begins with the user. If you do not know who you are serving and what they require, the rest of the process collapses. The criteria for selecting, evaluating and repackaging information are drawn directly from the potential clientele, not from the convenience of the information centre. This is why studying the user before attempting consolidation is treated as a foundational step rather than an afterthought.

Identifying the user population 🔗

The first task is to define the user group precisely. Are you serving postgraduate students, agricultural extension workers, hospital clinicians, or small business owners? Each group has different reading habits, subject knowledge, and time constraints. Skipping this step is a common mistake, and it produces information products that are not particularly usable for anyone in particular.

Assessing what users actually want 🔗

Once the group is defined, you need to find out what they need and in what form. Standard assessment tools include user surveys, questionnaires and interviews, which let the library evaluate expectations and requirements directly. The aim is to map three things: the subject areas users care about, the level of detail they can handle, and the time they realistically have to engage with the material. A clinician on a busy ward and a doctoral student writing a literature review will answer these questions very differently.

Step 2: Selecting and evaluating information sources 🔗

With user needs mapped, the next stage is to gather candidate material and judge its worth. This is two activities in one: selection and evaluation.

Selecting relevant sources 🔗

Selection means choosing which items are worth consolidating from the vast pool available. Sources can be drawn from research institutes, government publications, online databases and networks, and even indigenous or local knowledge. Grey literature, such as conference papers, technical reports and unpublished studies, is also important here, even though it can be unattractive in form and hard to track down. The point is to cast a wide net before narrowing down.

Evaluating reliability and credibility 🔗

Not everything collected deserves a place in the final product. Evaluation involves judging the accuracy, completeness and consistency of the information, and combining material from different sources requires careful critical thinking. This is where the information professional’s subject expertise matters most. A piece of information might be relevant to the user’s topic but outdated, biased, or methodologically weak. The evaluation stage filters these out, so that only trustworthy content moves forward. Getting this right protects the credibility of the entire service.

Step 3: Analyzing and synthesizing information 🔗

This is the intellectual heart of the process. Selected, evaluated material is still a pile of separate documents. Analysis and synthesis turn that pile into something coherent.

Analysis: breaking information down 🔗

Analysis means examining the content of each item closely, extracting the key facts, findings and arguments. It separates what is essential from what is incidental. The analyst reads with the user’s needs firmly in mind, pulling out exactly the elements that will answer the user’s questions.

Synthesis and restructuring 🔗

Synthesis goes a step further. It integrates data from multiple sources into a single, cohesive whole, which Saracevic described as a process requiring both technical and intellectual effort. The extracted information is then restructured so it can be used most effectively, and this may involve condensation, rewriting, simplifying, or producing a state-of-the-art review. A common output of this stage is the review article or state-of-the-art report, which pulls together everything known on a narrow topic into one readable document. The result is not a summary of one source but a new piece of knowledge built from many.

Step 4: Packaging and dissemination 🔗

A brilliant synthesis is useless if it never reaches the user or arrives in a form they cannot use. Packaging and dissemination handle these two concerns.

Choosing the right format 🔗

Packaging refers to how the restructured information is physically presented, and the aim is to enhance the acceptance, use, assimilation and recall of the content. Common formats include:

Print: Reports, bulletins, brochures, fact sheets and bibliographies remain valuable for formal publications and contexts where digital access is limited. Print is still trusted and easy to circulate.

Digital: E-newsletters, PDF reports, web pages, databases and RSS feeds allow rapid updating and wide reach. Digital formats are searchable and cheap to distribute once produced.

Multimedia: Infographics, short videos, audio summaries and interactive dashboards suit users who absorb information visually or who are working on the move. Multimedia can convey complex relationships far faster than dense paragraphs.

The right choice depends on what was learned about the user in Step 1. The information centre needs a thorough knowledge of the target audience, the message, and the message carrier.

Disseminating to the right people 🔗

Dissemination is the distribution and delivery of the finished product through appropriate channels. It requires deciding which channels will actually place the product in users’ hands, whether that is email, social media, a library portal, printed circulation, or face-to-face delivery. Two well-established library services illustrate targeted dissemination.

Current Awareness Service (CAS) is a proactive strategy to keep a broad group of users informed about the latest resources and developments through tools such as email newsletters, social media posts, RSS feeds and bulletin boards.

Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI) is the more personalised cousin of CAS. Proposed by Hans Peter Luhn of IBM in the late 1950s, SDI works by building a stored interest profile for each user from keywords, subject terms and other criteria. When new documents enter the system, they are matched against these profiles and only relevant items are sent out. It delivers pinpointed information to an individual or a small group with shared interests, saving them the effort of broad, time-consuming searches.

Step 5: Marketing and feedback 🔗

The final stage closes the loop and is too often neglected. Producing a good information product is not enough; users must know it exists and you must learn whether it worked.

Marketing the product 🔗

Saracevic explicitly listed marketing among the core consolidation processes, alongside selection, analysis and dissemination. Marketing here means promoting the product and educating users in how to use it. Even the most carefully synthesised report will gather dust if the intended audience never hears about it. Promotion can be as simple as announcing the product through library channels, demonstrating it to user groups, or training users to interpret it correctly. Consolidation is itself part of library marketing, because it identifies user needs and works to close the gaps between what users need and what they can access.

Gathering feedback and improving 🔗

Feedback is the mechanism that makes the whole process self-correcting. After dissemination, the service collects users’ reactions to evaluate how useful the product was and to make adjustments. In an SDI system, for example, feedback is used to refine the user profile so that future matches become more accurate. Across the wider process, feedback feeds straight back into Step 1, sharpening the understanding of user needs for the next cycle. This is why consolidation is best seen as a loop rather than a straight line: each round of feedback improves the next product.

Bringing the steps together 🔗

Seen as a whole, information consolidation and repackaging move from people to product and back to people. You start by understanding the user, gather and evaluate sources, analyse and synthesise the content into something new, package and disseminate it in the right form through the right channel, and finally market it and collect feedback. Each step depends on the one before it, and the feedback from the last step renews the first. Done well, this process is one of the most valuable services an information centre can offer, because it directly tackles the problem of information overload that every modern user faces.

What do you think? If you were designing an information product for first-year college students in your own subject, which dissemination format would reach them most effectively, and how would you measure whether it actually saved them time?

References

1. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED226753
2. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ333390
3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/selective-dissemination-of-information
4. http://faculty.washington.edu/harryb/courses/INFO%20Course/Definitions.htm
5. https://www.lisedunetwork.com/relation-between-current-awareness-service-cas-and-selective-dissemination-of-information-sdi/
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_dissemination_of_information