Wiegand: Mom and Me

Ok. I'm a little torn here.

On the one hand, it absolutely makes sense to consider and honor information seekers' needs and values. Forcing them in unwelcome directions would be counterproductive, but also just plain rude.

On the other hand, how far do we take informational subjectivism? If people are seeking or interpreting information in ways that I'm confident will lead to unhappy things, should I honor their personal information economies by letting them go down in flames?

What if, instead of a new Buick Century, Wiegand's mom had taken advice from slacker friends in her garage band and fallen in love with a nasty, gas-guzzling, repair-prone, chartreuse and fuchsia deathtrap? Though I certainly want and need to consider the information seeker's mental space, there has to be some point at which it's not only valid for me to employ my own, but ethically required.

Morris: Toward a User-Centered Information Service

Like Dewdney's librarians (p. 27, right column), I found the constructivist sense-making model "intuitively reasonable." Anyone who's staffed a phone- or email-based support service has eventually made a similar discovery: people think that they want simple facts, and are often quite certain about which facts they want, but when you take the time to understand their context and their real needs you end up going with them in a much more helpful direction.

I appreciated reading some specific suggestions on applying the model, and was especially taken with the idea of librarians going into the field (the lab in this case) to get involved in the information-seeking process earlier.

I was also struck in the early parts of this paper by the sense of fear and urgency that's been a subtext of several of our readings. Several times now, authors have suggested that the entire Librarian profession is at risk if it doesn't rethink itself in some fundamental ways.

Elmborg: Teaching at the Desk

There were nice thoughts here about treating the reference desk as a learning desk, though I was puzzled by the special focus on comparisons with composition teaching, since Elmborg's points apply to nearly any teaching situation. It does take uncommon discipline to answer a question with a question, and doing that can encourage people to be more active learners. I was struck by parallels with the Montessori philosophy.

As technology makes access to facts increasingly mundane, it's even more important that librarians provide something beyond mere data. Teaching patrons how to explore information is a wonderful example of that.

Pawley: Hegemony's Handmaid?

I certainly agreed with some of Pawley's points. For example, the dominant class will work hard to remain dominant; we should carefully consider the effects of corporate funding on libraries and LIS programs; many disciplines are over-concerned with becoming Sciences; more important than giving low-wage workers information age skills, we should ensure that no one earns a low wage.

The paper didn't persuade me of other points. Is LIS’ growing emphasis on technology an attempt to become a Science, or is it a recognition of technology's information-sharing value? Is the information age an intentional ploy by corporations to control information? LIS offers few courses with a class-based worldview; does that reflect the dominant class' agenda, or just the human tendency to focus on tangible gratification, the kind provided by the concrete, bite-sized outcomes of the managerial and pluralistic worldviews?

I guess I'm struggling to see the hegemonic invisible clearly. I appreciate the invitation to struggle, though, since I hadn’t considered looking for it in LIS before now.

Kelly: Scan This Book!

When reading a technology enthusiast/apologist/utopian, it's interesting to think through the dark side of the vision. Kelly concedes that the "dethronement" of the copy means it's harder to compensate creators based on their ownership. But copy-blind compensation works for scientists and so, he suggests, why not for authors?

Might the "scientist compensation" model lead to a world of elite authors (perhaps salaried by publishing houses) and unpaid or low-paid hobbyists, but with a smaller group of part-time professional authors? It seems as though, despite the political hurdles, rolling back the 70-year-post-mortem copyright lifespan would be a more direct way to address the "dark library" problem.

(I just noticed this related news story...)

Olson: The Power to Name

It was eye-opening to think of information classification as an activity that risks not just inconveniencing people, but also marginalizing them. Groups at the top of the hierarchy get first priority, and the classifier decides which groups are dominant.

Recently I’ve seen some discussion of folksonomies (folk taxonomies) which are at the opposite extreme: they provide a total lack of structure and let classification grow organically through users' choices. I wondered whether Olson was referring to that approach when she wrote, “…users could be encouraged to create their own links between documents… and leave a trail for future users.” Maybe the real solution lies somewhere between the extremes: classifiers providing a loose framework and “real people” working out the details organically.

Buckland: Information as Thing

It was a fun argument (especially "antelope as document"), and I was with him for a while, but I ultimately agreed with the other side. It seems to me that information is a mental representation. If there are no thinkers, there's no actual information, just potential. If a book sits in the forest and you're not around to read it, does it make you smart?

And... I don't feel that's a problem. Some scholars feel that information systems/science aren't dealing with "real" information when dealing with tangibles, and that seems to bother Buckland. For me, "information system" is short-hand for "system dealing with representations and transmission of information".

As information professionals we'll deal with information-as-thing and information-as-process, so that people can experience the "real" thing (information-as-knowledge). That's good enough, and important enough, for me.

Information Ecologies

I’ll definitely recommend this book to others, especially Section I, which was more idea-rich. Section II was helpful, though I felt it could have made its points more briefly.

I agree that we shouldn’t view all technology as inevitable. Fear complicates things, though. Oppenheimer helped to create the Bomb in part because it was a sweet problem, but “we” created the bomb because we were afraid that “they” would beat us to it. That argument gets played out in less grim scenarios whenever a company innovates to avoid losing money or jobs to another company. It’s a troubling reason, but it increases inevitability.

I agree that rapid change can stress our minds and souls. It devalues the wisdom of age, too, which deprives us of a centering force. I’ve also seen an interesting argument that it’s leading to a rise in immaturity among adults: a “child-like flexibility” that leaves many modern adults with minds that are “unfinished”. I’m hoping to finish mine this semester.

I loved the idea of technology as text, with designers sending us messages in bottles and hoping that we’ll receive and understand them. The Design of Everyday Things, and a book that I have a love/hate relationship with, Alan Cooper’s The Inmates are Running the Asylum, make the point that sometimes designers put very little thought into the message before sealing up the bottle.

I was struck in the Pueblo example by the value of identity (non-anonymity). They could address many problems in their small information ecology because everyone’s identity was public. Anonymity tends to diminish civility in large ecologies.

I enjoyed the idea of Gardeners, who are in some sense domain-limited volunteer librarians, acting as intermediaries between people and information (technology). In many situations a full-time information professional isn’t needed.

That the Internet removes intermediaries is in many ways a good thing. I hadn’t thought of that ecologically before, though: some of those intermediaries provided value through context and advice. Can information professionals help to fill that void?

The idea of Information Ecologies is a beautiful one, and works well. Nardi and O’Day provided some great examples and teased out some helpful principles. I'll look at more situations in terms of their ecology now. I would have liked more concrete advice on creating or tuning a good ecology. That seems at least as intimidating as the System model: a rainforest is a complex place to understand, let alone balance.

Saracevic

It was really fun to see LIS crossing into cognitive science, since I majored in philosophy of mind. I hope we’ll see more of that. I enjoyed the “information science looks like Australia” analogy, but didn’t follow the examples behind it. I generally followed the idea that information science has a Basic cluster (about the nature and structure of information), an Applied cluster (about information use, interaction, and retrieval), and a gulf between. But when Saracevic gave a list to illustrate the Basic cluster, it seemed to me to include things that involved information process: “communication in various populations”, “information uses”, “information seeking behavior”, and the like. So now I’m less sure that I really understand the distinction Saracevic is making.

Wiegand

In Wiegand, I really enjoyed reading about the principle of “library faith” and watching how it played out through the decades. It seemed essentially an “if you build it, they will come” model – or maybe more appropriately, “if you build it, they will come and read well”.

You can see the same debate play out in so many places: will individuals naturally improve through good choices, or do we need to be more directive in choosing peoples’ experiences for them? As the internet keeps increasing everyone’s information access, it’ll be fascinating to watch how library faith plays out there. Will people choose to distinguish between good and bad information, or at least distinguish well enough that they generally get more knowledgeable and literate? Will they even be able to distinguish?

Rusch-Feja

Caveat: I'm about to take a quote out of context and blow it out of proportion – not to be rude, but because it made me think. From the final paragraph: "To survive the massive challenges to the profession, the librarian must become an information specialist..."

It's a little troubling to think of a profession in terms of its need to survive, rather than in terms of the world’s need for the profession. I'm sure that's not what Rusch-Feja intended, but even so, for me it raised an interesting question: what will the profession survive to become? Over time will it shift to increasingly focus on digital media, to the detriment of other areas? Will it broaden and fragment into so many sub-disciplines that it becomes hard to recognize what they have in common? Or will the disciplinary threads that run through all the diverse areas get stronger and pull them all together?

Pauley

This article provided a good, brief overview of library history, and while I appreciated getting so much history in so few pages, I was a little disappointed that it started so... now. Even libraries from the 1800s sounded familiar enough in their broad outlines that it made me wonder how Renaissance, Medieval, and ancient libraries differed. I suppose I should go see what Wikipedia has to say about "Alexandria".

Something that hadn't occurred to me, and I'm a little embarrassed that it hadn't, is that introducing technology into a library doesn't come without a cost -- the cost being time and money. Budgets for both of those resources are finite, and "supplementing" a library's reference service with email, chat, or web-based options risks "reducing services to those without computers". It seems as though there would be ways to get the best of both.