Anne J. Gilliland-Swetland and Virginia Walter
Department of
Library and Information Science
University of California at Los Angeles
212 GSE & IS Building
Los Angeles, CA 90024-1520
Phone:
(310) 206-4687
Fax: (310) 206-4460
E-mail:
swetland@ucla.edu
When
Domains Converge:
The Emerging Information Professional
GENERAL SESSION II: Converging Domains,
Thursday,
February 13, 1997, 11:00am - 12:30pm
The emerging information culture brings with it the potential to enfranchise marginalized or completely new user groups, liberate traditional resources from the confines of their media and their repositories, facilitate life-long learning, and nurture new communities. A key role for library and information science education is to create the professionals and the research that will ensure that this potential is met.
Graduate education for information professionals has until now tended to focus on producing well-rounded generalists or narrowly focused specialists. It is our contention that in the rapidly evolving information culture of the twenty-first century, neither approach is appropriate. The twenty-first century information professionals will not be constrained by old labels. They will be reference librarians who are also patron educators. They will be archivists whose clientele happen to be children, or children's librarians who create digital archives. There will be cataloguers who tame the World Wide Web, and netsurfers who add value by packaging the information in new and usable ways. We propose that the first generation of twenty-first century information professionals should be skilled boundary-spanners, masters of the overlaps where domains converge, and nimble negotiators of the ambiguous and emerging grey zones between existing entrenched disciplines.
Building on the theory and research of such people as Kenneth J. Gergen (The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life, New York, Basic Books, 1991), Seymour Papert (The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer, New York, Basic Books, 1993), and Sherry Turkle (Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1995), we suggest a curriculum approach that is as fluid and evolutionary as the social and technological context in which we live. As our exemplary case, we point to the convergence at UCLA of what might at first appear to be unlikely partners: archival studies, children's information services, and multimedia technology. We are involved in several educational and research initiatives that are seeking to understand the shifting and overlapping boundaries between schools, libraries, museums, archives, homes, and entertainment providers that result from the availability of networked multimedia. Within this environment, we see the potential to prepare graduates who will be able to:
- Help users articulate and meet their needs in a complex, changing, and fragmented information environment
- Create new roles for information professionals in non-traditional settings
- Design new information systems and institutions to meet changing needs and opportunities
- Work with communities to exploit the potential of new information technologies
- Create new information products and delivery mechanisms, such as digital archives of primary sources for children or networks for minority entrepreneurs, which empower new user groups
We will present a paper which expands on these ideas and illustrates them with examples of multimedia projects and curriculum initiatives currently under way at UCLA
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