The same will happen, no doubt, with the access to digitally transferred information; we will get more formatting options, faster file transfer, better graphic encoding and picture decompression. But this alone does not mean that we will cease to be befuddled users clicking wildly and in vain in search of this particular one, urgently needed piece of information.
The information professionals have to try and create some form of sensible organization of electronic data, giving the user a quick and clear-cut access to needed information. A good example of what I have in mind may be the increasingly popular Mosaic or Netscape access to World Wide Web. Both formats, with their hypertext capabilities, are clearly an improvement over "wildcard" searches via Internet. They introduce some sort of linear logic into data retrieval.
Nonetheless, a path
Environment ---> Animals ---> Farm Animals ---> Farming ---> Farmers ---> Rural Communities ---> Education in Rural Areas ---> Job Openings For Teachers in Rural Areas
although certainly displaying some kind of kinky logic, is not something we would like to serve the user/client. As long as artificial intelligence remains within the realm of sci-fi, the information professionals must put their own intelligence to use in connecting output and input of the data flow.
I see a need for intensive research on effective ways of organizing/trimming/sorting/cataloging.....,etc, of digitally available information. The Heap of data is no longer a desired structure, what is becoming necessary is a sophisticated yet intuitive Registry.
For public libraries, I envision a real shift in services; reference will be on-line from home, for the most part. Adult recreational readers will probably drop in to download their reading and cart it off; the library and future youth services librarians will take leading roles in the educational community.
The library will be even more important as a socialization agent for very young children and support provider for their families. Print-rich in picture books for the very young (young children need tactile, kinesthetic, visual stimulation then as now), the library's strength will be in early childhood literacy. Librarians will be teachers and role models for care providers, since a growing number of parents are working sooner than ever after births.
About the age of 9 or 10, kids will make the transition into e-books. Youth reference will be a model of cooperation between school and public libraries, since electronic communication makes it easy to share not only materials, but plans.
That's a start, anyway.
This is fundamentally an economics question. The market will decide which graduates there is a demand for and since traditional LS programs have spent years training the "students who love books" there seems to be excess demand for and by the students who want the new technological skills.
In 20 years my guess is that there will be three types of LS schools; those that specialize in training the techies, those that specialize in the traditional LS education, and those with sufficient faculty resources to do both. The mix of these three types of programs will be determined by the demand for the different types of graduates.
I forsee a tremendous training bottleneck that is visible today in various settings such as academic libraries and on campuses where "universal access" to the Internet has been instituted. In companies and institutions too, employees do not use software tools to their full extent and never seem to completely learn an application before it is superceded and new things must be learned.
We have made much available already, with more to come, but access is not sufficient without adequate training at many levels. It is still a legend that elementary and secondary school students are computer literate. I have been doing research on their search logic reasoning abilities, and have found that they are not prepared to use Boolean logic.
It is also a legend that user friendly systems have developed or will within the next five years. This is not the case because the hard problems of incorporating user models into system design have not yet been solved. In reality, several search approaches yield different results for the same query.
I believe that we need to educate our LIS students to be trainers in any information environment they care to work in. There will always be a need to facilitate the use of systems, whether from home, library, community organization, office, or school.
I find it very useful to remember that novices will always be with us, and that we will always be novices in some respects ourselves because we never seem to become completely familiar with the systems that we use, and because we will always be challenged to learn new systems.
How should a future-oriented professional program prepare information professionals for a future in which this vision is realized?
What I am trying to say is that when everyone is so technologically proficient that http and ftp are as common as a&p, reference work may indeed be primarily through the net. However, I doubt that recreational reading will be a thing of the past.
The other point related to professional education. When seeking to educate people about the use of technology there is a good case for equipping them with enough technical know-how in order that they can make use of the available information technology but there is, I think, an even stronger argument for sensitizing them to the need to select the appropriate tool for both the information to be supplied and the user.
What especially interests me is to discover whether the 'core' curriculum concept is still recognized and used, albeit with names other than 'Management', 'Cataloguing and classification', 'Information sources and services'. Is this still our expectation of what all students of Library and Information Science should study alongside individual specializations?
The key issue in my mind is how does the ILS world continue to provide value-added service in this hybrid world. How should the fundamental mission of information access (physical, intellectual, and long-term access) be conducted in this increasingly hybrid -- any time, any place, any format -- world?? What does this mean for the profession, the organizations, and ILS education??
I agree, it will be a long time before many people will want to curl up with a computer screen for recreational reading -- but I predict that increasing numbers will in the future. Screen and battery technology will get much better over the next decade and some people will prefer the multimedia rendering that is not possible with p-o-p alone. There will be mush more choice and personalization/customization possible -- some will want the p-o-p version -- some will want the integrated media version -- and both will exist. But ILS professionals need to have command of both/all...
Because the future is so uncertain, focusing on knowledge alone is no longer sufficient. Library schools should concentrate on preparing professionals on not only how to adjust to constant change but to take a leadership role in bringing it about.
In broad terms, I think education should prepare information professionals to be flexible, visionary, people-oriented, and willing to take chances. They will need to understand the basics of relevant technology and, equally important, know how to keep current with changes in technology, even anticipatory about changes. They must be able to take leadership roles and have the ability not only to work with people but be able to persuade people to work with them and in groups.
To accomplish this, library schools will need to become more interdisciplinary. Courses in technology are already being taught, but added to that should be courses that teach and/or encourage effective communication, persuasion, risk-taking, flexibility, and positive thinking. The latter is an absolute must,in my opinion.
I realize that this is not specific to today's course work, but I think we need to look for the qualities in our library school candidates that will enable them to become the information professionals described above. Then we look for ways of instilling them with this knowledge and skill.
Are the services the Council is talking about welfare services, or psychological support and consulting for distraught and idle people?
I think that the greatest challenge in this "technological" world is how to use the new technologies for the well-being of all humans, and not only for the rich and the information literate. Access to information is one thing, access to a job, food and lodging and human dignity is much more important; I don't see much of these preoccupations on the Net.
"What I am trying to say is that when everyone is so technologically proficient that http and ftp are as common as a&p, reference work may indeed be primarily through the net. However, I doubt that recreational reading will be a thing of the past."
While I agree with you about certain types of recreational reading, I think that the definition of recreational reading is broader than what you suggest. It is not just curling up with a good book. I believe it is any reading that you are doing more for pleasure than for profit. Reading listserv digests, or joke files, or whatever, on the internet can be considered recreational reading. There can be no doubt that recreational use of the internet is on the rise, and will continue to rise. We, as information professionals, will be called upon by the uninitiated to help them find their way around the net, to show them how to find the resources on the net that they want.
So far, so good. But then I remembered the fun reading times out on the porch, in the easy chair in the living room, sitting in the car waiting for my daughter to finish a piano lesson....will our information age really change that...AND change people's behavior. Somehow I think not.
Then there's the problem of information management, especially from my point of view which is as an archivist. Today I have people who want to research the history of their house. Are all the abstracts ever written going to be online AND indexed? Are photographs on some family's 1999 Photo CD going to be locatable or even readable? Once city directories switch from being in print, to being electronic, is there going to be an electronic BACKFILE? If so, where and who is going to support the costs of maintaining an electronic city directory so you can track people and property and addresses into the past? Today, we save the books.....what do we save if there are NO books?
I know of organizations publishing electronic newsletters. Great! Where are the back copies? On someone's hard disk? Will they disappear when space be- comes a premium? What happens when an organization or institution (our SERVER) for example, "pulls the plug" or goes out of business? Today, you transfer the record files to the next organization or to an archives.
Information management is so much more than controlling, filing, and locating CURRENT information. For electronic information, where is the past data? In October 1994, America Online pulled the plug on its Commodore online service (QuantumLink or Q-Link). There were thousands of files and message boards on that system which ran from 1983/84 - 1994, and they're gone. One board consisted of genealogy where people posted queries, like "looking for the Jones family of Madison County, Ohio, 1850s".... In libraries, we try to place such queries in accessible vertical files for the next user who may or may never come. The information may get older, but it does not negate the value in terms of providing information links to others.
These are the kinds of questions for which there are little or no answers. In- deed, CD and database compilers/publications are in the business to make money. In truth, they could care less if the information is valid, footnoted, retained permanently, comprehensive, etc. It is market-driven.
When anticipating future research and historical information needs, I am very nervous that the information (1) may not survive, (2) may not be accessible, and (3) may be in such form that future equipment cannot read it. Also are we anticipating that EVERY information-seeking agency is going to have the equipment and resources to access the equipment.
Just some information-provoking thoughts.
I truly am looking forward to a wired future, but read literally the above statement is quite frightening. What ever happened to privacy?
I am regularly bothered by beepers that go off in the middle of a concert, or by people interrupting a face-to-face conversation with me to answer the phone.
And, since a commercial society will not be able to keep ads off the net (after all, one person's junk mail is another's eagerly awaiting catalog), the shear amount of data incoming could pose real problems. A future-oriented library school should be looking hard at filtering programs, forcing individuals to define wheat and chaff and setting priorities.
The wired future also integrates functions previously considered separate. I believe librarians will have to look hard at records management and be able to provide advice and services to our traditional patrons to help them organize their private information banks. Today, we see our responsibilities stopping at the copy machine; tomorrow we should extend our reach into the office file cabinet, or the local hard disk, or personal digital archives.
Obviously, digital archives in general is a whole fruitful field of study.
In the UK recently there has been some discussion of the "feel bad" factor - and it emerges that there is great pessimism among those in jobs because of repeated "downsizing" (euphemism for job-loss), because of moves towards temporary employment, contract employment and the like. The idea, advanced by management gurus like Handy, Peters, and Drucker, that people will have "portfolio careers", moving from one contract to another, from one occupation to another, does not seem to appeal to the majority of people who look for security of employment, for a regular wage that pays the mortgage and the household bills.
What does this have to do with the future of the information professional? Several things: first, with many people seeking security and consolation, the role of the public library as a support agency will grow in importance - but because of the lack of understanding of this role and a denigration of its importance, it is likely to be under-funded, and its practitioners to be ill-rewarded. We may well see public authorities relying increasingly on volunteer workers from the jobless to perform the role as those who can afford the professional education seek better-paid careers elsewhere. The professionals who want to work in the pl sector will need good political and PR skills to get their messages across to voters and politicians.
Second, the information future is likely to bring closer to reality the idea of the virtual library, with "end-user" access the norm, and with special libraries declining in numbers and in staffing - this is already happening. I do not believe that there is a decline in the need for information professionals, but they are less likely to be located in special libraries and information units in companies and other agencies, and more likely to be spread across an organization serving small groups, research teams, management teams, etc. Outside the professional librarians, they always have been - witness the special roles in market research, planning departments of local authorities, financial information, etc.
The virtual library is unlikely to lead to the disappearance of academic libraries (in spite of the recent note about a university planned without a library - they'll realize their mistake), because much will remain available only in print (all of that out of print stuff, for example - in spite of Project Gutenberg). However, the day of the monolithic university library is probably over - locating information professionals closer to the user groups will become the norm.
What does this mean for education? It means we have to deliver people with high interpersonal skills, high skills as technology users, strong subject skills to provide support to user groups, entrepreneurial abilities (or, perhaps, "intra-preneurial") to provide cost-recovery services within organizations, and extensive knowledge of both networked and conventional information resources - and the ability to build their own.
It is essential that rural communities and environments, often without the blessing of an MLS and still light years behind in cyberspace terms will go deeper, excuse my expression, into the hole.
Although I have yet to arrive at a solution, it definitely is a concern.
Michigan and Drexel will be there and we will learn from them about their Kellogg Curricula. Blaise amd Michael will challenge us, and maybe provoke us a bit -- which is great. The Wilson point, a pretty good balance between technological hysteria and "L" word nostalgia, ought to be required reading and listening among the LIS education crowd.
After 30+ years of working with the public I have to say that this is a wild overstatement of the reality which exists.Only knowledgeable and well educated citizens are going to be able to take full advantage of such a structure.
The classic foundations of education will still have to be there but the information professional will need to more knowledgeable about how people obtain and use information. Cross-disciplinary courses in the effect of technology on cultures will be more valuable.
Greater strides will need to take place to make these systems more usable for a large segment of the population. And this really doesn't have as much to do with education as it does with whether or not people are connected as a result of the work they do or involved because of their personal interest. There is a large group out there that still is not on board. I know many highly educated people who have an aversion to the electronic processing of information just as I know of far less educated individuals who have the same feelings.
As far as preparation of future information professionals goes, we need individuals who have all the requisite talents mentioned in earlier discussions to plan and interpret systems, but what we also need is a perspective that recognizes that the central issue is not so much the technicalities of systems but the collection and delivery of information to patrons to respond to a need.
And in the workplace, then, we have what I view as an increasing need for development of our staff to understand the team environment in which they operate, to be able to contribute to that, and to deal successfully with the plethora of methods available for accessing information for our users. For that is the goal I think we have: not so much a great process, but the great and effective delivery of information to our users-- the process we use being a way of doing that.
"Intellectual work is social work -- notwithstanding the myth of the solitary genius -- and the university is a social institution. The Internet can enhance the society of the university and quicken its pace of discovery and invention, but the electronic environment cannot replace physical human society. We humans cannot thrive in a bodiless, frownless, smileless ecology, and our intellectual society cannot be complete without physical interaction," says the University of Pennsylvania's provost -- a point of view that author Lewis Perelman characterizes as "an expression of hope triumphing over logic." (Chronicle of Higher Education 1/27/95 A22)
In the past, the most publicized advances made in Information Sciences have focused on doing those things that allow people to find information. What has not received enough attention is what is being done to address then fundamental question that the library users has when they walk into the door, "I want to KNOW...." In changing the focus from information management/sciences to knowledge management we come closer to being able to support the knowledge workers of our evolving society.
What is Knowledge Management? I take the position that, "Knowledge Management is the collection of processes that govern the creation, dissemination, and utilization of knowledge."
Now that is a very arrogant sounding statement. By the use of the word "govern" it seems to propose that this universal, etherial element that we call knowledge can be restricted, controlled, and manipulated by some "governing" body. This idea does not go down well with a lot of people, and it never has. Yet many attempts have been made over the ages to do just that, some successful some not, some beneficial and some not. We have referred to these attempts but such names as; scientific thought, religion, education, security classifications, etc. Some of these knowledge management schemes we recognize as good and others not so good. But either way, Knowledge Management in one form or another has been around for a long time. Practitioners have included philosophers, priests, teachers, politicians, scribes, and oh yes, .. liberians.
So how does that relate to the CRISTAL-ED discussions?
I feel that if we are going to properly educate those who will be running our libraries, then we must first realize that if libraries are going to help patrons meet the challenges ahead, they should step up to the role of enabling access to knowledge, not just information. This means that Knowledge Specialists must become far more integrated into the ways in which patrons are using the knowledge. In academia, this could mean removing much of the distinction between class room and the "knowledge library", between teacher and librarian. In business it could mean becoming integrated into the business process as the conduit for enabling knowledge. For the general public it might mean an stronger focus on the reference librarian's roles to include not only providing information, but access to the tools and processes that transform that information into useful knowledge.
The knowledge specialists of tomorrow are going to need all of the skills of the information specialists and teachers of today and then some! They will need to understand such diverse subjects as; general process engineering so that they can properly relate the knowledge request to the action or decision in question, decision making theory so that they can understand just what the patron needs to know to make the decision, and the psychology of perception so that they can choose the proper vehicle which to convey the knowledge to the user. And the list goes on.
As someone who is not a librarian but rather the developer of knowledge libraries and knowledge management systems, hope I have not stepped on any toes, nor come off sounding too far fetched. Since I was young, the library has been one of my favorite places and now I have discovered why, because when I want to know, that's where I go.
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