The world is dynamic and changing. Ricardo Aroja has a song entitled Jesus verbo, no es sustantivo -- complex dynamics or chaos theory vindicates this as does process theology. In the post information age (yes post) flexibility is the key. My children of the Nintendo generation see and react differently to the world because they grew up in cyberspace's antiroom.
We need to concentrate more on capabilities for people to think and not on the subject matter which can be verified via traditional testing systems.
Major corporations have gone to schools of business and said -- forget the certification, that will be done on the job -- give the students skills and we will provide the context.
Education that certifies is NOT forward looking. You cannot certify for that which is not yet -- you can only certify the past because that is all you can measure. It is up to the student to certify themselves for the future. When we can stop thinking about certification, then true knowledge and learning will be in the front. Otherwise education is doomed to be a production line turning out CERTIFIED antiques.
1. Rich works in the media department of a public school system in a mid-sized Michigan city. In addition to his responsibilities for a variety of traditional information sources (print, audiovisual, and so on), he is working with a group of students on a project to study Michigan history. Their specific aim is to look at the history of the mining industry of the Upper Peninsula. Using high-speed telecommunications links, Rich is able to connect his students with a number of unique resources at many sites in the Upper Peninsula: scanned images of rare documents, such as company records, photographs, newspapers, letters, and diaries, as well as oral and video histories made by people who worked in the mines. He is also able to allow students to consult and work directly with archivists and local historians via live video teleconferences. Their final project is a documentary video which incorporates many of these elements, and which is shown on the local public broadcasting station.
2. Edna is with a public library in one of Michigan's largest cities. Her work is with First Steps, a project designed both to bring together a number of resources in an easy-to-use fashion, and to raise awareness of the library among the citizens of the City as a place to start when they are faced with problems which involve information. She is the designer and maintainer of the First-Steps Web site, which is available via the Internet, and which provides access to a wide range of community-focused resources, such as census and economic statistics, government publications and information, legal information, and so on. A number of computers throughout the library are provided for use of the site and other information searching tools, and Edna is available for individual consultation in using and understanding them. As the web-site designer, Edna's responsibilities also include surfing through the Internet to find appropriate resources for inclusion as well as mounting local resources and creating new information products and systems. First Steps is discovered by a number of community and advocacy groups, and they are able to use the resources and information they find via the web and working with Edna to create proposals for local and state government for community improvement.
3. Diane works in a university/research library of one of the premier educational institutions in the state of Michigan. Although her office is physically located in the graduate library, she works all over campus. She interacts with faculty and researchers throughout the university as a member of a number of collaborative research teams. Not only does she provide general library and information support to these teams, she also acts as their technological consultant, and does discovery and organization of Internet resources for them. One of her teams is a large, cross-disciplinary group, geographically dispersed, which is studying the effects of deforestation on climate. They are connected by an information system which combines electronic mail, voice communication and sharing of data gathered from a number of devices at remote sites. This team is one of several at the University which has elected to make the results of their research known via electronic publication, and so the report they produce (a multimedia document containing video, data sets, audio commentary, internal and external hypertextual links as well as text) is never "published" in traditional ways. It becomes a knowledge resource which is really never finished. Commentary and annotations from the scholarly community are incorporated, and the document continues to grow and improve as time passes.
4. Kiesha is a free-lance cyberdesigner. In cooperation with a team of computing and networking professionals, she consults with corporations and other organizations to help them make their information systems more efficient and easier to use. For a recent undertaking, for a large corporation, she designed a ubiquitous computing environment. The building was rewired, and a speech recognition system was installed to provide hands-free operation for many frequently used resources and routine processes. The existing electronic mail system was upgraded and supplemented with a video and voice paging system (also speech-activated, with appropriate privacy features) which locates a desired person and opens a high-bandwidth channel for communication. This system extends beyond the headquarters building -- a number of senior executives and researchers expressed a desire to have their homes or other sites included, so satellite links were installed. In addition to providing a number of alternative methods of accessing both locally held as well as networked information resources, keyed to the needs of the users, Kiesha's system allows for rich and detailed collaborative work.
Are these scenarios realistic? Do they go too far? Do they not go far enough? How would you rewrite these scenarios? Have you envisioned other scenarios? Please share your scenarios of future graduates with us.
She might also be involved with many distance learners who do not actually attend the physical university. She will work with these students electronically, helping them access information from their homes.
Academy for Educational Development (AED)
1875 Connecticut Ave. NW, 9th floor
Washington DC 20009-1202
Telephone (202) 884-8096 Telefax (202) 884-8400
JTIFFT@AED.ORG
I have often wondered at the compulsion to find "theoretical foundations" that I've noticed surfacing repeatedly in library literature. To me it is so patently obvious that the appropriate model for library instruction is the Harvard MBA or MPA model of cases, that I wonder at never noticing it mentioned anywhere. (I'd love to know if anybody has gone into it at all.) The research and technical models (with a nod to Tefko Saracevic) are fine so far as they go and suitable avenues of specialization, as they are in the business realm too, but to my mind certainly not the be-all and end-all of professional training in the information field, which, like business, whether for-profit or nonprofit, encompasses the spectrum of organizational endeavour from the individual to the social to the technical. The skill sets required are therefore also just as broad. There are places in the information field not just for people who need rules or prefer solitary work but also for people who are good negotiators and visionary managers. I think the reason that the information field has perhaps drawn an excess of the former and an insufficiency of the latter is just that the training has a focussed on the type of research or technical approaches that appeal only to the former.
In winter 1993, our dean gave the following charge to a task force of faculty in the School of Information and Library Studies at the University of Michigan: "Is there a core of concepts, theory, skills, knowledge, experience, which provides the basis for a broader array of future-oriented professional practice in information systems and services, including but not limited to current forms of libraries?"
(Searching for answers to this question were the first steps that our faculty took toward launching the CRISTAL-ED Project.)
How would you reply to such a charge?
The above was in response to this posting from James Sweetland, sweetlnd@csd.uwm.edu:
I have been reading the comments with great interest. Re: the most recent list, re skills/competencies/etc. I may just be getting too old, but the full list in vol 2 (3) sounds not much different from earlier lists from the sixties and earlier about "librarian" competencies. Some of us may remember the job descriptions wanting several languages, experience in cataloging and reference, ability to work with people and books (and possibly computers, too), etc. etc. As I recall, some such lists were presented in the early days of affirmative action, to justify requiring master's degrees for librarians. And, as I also recall, in many places we were laughed at. And, in many places, we can no longer require such a degree. And, according to ALA's accreditation newsletter, the federal government is on the way to ceasing to accept ALA accreditation at all, since nobody really seems to justify requiring it anyway.
As a former graduate (December '92) with a keen interest in the future of the school, I have been asked by acting dean Nancy Van House to compile a list of SLIS graduates (or similar programs from other universities) who are doing "non-traditional" kinds of work, and interview them develop a sense of the ways MLIS degrees are being used outside of traditional library settings, and to elicit suggestions and input regarding the curriculum of the new school.
The term "non-traditional" covers a lot of ground, some of it taking place in traditional academic and public libraries, and can include such areas as digital libraries, image databases, organizing and presenting internet resources (in gophers or web servers), developing search engines, the list can be very long. Besides the obvious need to test the range of the field, contacting some of these specialists is often more difficult than in library settings, where professionals are likely to belong to organizations like ALA and the network of connectivity is fairly strong.
My request to CRISTAL-ED subscribers is twofold: If any of you are engaged in non-traditional library work even as only a part of your work and are willing to offer me half an hour or so of your time in a phone interview, I would be most appreciative. This is a very open ended kind of interview, mostly there are broad questions about your own work, how your graduate training helped (or hindered) you, and how a new program like UCB's SIMS might be useful for your area, and what courses you might recommend. Secondly, if you know of people who might be valuable for this project, I would be grateful if you passed on their name and address to me.
I can be reached at (510) 540-0332 in Berkeley CA or preferably by email at fielden@info.berkeley.edu.
This is a heady time for library and information professionals, and the themes raised are vital and difficult for us, both immediately and for the future.
>3. Diane works in a university/research library of one of the premier >educational institutions in the state of Michigan. Although her office
> >Are these scenarios realistic? Do they go too far? Do they not go far >enough? How would you rewrite these scenarios? Have you envisioned other >scenarios? Please share your scenarios of future graduates with us.
> At our Campus we are starting construct a model somewhat similar to model 3 (http://www.anu.edu.au). Individual groups on campus are starting to publish their own material direct to the web and links to material which their peers on the net are producing. There is a role to be filled in providing assistance for electronic publishing and organizing the links to internal and external information. Whether in the long term these tasks are done librarians awaits the jury's decision but so far they are. The "library" as place maintains it role as the home of books and other physical information artifacts, as a comfortable study place and as a point of access to the net.
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