Librarianship: the Forgotten Silver Bullet?
By Hamish
(From a conversation with Elisabet Soederhielm and Bo Andersson from Astra Zeneva at the Amsterdam LarKC meeting.)
Very often, moving in information technological circles, we hear statements like “the technology must give us something for free or no one will use it”. Often the context is the organisation and navigation of complex information spaces, and a frustration arises in those knowledgeable of the history of what used to be known as librarianship (and may now be the preserve of the corporate data curator, or the academic information scientist). Web technology has made publishing very low cost, and Web 2.0 has shown us how to mine user behaviour to make navigation and organisation lower cost. Nevertheless, just as the best wikis always turn out to have a commited user group doing lots of editorial work, so the technology is only ever a facilitator for human efforts, and never manages to replace all the detailed skills which the information scientist learns through years of hard work.
In other words: on the one hand the technology still doesn’t measure up as a replacement for skilled people; on the other hand the IT story is a powerful one, and nowadays organisations are reluctant to pay for skilled curation staff (and librarians are less common as a result).
For those of us working on technologies that support users deploying richer information models (or “semantic technology”), a related problem is the difficulty of persuading users to experiment with more complex mechanisms than they are currently familiar and happy with (e.g. conceptual query instead of keyword query).
What to do?
I suspect that part of the answer is to use the technology in ways that lead users to invest more time in learning organisational skills, and that a key technique is to start with the small and uninstrusive and build up to more sophisticated features later on. One way to think about this is that when we approach a new end-user community and start deploying our technology, we should start by exposing functionality at a level something like the Information Science 101 introductory lecture (as opposed, for example, to the post-doctoral master class in description logics!).
Perhaps we’re really all librarians in training, which, as a computer nerd, is definitely a step up in the world :-).