Gatekeeper or signposter?

We did a practice run of our BOBCATSSS workshop for some of our colleagues last week and this has been the starting point for some interesting discussions.

The librarian's traditional position of authority, as gatekeeper between the user and the information they seek, is now being eroded - as Chris Anderson identified in The Long Tail, anyone can now publish their thoughts online, without the need for a publisher's investment in printing or distributing their material. And as so much information is available free of charge, the power of the one who holds the purse strings is diminished.

Perhaps we can get ideas of how we should redefine our role as librarians by examining the response of publishers, who are facing a similar threat.

As the quantity of information increases, so does the gap in the market for services which help the user to find that which they need. So the quality control (peer review) and marketing aspects of the publisher's role become more important than the physical production and distribution of the content.

Some forward-thinking media organisations have responded to the potential threat of user generated content by incorporating it into their publications - for example the BBC News site which invites video or photo contributions from the public, or The Guardian's Comment is Free blog site in which regular columnists from the newspaper engage in debates with the readership, the highlights of which are reproduced in the paper.

These organisations understand that in a sea of user generated content, the quality material can be hard to find - and so they become signposters, pointing their readership towards the stuff worth seeing. There are, of course, other ways these services could be provided (e.g. Digg, Reddit) ; but as established information brands, publishers and traditional media organisations have a head start in these roles.

Likewise, as librarians we have an established brand within the user communities we serve - people are accustomed to coming to us as a source of quality information, so the way to ensure that we have a role in the changing information landscape is to demonstrate that we are participating in it and just as able to apply our skills here as we have been throughout history.

University of Google?

The Telegraph has an article about how students are "turning to the University of Google" for quick, easy answers. The academic concerned, Professor Tara Brabazon from the University of Brighton rallies against an academic world where she describes using these search engines and Wikipedia as "white bread for the mind". She continues to suggest that we need to teach students interpretive skills before we teach them technological ones. (Although I would have to argue that most of the literature suggests that these students don't need technological skills - check out the post on the PEW Internet report).

Unfortunatley, the article strays away from the librarian's role, other than to mention that the "decline in libraries, with diminishing book stocks and fewer librarians, sites such as Google offer easy answers to difficult problems." No mention is made of how we can provide user education, which is a shame. Anyway, you can make up your own mind. The article is here.

you read it there first

"The easy access of the Information Age means we're all librarians now, but without the crucial training"

So wrote Clive Thompson (in Time Out) back in 2004(!)

(Thanks to Peter Suber who compiled the now-defunct RLG news digest ShelfLife in which I found this quote. Peter now edits Open Access News which is also highly recommended)

Library of congress agrees - everyone's a librarian now

There is a fascinating blog entry that absolutely agrees with Mark and I that everyone is a librarian now. Or at least according to the library of congress. They are posting archive photographic material to flickr so that crowdsource tagging can help them organise the pictures. They want people to:

"tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images." Available here: http://www.loc.gov/blog/?p=233

The role of the librarian.

As part of our workshop for BOBCATSSS, we are trying to pin down what we feel is the role of the librarian. What we thought would be a quick slide has turned into a massive brainstorm, and naturally has even touched upon Ranganathan. We've distilled it into a number of areas, but are interested in what you think. Comments please!

Everything is Miscellaneous - By David Weinberger.

Read. This. Book.

That would be my advice to anyone interested in trying to grasp an understanding of how and why the information professional profile is changing. I was all set to do a review of the book, when Mark pointed out that there was an excellent one available at ALA Techsource...

But I can't resist mentioning a couple of points - he talks about the limitations of atoms, and how something like Wikipedia will always benefit over more traditional resources such as the paper based Brittanica because of there are no limitations on the number of articles and links that are embedded within. Whilst I agree that quality of information is crucial (and an area that perhaps Mr Weingberger doesn't cover in enough detail) I think the atom one is a beautiful analogy.

Teaching

We recently had some franchise students vist the library. Franchise students are ones that, although their final qualification is awarded by Sheffield Hallam, have their teaching undertaken by one of the Further Education Colleges in the area. The ones I saw were a collection from Sheffield College, studying Tourism. The difficulties arise when I have to show them what resources are available electronically as they normally don't have access to our electronic databases. Instead, we covered a number of online resources including Intute and Google Scholar. I managed to pull together a delicious page for them and put the presentation on slideshare.