Rinne, Nathan (ESC) wrote:
> In any case, I argue that librarians are elites much like doctors are
> elites.
Hmmmm. I'm not at all sure that I would *want* to be an elite much like
doctors are. They pass laws against anyone "practicing medicine without
a license" and people actually go to jail for that. We don't forbid
others from organizing information, and don't try to outlaw information
that was organized by someone else. I'd like to think that librarians
work *with* their users, not *on* them.
We do act somewhat like doctors in some ways, and ones that I'm not
happy with. Some of our users are the very experts who are creating the
materials we organize. Those users undoubtedly understand the subject
matter better than we do, but we don't allow them to take part in the
subject organizing of the library. We ignore their view (their
terminology, their idea of where their book fits into the bigger
picture) and impose our own. We act like there's only one legitimate
view, the one we are "licensed to practice."
My measure of a librarian's value would be in how much she or he
facilitated the creation of knowledge, not how much organization s/he
imposed on documents. In this highly networked world, facilitating
knowledge may take the form of allowing users interested in a topic to
find each other, or allowing users to show *their* view to others.
Basically helping build the conversation around the resources. And this
is the thing that I don't see us doing today.
kc
--
-----------------------------------
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
------------------------------------
Received on Wed Aug 01 2007 - 16:07:05 EDT