Coming out of lurkdom ...
Hear! Hear!
In essense, the value of what we do is to empower our users towards a goal
of lifelong learning. As such, it is our privileged mission to engage our
users in meeting their needs, rather than to impose our views onto them. Our
users needs can be met in different ways-- certainly through face-to-face
mediation in the way that Thomas Mann has described, or through the
application of more user friendly web interfaces that allow users to find
information on their own in addition to functioning as a way to build
connections through social networks that facilitate scholarly communication.
I don't think this is an either-or situation.
The measure of a librarian's value is intimately tied to facilitating access
to knowledge in ways that have meaning to our users, not to us. That is a
key difference in how our profession differs from the legal and medical
professions.
Andrea
*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*
Andrea Leigh
Metadata Librarian
UCLA Film & Television Archive
1015 No. Cahuenga
Hollywood, CA 90038
voice: 323-462-4921 x13
fax: 323-469-9055
email: aleigh_at_ucla.edu
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu]On Behalf Of Karen Coyle
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2007 3:17 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Elitism in libraries.
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
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Received on Wed Aug 01 2007 - 17:20:27 EDT