In an academic library context, anyway, I heard a way of describing what
we do recently that really appealed to me.
The goal of an academic library--with regard to our students--is taking
high school students who do not know how to do research, and turning
them into skilled researchers.
The way this is done though, is NOT by having library systems that are
only usable by skilled researchers (and again, I suspect that even the
faculty demand easier interfaces than we are currently giving them).
Instead, it's having systems that meet the users where they are at, that
work for the high school students AND the faculty AND provide the
'ladder' to move from one to the other. The more research skills you
get, the more library tools should be able to offer you, but they should
work for as wide a range of users as possible. Both these parts are
important: We can not give up on serving the novice user; we can also
not give up the idea that our systems provide sophisticated tools for
the advanced user. I think both are entirely possible, I don't think we
need to give up either one to get the other.
Jonathan
Andrea Leigh wrote:
> 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
> ------------------------------------
>
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Thu Aug 02 2007 - 09:24:34 EDT