Re: Resignation

From: Rinne, Nathan (ESC) <RinneN_at_nyob> Date: Thu, 6 Sep 2007 06:51:39 -0500 To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu

Julia,

I think that was a great post you did.  I agree 100%!

As someone who "Googles" most every day, I think "good enough" is *just
great* most of the time.

I think the problem is when for more and more people it is increasingly
seen the only option for most everything - and when the word "relevance"
is increasingly about *MyRelevance* and decreasingly about the realities
of our the world we share.

Nathan Rinne
Media Cataloging Technician
ISD 279 - Educational Service Center (ESC)
11200 93rd Ave. North
Maple Grove, MN. 55369
Work phone: 763-391-7183

-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Julia Bauder
Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2007 3:26 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Resignation

B.G. Sloan wrote:

>  I've always thought it was interesting that librarians often use
"good enough" disparagingly.
>
>  Isn't it possible that "good enough" information can be "good enough"
for the task at hand?
>
>  Bernie Sloan
>
>
I actually wrote a post on my blog about that not long ago:
http://folksweb.blogspot.com/2007/07/satisficing-is-not-dirty-word.html
. It's more about information that's "good enough" for patrons rather
than for library professionals, but if anyone's interested, I've copied
and pasted it below.

Satisficing Is Not a Dirty Word

Another one of my pet peeves is people who complain about students and
other information-seekers "satisficing"-looking for information that is
just good enough, rather than for the best information. A related pet
peeve recently came up on PUBLIB (don't ask why I lurk on PUBLIB; there
was a reason at the time I signed up for it, but now it's mostly for
amusement value), when someone called easily searchable digital
information systems a "prop" that hinders the development of thinking
and reasoning skills.

While these complaints have a certain degree of merit to them, they
ignore a couple of important economic principles. (Humor me here; my
undergrad background is in the social sciences.) We all have a limited
amount of time, money, energy, etc., to get through our days, and we
have to make rational decisions about how to "economize" those
things-how to use them most efficiently to achieve the most we can based
on our constraints. This means we can't have it all-things that are
time-consuming might not be expensive monetarily, but they're
"expensive" in terms of another scarce quantity: time. Home-cooked "slow
food" meals might not cost more than take-out, but an hour spent
preparing a slow food meal is an hour that you can't spend, say, mowing
the grass or sleeping or doing other things that you need to accomplish.
Information is no different: an hour spent digging through a pile of
poorly organized information trying to find the piece that is needed is
an hour that a student can't spend writing the paper he needs to write,
or doing homework for his other classes, or having a life outside of
school. Yes, sometimes it's important for students to take the time and
effort to really dig in and learn the structure of the literature in an
area, to see who the big names are and what they're arguing, to learn
the contours of the discourse . . . and sometimes they just need to find
a piece of information quickly and get on with the rest of their lives.
I suspect that this is doubly true of public library patrons, who
generally don't feel the need to engage with a broad swathe of human
knowledge the way students should. So give the people what they want
already and don't make them feel guilty for having other things in their
lives that are more important to them than conducting the best
information search possible! Unless you live up to every other field's
standards of perfection: if you eat only home-cooked healthy meals,
exercise for the recommended 30 minutes per day, sleep for the
recommended 8 hours per night, maintain your home in a state of Martha
Stewart-like perfection, check the air pressure in your tires every time
you gas up your car....