Jim Weinheimer said:
“People need help when they search for information, and they need to rely on people who follow a code of professional ethics. (Sounds like a librarian!) But unfortunately, people are all too often unaware of what they are missing, or what they are really looking at.”
To which Bernhard Eversberg replied:
“Yes! But it will always be better to try and help them _become_ aware instead of, to the contrary, not try at all and wring our hands behind our backs but leave them in their immature (as Kant would have it) attitude.”
I agree with Bernhard that it’s better to try to help users become aware of the help that is available than it is to NOT try to do so. But how do we put that into practice? In my 30+ years in librarianship I’ve come to the conclusion that we librarians are not very good at getting this message across.
For example, with the explosion of web resources in the 1990s, we librarians were fond of saying things like (to quote Jim W) “People need help when they search for information, and they need to rely on people who follow a code of professional ethics. (Sounds like a librarian!)”. We’ve been saying things like this for 15+ years, and we’re still saying them today, and I doubt we’ve seen a huge increase in people thinking “I think I’ll find me a librarian for help in searching Google.”
Bernie Sloan
Sora Associates
Bloomington, IN
Received on Mon Feb 23 2009 - 19:22:26 EST