> A quibble and an invitation to lynch me.
>
> > * identification of the authoritativeness of sources,
>
> I'm not so sure how important this is for *scholars*. Put bluntly,
> authoritativeness is a chumps' game. It's what undergrads substitute
> for knowledge, training and judgment. It's a sometimes dangerous
> shortcut to knowledge, not the road itself.
>
> A classics scholar confronted with an article on Alexander does not
> think about how "authoritative" the article is. *They're* the
> authority; they think about how true, smart, well-argued or useful it
> is! You'd only care about "authority" if you were fishing in some
> alien field—looking into dates of Arabic manuscripts or needing some
> information on crop rotation.
Sorry, I don't buy it. One thing that is absolutely critical for scholars, set up by them and they are in complete control, is the entire process of peer-review If something hasn't gone through peer-review, a lot of faculty don't want anything to do with it, and they certainly won't get their tenure or promotion. So, authoritativeness is of supreme importance to their own worth, and to their entire publishing and career path. Look at the debate over the use and worth of open archives!
It's nice to think that scholars already know everything in their topic, know all the "relevant" people and don't need anything else, but any reference librarian who has sat with a scholar knows that they need our help and some even appreciate what we do!
Of course, many librarians are subject specialists also and publish regularly. Also, I have worked on lots of metadata records originally created by experts who cataloged their own articles. From the subject point of view, the insufficiency came from the fact that they were *not* specific enough, and that a cataloging expert could hone in and supply far better subjects.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Tue Mar 03 2009 - 13:41:46 EST