Maybe I am the only librarian on this planet that are not in the
"information" business. At
least I have that feeling. As a librarian, working with collection
development, I thought I
was in the "knowledge" business. I don't want to make anybody angry, but
I think that
people that don't know anything about knowledge prefers to talk about
information, like
admininistrators, technicians and heads of libraries. To make it easier
to understand, it's
like the difference between malt and whisky. Information is easier to
handle than
knowledge. Knowledge that can sometimes lead to wisdom. We can supply
destillated
knowledge but not wisdom.
Some are obviously in the information society and a few in the kingdom
of knowledge.
To capture the quality of knowledge, the relevance of knowledge in a
catalogue is
impossible.
Jan
Alexander Johannesen skrev:
> Sloan <bgsloan2_at_yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm not so sure I agree that, in some future world, the catalog "will still be the
>> key to it all." I'm not even sure that the catalog is "the key to it all" now. I
>> know it's not "the key to it all" for me. It's more like an inventory tool for me.
>>
>
> I agree with this; I think the future is for libraries to become a
> part of information management infra-structure of the world, and try
> to get away from "that place down the road where you can get books."
> I'm not sure how many times I've said this, but the future of
> information management does not lie in *bibliographic* meta data, nor
> in the management of physical objects. No, it lies in giving
> information management services to the world who needs it, like
> identity management, knowledge extraction and curation, virtual
> hosting of journals (and semantics between them), and so on. We need
> librarians and catalogers to scour the net and sort it out in ways
> that people would need. Books and structure is out, chaos and overload
> is in.
>
>
>> I remember reading a couple of studies about the discovery methods
>> used by academics. I can't recall a lot of details, but I do remember that
>> the library catalog wasn't "the key to it all" when it came to their information
>> seeking behavior.
>>
>
> The more people use the catalog, the less they trust their library
> having the resources they need. The library (including OCLC or some
> other world-wide library catalog) simply isn't big enough to support
> all that they might want to get; blogs, deep data, other online stuff
> like chatter and tips, intra nets, and on and on the list goes.
>
> Unless the library grok this distance between what the library has got
> and traditionally have done with where the future is heading, there
> simply may not be a library future. I know that's bleak, but tell me
> otherwise ...
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Alex
>
--
De åsikter som framförs här är mina personliga
och inte ett uttryck för Göteborgs universitets-
biblioteks hållning
Opinions expressed here are my own and not
those of the Gothenburg University Library
Jan Szczepanski
Förste bibliotekarie
Goteborgs universitetsbibliotek
Box 222
SE 405 30 Goteborg, SWEDEN
Tel: +46 31 7861164 Fax: +46 31 163797
E-mail: Jan.Szczepanski_at_ub.gu.se
Received on Tue Jun 29 2010 - 02:12:06 EDT