Jan Szczepanski said:
> 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.
No, I'm sorry, but I can't agree with you. I have worked in the
knowledge industry before--I was a scientist. What we librarians
provide is information, not knowledge. Knowledge is based on
information, but it is due to processing information, acting on it,
understanding it, and even developing new information from it. That new
information gets published, and libraries then provide it. Knowledge is
a personal thing--the analysis and understanding of information gathered
from both outside resources (books, friends, teachers) and from our own
senses and observations. Information is what can be recorded. A
teacher can give a student all the information you want, but until the
student internalizes it, understands it, and can use it him- or herself,
it isn't knowledge. We may be in the business of _helping_ people gain
knowledge for themselves, but what we provide is information.
Steve McDonald
Steve.mcdonald_at_tufts.edu
Received on Tue Jun 29 2010 - 08:37:42 EDT