Re: Watson - IBM's "question-answering" machine (potential implications for libraries?)

Thomas Krichel to Mark Huppert :

> Do you have anything specific in mind?

I'm not too sure in any case that the current LIS education
establishment is up to the task, or whether that's the right
way to go in any case. I have strong doubts -- even when it
comes to that establishment's viability überhaupt. Just
pulling the plug may be far preferable to sicking it out any
longer. ( Maybe, indeed, we should assume that Columbia
and Chicago saw the light a long time ago. )

But the realization that Mark's kind of approach is indeed
a more nearly reasonable and realistic one may be starting
to sink in.

I'm reminded obliquely of Bertrand Calenge's question
posed already more than ten years ago :

"Une question cruciale réapparaît régulièrement avec insistance:
faut-il disposer de bibliothécaires généralistes d’abord experts en
techniques documentaires, ou doit-on recruter des bibliothécaires
spécialistes d’une discipline et leur donner ensuite des outils
bibliothéconomiques?" ( - _Bibliothek -- Forschung und Praxis_
24.1 (2000), p.23 )

Even the ACRL could be seeing the light, with its allusion
to "a new educational model", whereby students -- at least
undergraduate students -- would "major in a subject area
and get a minor in library or information science or
information studies similar to teacher education programs
that require undergraduates to major in a subject area and
minor in education" ( "White Paper", 2002, Final Draft, at
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/issues/recruiting/recruiting-wp.pdf ,
p.19 ). But I fear that that may have been a weird aberration,
or just a rhetorical flourish :-).

 
- Laval Hunsucker
  Breukelen, Nederland



----- Original Message ----
From: Thomas Krichel <krichel_at_OPENLIB.ORG>
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Sent: Sat, February 19, 2011 3:42:04 AM
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Watson - IBM's "question-answering" machine (potential 
implications for libraries?)

  Mark Huppert writes

> The challenge is educate these new information services workers
> in a new way - bring something of librarianship to system
> administrators and online education specialists.

  Do you have anything specific in mind?


  Cheers,

  Thomas Krichel                    http://openlib.org/home/krichel
                                http://authorclaim.org/profile/pkr1
                                              skype: thomaskrichel