Sue Myburgh PhD

University of South Australia

Librarians and other information professionals, such as records managers, archivists and museum curators, have long been taken for granted as the almost invisible, but nonetheless omnipresent and indispensable, guardians of the record of human thought, creation, discovery and invention.

WHY do we think this is good?

In other words, why do we do this work at

all??????

Internationalisation can be interpreted in two ways: predatory and protectionist, using cultural and

technological imposition to achieve competitive advantage

can also provide the opportunity for organisations to defuse some of the more negative characteristics of globalisation, by demonstrating collaboration, co-operation, solidarity and mutual assistance.

A useful definition of the term is “the process of integrating an international/intercultural dimension into the work of an institution (Knight and Wit, 1995).

What is a digital

librarian?

If libraries are already avoided (or not used) by many people in the course of their daily activities – work or pleasure – why are we so sure that digital libraries will be embraced instead?

Action guided by habitus has the appearance of rationality but is based not so much on reason as on socially-constituted dispositions.

Van House and Sutton, 1996

Focus on documents, not information Focus on physical stores (even when

they are digital), not skills and knowledge

Emphasis on legitimizing such tasks Emphasis on LIS programs that focus on

tools and institutions, rather in transferable concepts and analysis of information work.

LIS will almost certainly not survive in its present form or paradigm, and the greatest threat to the profession is the ‘librarian mindset’

Action guided by habitus has the appearance of rationality but is based not so much on

reason as on socially-constituted dispositions.

Van House and Sutton, 1996

Focus on documents, not information

Focus on physical stores (even when they are digital), not skills and knowledge

Emphasis on legitimizing such tasks

Emphasis on LIS programs that focus on tools and institutions, rather in transferable concepts and analysis of information work.

Once upon a time, long ago and far away…

Telephone engineers (Shannon and Weaver)

On and off (binary bits and bytes) Poetry (T. S. Eliot)

Reductionism

This hierarchy is first suggested in a poem by T. S. Eliot, published in 1934, called The chorus of the rock:

 Where is the Life we have lost in living?Where is the wisdom we have lost in

knowledge?Where is the knowledge we have lost in

information?

At the centre of our universe, and guiding all our activities, is information. And it is therefore very

important to have a very clear idea of what information is.

Sadly, this does not appear to be the case…

information theory was characterised as being able to measure information, and information is associated with ‘knowing’ and the reduction of uncertainty.

Donald McKay: this theory “enables us to speak precisely and quantitatively. It provides objective substitutes for intuitive criteria and subjective prejudices” (McKay, 1969, cited by Borgmann, 1999, p. 132).

Without the – appropriated and unintentional – conceptualisation of engineers, information professionals literally ‘cannot speak’ – since to do so is to risk relegation to non-scientific categories of subjectivity, intuition, and prejudice.

Introducing a formula that appears to be able to measure information, this theory “at long last did for this crucial force of nature and culture what the sciences had done for matter, energy and organisms” (Borgmann, 1999, p. 132).  The four basic entities of the proposed model are data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. They are the four entities of information theory and can be constructed collectively as a basic entity set, denoted by S’. The mathematical representation is s’ = ( (S, \j = 1 to 4) ) = W,I,K, W>), (1) where Sr = D = data, Sz = Z = information, S3 = K = knowledge, and S4 = W = wisdom are the elements of the set.

An expression of the form is considered by convention to be equal to zero whenever p = 0. This is justified because for any logarithmic base.

“IPs collect, organise, describe, manage, preserve and make accessible… ”.

•the pattern of organisation of matter and energy that has been given meaning by a living being.

•the lifeblood of the knowledge-based organisation.

•anything that makes sense.

•something that is intended to make sense.

•an objective phenomenon, something that is generated by, transmitted in, received and stored in physical media, but the existence of which is independent of an interpreting agent.

•the presence of a 1 or 0 in a bit.•a stimulus which expands or amends the World View of the informed.

•what people or systems need to be able to carry out work practices.

‘The mother of all models’

Transmission model. Shown to cultural and communication studies as a poor, oversimplified and irrelevant example.

Information is that part of knowledge that is selected to be communicated

It is communicated by being represented in symbols (sound and image) – language

Knowledge of language (sound and image) must exist before communication can take place (i.e. mutual understanding of cultural symbols)

Access to information resources has long been considered the most important task of a library, but this is a fallacious view and one restricted by a mindset located in a time when books (or documents) were, to all intents and purposes, synonymous with ‘information’.

And what is information used for, anyway?

Learning is a process of active engagement with experience.

It is what people do when they want to make sense of the world. It may involve the development or deepening of skills, knowledge, understanding, awareness, values, ideas and feelings, or an increase in the capacity to reflect. Effective learning leads to change, development and the desire to learn more.

Information is that part of knowledge that is selected to be communicated

It is communicated by being represented in symbols (sound and image) – language

Knowledge of language (sound and image) must exist before communication can take place (i.e. mutual understanding of cultural symbols)

manage digital libraries; organize digital knowledge and information; disseminate digital information from the

computer; provide digital reference services and

electronic information services; provide knowledge mining from the

knowledge warehouses; handle the tasks of massive digitization,

digital storage process, and digital preservation;

provide universal access and retrieval of digital knowledge, ultimately access to all;

catalogue and classify digital documents and digital knowledge.

Anything to do with the Internet: navigation, browsing, filtering; retrieving, accessing, digital document

analysis; digital information and reference

services; searching digital sources and Web sites; creating home pages, content conversion; Web publishing; creating and/or archiving digital

documents; digital preservation and storage;

Anything to do with digital media (including virtual worlds)

multimedia indexing, image processing, object-oriented processing;

Information visualization; cataloguing and classification of digital

documents (must not forget – constantly mentioned);

searching and retrieval of text, images and other multimedia objects;

conferencing techniques including teleconferencing, video conferencing.

Understanding the creation and development of digital knowledge and information (communication)

development of machine readable catalogue records;

design and development of databases; design and development of software

agents for digital libraries; conversion of print media into digital

media.

Isn’t this what librarians already have to do?

Isn’t this what many other people, besides librarians and other ‘information professionals’ do anyway?

Isn’t some of this done by computer scientists?

Doesn’t this stuff change all the time?

In 1996, Kirk Hastings and Roy Tennant wrote a piece called How to Build a Digital Librarian

They stated there that: “Digital librarians are required to

select, acquire, organize, make accessible, and preserve digital collections”.

“Our primary goal was to train information professionals in practical techniques that they could use to create new kinds of collections and services using current technologies”.

digital library theory and practice (???),

HyperText Markup Language (HTML),

imaging, optical character recognition, access and indexing, selection of materials for digitizing,

and effective training techniques.

Practice is the execution of the theoretical principles embodied in the knowledge domain of a discipline/profession.

This is not unique to LIS.What has confused us is the physical

embodiment of what we deal with (‘health’, ‘law’, ‘design’, and so forth do not have a similar embodiment).

Also the sheer scale: information affects, influences or is involved in every human activity.

WHY we do this work at all???

Rearticulation of purpose Investigation of social landscape New roles in a changed/changing world

That information possesses transformative abilities is an article of faith for IPs

This transformation can occur only if the information can be interpreted by the user

Giddens and structuration Durkheim

For Castells, it is the interaction between knowledge creation, making meaning, learning and application that is a key aspect of the Information Society.

Power then is central to information – for information, as Castells in particular has so forcefully argued, is an element which must flow. Where it flows from, and to whom, is the province of power.

They control mastery of and access to those discursive resources which could provide essential competencies in an information-based economy and society, and which directly affect social and economic power.

Habermas (1962) argues, in his book, The structural transformation of the bourgeois public sphere, that art criticism, social criticism and literary criticism developed in public spaces like coffee houses. They became organised in the sense that criticism developed particular forms of communication in order to talk and write about social, political and cultural issues in society.

The success of the public sphere, according to Habermas, depends upon:

the extent of access (as close to universal as possible), the degree of autonomy (the citizens must be free of coercion), the rejection of hierarchy (so that each might participate on an

equal footing), the rule of law (particularly the subordination of the state), the quality of participation (the common commitment to the ways of

logic). rational-critical discourse (Rutherford, 2000, p. 18).

The purposes of a North American digital library system are: To expedite the systematic development of: the means to collect, store and

organize information and knowledge in digital form; and of digital library collections in North America;

To promote the economical and efficient delivery of information to all sectors of North American society;

To encourage co-operative efforts which leverage the considerably investment in North American research resources, computing and communications network;

To strengthen communication and collaboration between and among the research, business, government and educational communities;

To take an international leadership role in the generation and dissemination of knowledge in areas of strategic importance to North America

To contribute to the lifelong learning opportunities of all North Americans.

Association of Research Libraries. (1995). Definition and purposes of a digital library. [Online]. http://www.ifla.org/documents/libraries/net/arl-dlib.txt

Foucault’s notion of a library was as a place to explore knowledge, rather than to fix it, for a library provides a context for never-ending and multi-facetted knowledge creation, as each text located and read strengthens knowledge but never makes it final. Rather, a new text comes to make sense only in the contexts of those already accessed and used (in the knowledge already accumulated). In the Bibliothèque fantastique, there is no longer a canon (implying hegemony); instead everything is potentially valuable, depending on the individual searcher. Foucault (1977) writes that

  … the imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial

or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstices of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is a phenomenon of the library (Foucault, 1977, p. 91).

Possibilities for the future New service models for libraries, with more outward focus on

users; broad engagement in planning for the future and the importance of collaboration and partnerships in enhancing, expanding and re-defining library services.

Changing role of collections, comprising more information on demand, social networking and user creation (and interaction); focus on special, local and unique collections as well as shared repositories for print and electronic resources.

Staff transformation involving a re-design of work to focus on user impact and increased efficiencies; the need for knowledge and skills development and outsourcing and flexible staffing options.

Library as place and the re-purposing of buildings, including more multi-purpose community and collaborative space and less collection/information storage.

Library as social institution

How and why is knowledge createdHow and why is knowledge selected for

communication; how is it representedWho are the intended recipients of the

coded message?How do they decode it and extract

meaning and make sense?What happens when they have received

and understood the information?How does this ‘transform’ them (change

their decisions and actions)?

Understand the user Understand human information

behaviour Understand information Understand the document Understand information and

communication technologies (ICTs)

•Different curriculum – broader, longer, deeper…•Different service model in institutions….•Disassociation from libraries as ‘warehouses’; libraries rather as social institutions (like marriage)..•Acknowledgement that libraries have a social role and are willy-nilly political sites…•Recognition by us in the profession (and the wider community) of all the very useful competencies that we possess…

IF IPs DO NOT REJUVENATE THEIR THEORETICAL

FRAMEWORK, THEIR PRAXIS AND THEIR SOCIAL PURPOSE

they are doomed.

The secret to success is to know something nobody else

knows.

Aristotle Onassis

Thanks for your kind attention.

Any questions?

Sue