Information Professionals as Sherpas - Part II

“…a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…” - Herbert Simon

This is part II of a pair of posts on Information Professionals as Sherpas. You can read Part I in isolation here.

I've written before about the ever increasing mountain of information. Specifically, my point about Sherpas relates to this quote, from this post:

"We’re all aware of the very real danger that libraries could become redundant, with users being able to do their own research, unassisted, and entirely online (hence the phrase you often hear bandied about, that ‘we’re all librarians now’). Who needs a library when you can find everything yourself? The answer to that may be that you need a library as a gateway to information with integrity. The current information-seeking behaviour of our users is simply not fit for purpose for searching on the kind of staggering scale we’ll be dealing with in the near future. You can easily type a key word into a search engine and get a million hits – what we professionals of information can do for you is sort the wheat from the chaff on an epic scale. We can rule out the majority of those hits on the basis of dubious authorship, or validity, or context, or even just quality. And we can provide access to those materials which are legitimate for our users (and must brand this information accordingly, so our users understand the role the library has played in assessing it). These are roles which will become more and more important as the amount of digital information becomes more and more vast. Imagine the available data as an almost random stream of sentences, arranged without rhyme or reason across a hundred pages. You might find a sentence or two which is really useful, but overall the effort required to search through it all would be overwhelming. What the Information Professional can do, is arrange the sentences into paragraphs, the paragraphs into chapters, and provide you with a Contents page, an introduction and an index. More and more, that will become an invaluable service in the Information Economy in which we live."

Edit: Good to see Agnostic, Maybe writing along similarish lines!

There is already evidence that users want some kind of guidance, that simply typing stuff into Google isn't working any more. When Facebook purchased FriendFeed, Mashable posted this interesting article about 'the new search war'. The article suggests that with its 250 million registered users (and that figure is up to 400 million now, according to Facebook's own stats), Facebook has always been in a position to lead the way in Social Search - the web search method that determines the relevance of search results by considering the interactions or contributions of users - and that now this could come to fruition. The same article also links to a blog post from Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail, among other things), from way back in 2008, in which Buchheit anticipates the power of 'human link data' and suggests it could one day become more useful than 'web link data'.

I already use human link data, in the form of delicious and blogs, and in real-time with Twitter, to get information. Particularly with more qualitative information, I prefer the opinions and advice of my network of peers than just asking Google's non-human algorithms to provide me with information I can trust. There are efforts to formalise this process, such as the search-engine Aardvark,which 'connects users live with friends or friends-of-friends who are able to answer their questions'. The wikipedia article on Social Searchis slightly dated in that it mentions Aardvark, but not the fact that Aardvark was acquired by Google last month, as Google seeks to even the odds with Facebook in the search-war... The recently launched Google Buzz is also an effort to tap into this side of using one's social and professional network as a knowledge pool.

Facebook looks well placed to win this war, which sucks for me as I hate Facebook and want no part of it. But getting relevant information from a network of real people exploits mobile technology a lot better than algorithm-based computing power does,  and in any case, look at how Facebook is grabbing people's internet-attention more and more while Google is declining slightly:

So, all of this points towards a move to more qualified information - information provided by someone you trust to give you the good stuff, rather than an anonymous piece of mathematics proffering you its results. And as I've said before, just as solicitors are the experts in legal matters, we Information Professionals need to position ourselves as the experts in information. The Information Professional has a valuable role to play. In a comment on a blog post about the #echolib debate, Gareth Osler suggested "How about a personal librarians friend on Facebook, someone who could answer questions, and maybe even offer timely advice on information" - which makes sense in this context. It needn't be one individual or one institution who provided that service - in the same way that asking your network for help relies on a number of them definitely being online at any given time, so you could have a network of information professionals, not formally organised, who all contribute to the 'friend' role whenever they are online. Might be interesting to try, and it might increase awareness of what we can do to help people.

Interestingly, there is some argument that the Information Professional could play this role without the platform of the library itself. In response to my entry to the LISNews Essay Contest, a comment entitled We need librarians more than ever; libraries, not so much was left by T. Scott. He argues (and this post is getting long so I've heavily edited this):

Libraries are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. They were built by librarians in order to fulfill our role in society -- to facilitate the connection between people and recorded knowledge for the whole vast range of reasons that this is important to people -- education, entertainment, self-improvement, science, art, religion, fun.... In the print world, building libraries as we have come to know them was the best way to do that. In the digital world it probably isn't.

We need to quit wasting time trying to figure out what the "role of the library" is in the digital age. Who cares? The library is just a tool. We know, if we stop to reflect, what the role of the librarian is -- as I said above, it's to connect people to recorded knowledge. It's the same role that we've always had.

There is an incredible future within our grasp -- but it's a future where our focus needs to be on librarians, not libraries.

Now I'm not convinced about the logistics of information professionals surviving beyond libraries - the issues of lack of collection, lack of funding and budget, lack of actual physical space to engage with people, all seem to point to difficulties there. But it is interesting to consider that in the digital age, the information Sherpa could exist without being tied to the dying building. Naturally I hope the buildings don't die, but I do think that the role of the Information Professional is less dependant on the library than it ever has been before.

- thewikiman P.S - I've just added a temporary page to this website about an upcoming event I'm presenting at. I'm afraid this events is only for CILIP members in the Yorkshire & Humberside region (ironic really seeing as the presentation is about escaping the echo-chamber...) so I don't want to do a proper blog post about it that'll clutter up peoples' Google Readers. But if you're interested you can click on the other pages on this blog link on the right, or just click here instead.

Information Professionals as Sherpas - Part I

I have two favourite facts in all the world. One is that there are more people alive than dead. (Oh my God! There are more people currently walking about on earth than have walked on earth in all of previous civilisation put together! Eeek! etc) The other is to do with the way many animals are born 'older' than humans. As we all know, a human is absolutely defenceless and fairly useless when it is born - it needs to be fed, and protected, and it can't walk, or really do anything. Your average horse, by contrast, is born, stands up, and is basically ready to gallop off down the shops for some fresh coffee and a copy of the local paper. Many animals go through the bit where they are helpless before their birth, meaning they are better equipped to survive once they are born. The main reason humans can't do this relates to our previously having walked on four-legs, and via evolution having made the transition to two-legs - in order that our hips and pelvis could support us as bipeds, they had to become much stronger. That meant (if you don't like the phrase 'birth-canal', look away now...) narrowing the birth-canal, which means we humans have to born earlier if we're to get out at all. Hence, we arrive 'younger' and ill equipped to deal with the world.

I think there are parallels with information in both cases.

The first is fairly frivolous, but nevertheless - there is much, much more information in the world today than in all of human history before us. (In fact, it is thought that more information is produced each and every day, than existed in total 100 years ago.) Here's a scary ticker showing the amount of information created this year alone, courtesy of EMC.

It is increasingly being recognised that we will soon be drowning in a deluge of information, and I've said before I think too much information is as prohibitive as too little. So the Information Professional has a role to play here, separating the good quality information from the stuff you can't trust.

In the second case, the digital revolution has effectively allowed information to be 'born younger', just like us. As the line between creator and consumer blurs (with the internet itself providing an instant publishing medium, and the increase in sharing and user-generated-content that defines Web 2.0) then information is increasingly available to us earlier in its lifecycle - perhaps prior to peer-review, or referencing, or even fact-checking. Where previously information had to go on a fairly lengthy journey between being written down by an author and ingested by a reader, now the two can happen all but simultaneously. And as such, some information is, like a human baby as opposed to foal, in need of help and guidance. We Information Professionals can help nurture information and ensure it gets to consumers in good health (which is to say, in a useful state).

In both cases, the Information Professional takes on a sort of Sherpa role. I've thought for ages that we're headed that way - with the amount of information in the world, negotiating it successfully will be increasingly impossible without a qualified guide. Seth Godin uses the word 'Sherpa' too, in his now (in)famous blog post on the future of libraries. And of the 12 differences between yesterday's libraries and tomorrow's libraries from Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk blog (you know, the one I totally ripped off for my last post! :) ) the one that struck me the most was:

9. Yesterday' libraries were all about organizing information by a set of rules. Tomorrow's libraries will be all about helping users organize information in ways that make sense to them

As I said in the comments, it illustrates the shift from Enforcer to Sherpa that we must undergo, and hopefully are undergoing already.

There are already signs that consumers of information are ready to be guided, as I will try and illustrate in part two of this, tomorrow.

- thewikiman

Library Routes Interview

Woodsiegirl and I have had quite a few approaches from people writing about the Library Routes Project, asking us for our thoughts on it and plans for where it is going. A lot of them are for regional or organisation-based publications which not everyone would get to see normally, so we plan on putting them altogether on a web-page sometime as there are lots of great pieces. In the meantime, Joseph Hughes from the University of Essex has very kindly allowed me to use the interview we did for the publication he edits (called, intriguingly, The Goose...) on this blog, on the grounds that the two readerships probably don't overlap too much! The questions are very insightful, so for anyone interested in Library Routes I thought I'd share it here. Cheers Joe! Could you give us a brief biography about yourself and your current position? I’ve worked in the academic library sector for just over four years now, at the University of Leeds. I started in Customer Services, eventually worked my way up to become Digitisation Coordinator, and now work on a JISC-funded project called LIFE-SHARE, looking at digital preservation and curation. I’ve never thought of myself as a techie person but it turns out digitisation is actually very interesting…

Why was the Library Routes Project (LRP) set up? Were there clear objectives from the outset or was it more of a whim that has developed? It was definitely a whim – it was a case of, let’s actually do something rather than wonder what might happen if we did, and then we did do something, and then it took off. Someone blogged on their own root, someone else said ‘we should all do this!’ and I set up a wiki and said, ‘let’s make it a formal movement and try and get lots of people involved’. It went from whim to fully-fledged project in about an hour, it was ace.

You were clearly at the forefront of LRP but who else was involved? (Directly or merely as inspiration)It’s very much a joint effort between myself and Laura (who blogs as Woodsiegirl) – we planned it together, we approach people to ask them to contribute, and we tidy up the wiki when peoples’ edits make the table go wrong! Jennifer Findlay (who, like Laura, is a law librarian) was the person who originally said ‘maybe we should all blog our roots / routes!’ so she definitely gets the nod for inspiration.

Have you noticed any patterns or recurring themes in why/how people got into the profession? The amazing thing is that we haven’t, really. It is extraordinary that some 115 entries to the wiki later and we’re still yet to see many people with the same roots. One theme does seem to be careers advisers – a well-placed word from a careers advisor at a relatively early age often seems to result in a Eureka moment where the person realised that actually the information profession suits them perfectly. The careers advisor who doesn’t suggest this often sends the person off on a wild vocational goose-chase that can sometimes take decades to eventually lead them to the realisation that they wanted to be librarians all along.

Do you hope that the project might break some of the traditional stereotypes of Librarianship, for both the profession and the professionals? (E.g. the strict dowdy Librarian.) I would love it if it did that, yes. Some of the participants to this project do conform to some of the stereotypes – many profess to have loved organising books as a child and that sort of thing… but I don’t have a problem with that side of the clichés – it’s when librarians deliver bad service to their patrons / customers because they are so strict or humourless or inflexible that the stereotypes really harm the profession. The LRP myth-busts to a certain extent because it showcases how diverse the careers in librarianship can be – the vast majority of participants appear not to have been able to imagine, when they first started, the job they are now in. That element of career adventure is definitely not part of the traditional stereotypes, so it’s good to bring it to the fore.

For the Project to really break the stereotypes it needs to be viewed by those outside the profession, rather than those who already have a lot of familiarity with the reality of the modern library - which is something Laura and I are working on.

Do you think careers services and other such organisations have a correct view of Librarianship? Is there a need to re-educate these facilities so a more contemporary and representative view of the profession is put across? That’s a good question, I’m not sure. I’d hazard a guess that the majority of professionals aren’t quite correctly portrayed by careers services as they (careers services) can only know so much about so many different aspects of the job market; the onus is on the professions to update and inform the careers service of the current state of play. I’m not sure what current mechanisms there are for that, it may be something I’ll go away and look into after this interview… [edit - blog readers, any suggestions here?]

Have the respondents been drawn mostly from the Blogging community or have there been a wider range of participants? The majority are from the blogging community as they are more likely to know about it in the first place – but a gratifying amount of people have created articles on the wiki itself and linked to those, if they don’t have a blog of their own. A quick look at the website today reveals just over 15% of people participating are not from the blogging community; I’ll take that, that’s pretty good.

The LRP seems at the moment to be known mostly only to those Librarians who are heavily involved with the online community. Has there been much promotion of the site through more traditional means or are there plans to do so? We have promoted via traditional means: Laura wrote an article for CILIP’s main paper, Gazette, which goes out to 20,000 people or something like that – we’ve also been mentioned a couple of times in Update which reaches the same audience, and various regional divisions of the Career Development Group have run features in their quarterly magazines. But mainly the promotion has just been self-replicating as people have blogged their roots and linked to the wiki, and the biggest impact has come when the very influential online people have participated, which spread the word to their followers and subscribers.

It would be great to get more people from outside the online community involved, but much harder for all the reasons you’d imagine: unfamiliarity with or mistrust of the (wiki) medium, not knowing about it unless we tell them directly, or perhaps they’re the type of person that isn’t involved with the online community because they are too busy so don’t have time for this either!

I am speaking at a couple of conferences in the next few months – I’ll definitely be trying to reach new audiences by trying to crowbar in a few references there…

Are there any other Library community-based projects that are planning? Wow this is a very well researched interview! Yes there is – I’m creating a New Professionals Network (or LISNPN) as part of my role as a New Professionals Support Officer for CILIP. I’m in the Yorkshire & Humberside branch, so the idea is to trial it up North and then if it works successfully, open it out across the UK (possibly launching it at the New Professionals Conference in Sheffield on July 5th). It will be aimed at people who have started in the profession fairly recently, but there won’t be any particularly strict criteria. It’ll start as a website with news pages, tutorials and discussion forums, but may extend to organising get-togethers or events in the future. There will be details emerging there shortly, hopefully [via this blog, among other places].

Do you think that Libraries need to make better use of internet resources? Particularly popular social sites such as Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, etc…Very possibly, but I am hugely wary of the tail wagging the dog in those circumstances. It’s hard to be truly clued up on the best internet resources – you need to go where your patrons are, or choose somewhere and direct them to it, and that’s a hard balance to strike. Whenever anyone mentions a Library MySpace account a little part of me dies. But yeah, as long as you’ve identified a reason for embracing an emerging technological trend (rather than setting up an account and then casting around for a way to involve your library) then generally speaking a lot of libraries would benefit from using social sites. The New York Public Library has 17,000 followers on Twitter – it allows them to communicate important (or entertaining) information quickly and easily in a way which doesn’t put the impetus on the patron to go and check the library website or whatever. That’s terrific.

Have you any aspirations for the LRP or are you happy with its current state and how it is evolving? We are relatively happy now – it’s grown to the extent that it’ll remain a useful resource for many years, whatever happens. But we’d like to expose it to a wider and not-exclusively-library audience, and perhaps introduce some multimedia entries to the wiki – audio, video and so on. If someone makes a video on why they became a librarian, and shows real passion for it, then they can stick it on youtube where any number of people might pick it up and embed it and be inspired to make their own and run with it – that sort of thing has a lot of potential to escape the confines of the world of library blogs and blogging, and reach new people. As long as they link to it from the project homepage, we’ll be happy!

- thewikiman