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 euthanasia, twapperkeeper, echolib, and New Professionals Conference

 NB: It's been pointed out to me that the links in this post are not working from Google Reader, for some reason. Apologies for that - while I sort it out, the links definitely do work online... If you are viewing this in Reader, then copy and paste this URL - http://thewikiman.org/blog/?p=473 - into your browser to get a working version!

 COLLEAGUES /

:)

A whole bundle of little things in this post, starting with a link to a provocative blog post from the Library Thing Thingology Blog - have a look at this.

The central premise is a quote from a further blog post from idealog.com, about e-books killing book stores. The key part of that quote is this: "If you are for bookstores lasting as long as possible, you want to slow down the uptake of ebooks." The implication (in fact it's not an implication; the idealog blog post explicitly states this) is that we have to make an uncomfortable choice between attempting to slow down the uptake of new technology, or hastening the death of the book-store. Thingology extrapolates this to libraries, reasonably enough, and although it stops short of actually advocating strategically slowing the influx and influence of e-books, the blog post is entitled 'Why are you for killing libraries?' and the suggestion clearly is that we are being complicit in our own demise. It's thought-provoking stuff - I may save my own opinions for an entry to the LISNews Contest... But in a nut-shell,  I don't think we should slow down the technology, as we exist to facilitate access to information and if we can't do that we shouldn't be here. We need to adapt, or die, but quite honestly either of those is probably preferable to deliberately obstructing progress.

Anyhow. In other news, I've been guilty of not using twapperkeeperwhen linking to the #echolib debate on Twitter. When pointing people towards the discussion regarding how to move library advocacy beyond the echo-chamber, I've just linked to a search of Twitter- but this only keeps post from the last few days. Twapperkeeper allows you to archive all the tweets relating to any hash-tag - I'm sure most of you reading this use it already, but I thought I'd mention it just in case... Turns out Emma Cragg has already set up an archive for #echolib, so thank you to her - it has all the tweets on the subject, from the very beginning.

Myself and Woodsiegirlhave not just been collecting comments / articles / ideas on this echolib subject for reasons of idle curiosity, by the way - we're going to run a seminar on the subject at the CILIP Yorkshire & Humberside branch Member's Day / AGM in York on April 7th, so if you're around then do come along; we'll be pumping you for information and ideas as well as presenting our own! I'm hoping this'll be the first of a few sessions / presentations etc on the subject - and CILIP members, look out for an article in Update soon.

Finally just to say there is still time for a New Professionals Conference proposal submission! Submission details are here, and you can read the papers from last year for some inspiration, here. New Professionals, too, has its own twapper archive, for tweets using the #npc2010 hashtag - it is still in its infancy for now but we'll use in the run-up t0, during, and after the conference.

- thewikiman