Transcript No Slide Title

CHALLENGES FOR LIS EDUCATION
A FIVE-YEAR PERSPECTIVE
PETER ENSER
University of Brighton
U.K.
Information Science is concerned with
“problems arising in communication of knowledge in
general and with records in such communication in
particular …”
[ Saracevic]
“humans and their knowledge usage … (as) actors in the
knowledge transformation process. The actions we are
most interested in … are called communication.”
[ Wersig ]
“scientific enquiry into the communication of knowledge
and knowledge representations to humans.”
[ Vakkari ]
We look to information science as a core
discipline which will continue to inform the nextgeneration professional practice of information
management.
However, the social and professional environment
which that discipline addresses has changed
remarkably in recent times.
“In the early 1970s, information scientists were
scarce and valued then, since only they had the
skills to tame the ‘information explosion’ of the
age.
With hindsight, the ‘explosion’ was really a damp
squib in comparison to the megatonnes exploding
without form or structure onto the Web each day in
2000.”
[ Dale, 2000 ]
In 1990 mobile telephones
WWW
intranets
knowledge assets
?
Knowledge transfer
Information need
Recorded
collective
memory
Community
membership
Towards 2005 - 1
The information chain will get shorter – users will
be much closer to producers;
information intermediaries will be squeezed to
produce ‘value-added’ by filtering and evaluation;
user communities will be distributed and will
demand ‘365x24’.
Towards 2005 - 2
Information professionals will come from very
diverse backgrounds and disciplines;
they will need to acquire, or already be in
possession of, specific subject knowledge
Towards 2005 - 3
In the corporate environment emphasis will lie on
training and developing people to exploit
information, and on pooling expertise and sharing
knowledge; the successful companies will recognise
that personal information is ‘currency’.
There will be widespread commitment to information
and recognition of its value at more senior levels
within the organisation.
Towards 2005 - 4
Digital information systems will increasingly
incorporate a range of media, and will also converge
with conventional media: interactive television,
desktop systems which output radio and TV, Websourced text retrieval via mobile telephones, and
textbooks which incorporate CD-ROMs with Web
links.
Towards 2005 - 5
Access to information will be open to a greatly
extended audience.
There will be new perceptions on the communication
process, the realisation that new media technology
has the potential to affect communication patterns
within organisations and communities, and to alter
perceptions of space and community.
Towards 2005 - 6
There will be enhanced realisation of the need for
people who understand the issues of computer
mediated communication, the design of
communication systems, and the ethical, social and
political implications of these.
Towards 2005 - 7
Perspectives on copyright and intellectual property
will have swung from protection to exploitation;
increasingly, producers will support licensing
arrangements.
Towards 2005 - 8
The Government Secure Intranet will be open to the
public as part of the Citizen portal.
All government departments will have electronic
document and records management systems in place
to support Freedom of Information.
This will have brought a new appreciation of the
importance of records management.
Towards 2005 - 9
Freedom of information legislation, on the one
hand, and data protection and the European
Convention on Human Rights, on the other, will
have exacerbated the tension between information
exploitation and privacy.
Towards 2005 - 10
The gulf between ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ in terms of
information access will have increased; the ‘haves’
will be adept at searching and finding whatever is
available anywhere.
“We need to make it possible to access relevant
information seamlessly regardless of its
type, location and scholarly tradition . . .
[ Ercegovac, 1999 ]
Visual and museum objects
historical data
cultural heritage
scientific data
librarians
archivists
scientists
“Institutions are relatively persistent embodiments of
values and practices organised around particular
goals, and we are only beginning to sense how
institutions will be built and modified in digital
spaces.
What is the institutional context of the library, of
the museum, or of the archive, as they evolve and
as the expectations and practices of their users
evolve?”
[Dempsey, 2000]
Memory organisations
Gather and preserve the nation’s
memory
Open doors onto knowledge,
imagination and learning
Secure our scientific, industrial and
cultural heritage, and are our legacy
to future generations
Museums
archives
Contribute to the fabric of our civil
lives, and support social and
business activity
libraries
[ Chapman, Kingsley & Dempsey, 1999 ]
galleries
[ http://www.resource.gov.uk/ ]
museums
museums
[ http://www.resource.gov.uk/ ]
museums
museums
archives
[ http://www.resource.gov.uk/ ]
museums
museums
archives
libraries
[ http://www.resource.gov.uk/ ]
[ http://www.resource.gov.uk/ ]
“This convergence (of interests among memory
institutions) is driven by the desire to release the value
of their collections into this space in ways that support
creative use by as many users as possible….
They are unified in the belief that without the rich
cultural resources memory institutions offer, emerging
network places will be impoverished, as will the lives of
the people who assemble there.”
[Dempsey, 2000]
Contemporary Culture Virtual Archive in XML
(COVAX)
[http://www.viscount.org.uk/laser/research/covax/covax_overview.pdf].
Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network
(SCRAN)
[http://www.scran.ac.uk]
Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER)
[http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub99/dner_desc.html]
museum
library
gallery
archive
The LIS community is fighting against a
misapprehension that the generation, organisation
and presentation of information content must be the
special preserve of those educated in computer
studies and trained in applications development.
The challenges and opportunities of e-commerce,
knowledge management and website/intranet
development have seen information
scientists/librarians and systems developers
jockeying for position at the information
service/information system interface.
“… librarians’ traditional reluctance to move beyond the
information container towards analysis and
interpretation of its contents has resulted in
organisations overlooking their potential contribution,
even in areas where their competence should be
obvious.
Information professionals are seen as service-oriented,
but not value-oriented – they don’t understand the
impact they can have on the business.”
[Corrall, 1998]
“Information staff needed to look very carefully at
what they could deliver to the organisation and strive
to accomplish this, because they were no longer the
owners of a territory, but players in a much bigger
game.”
[Ward, 1999]
“How did the prize of Knowledge Management escape
the LIS world? Everything is there for the taking:
knowledge mapping, knowledge networking, tacit
knowledge management and corporate knowledge
bases.
The core of almost everything that has driven the KM
movement can be found originally in the LIS world.”
[Dale, 2000]
European Commission’s Fourth Call under the
Information Society Technologies Programme
includes:
• information handling visualisation
• content processing for domestic and mobile
platforms
• dynamic interaction
• tools for massive data resources
• virtual representation of significant objects
Information literacy - having the confidence,
skills and understanding to harness
information and knowledge as assets in all
parts of our lives.
“Information literacy is as much a central
plank of social inclusion … as it is of
education … and as part of the successful
knowledge-based corporation, where
information literacy has sometimes become
attached to knowledge management
initiatives.”
[ Brindley, 2001]
“It is fascinating to see, in the new context
of the internet, intranets and knowledge
management, the resurrection of real
interest in, and adapting of, core facets of
information science - indexing and
abstracting, thesaurus construction,
information retrieval theory, and so on - all
as a necessary antidote to the chaos of an
unstructured web world and the
frustrations and idiosyncrasies of the
‘search engine first’ mentality.”
[Brindley, 2001]
New Wave Documentalists
Information professionals with
born-again skills in the indexing,
classification and cataloguing of
digitally integrated content and a
mind-set liberated from the
traditional preoccupation with text.
Physical world - realities
Mental world subjective knowledge
W1
W2
Collective W3
memory
Mental world objective knowledge
Recorded knowledge
A major 'engineering'
task of information
systems, and
library and information
science, is the
mapping of World 3
objects onto World 1
in such a way that they
can be found when
wanted, on
presentation of a
World 2 description”
[White, H.D.]