“Knowledge, a rude unprofitable mass, the mere materials with which wisdom builds, till smoothed and squared and fitted to its place, does but encumber whom it seems to enrich. Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much; wisdom is humble that he knows no more.” – William Cowper

  Living in a Book 
  Originally uploaded by eschipul

What do you tell the librarians?

Global Neighbourhoods asks "what should I tell the librarians?" for an upcoming talk on social media to a group of librarians.

First lets talk about the audience. Librarians are the most over educated, in a good way, people who are typically underpaid worse than teachers. A challenging masters frequently relegates them to book guardians at a local library doling out fines. And baby sitting kids whose parents view the library as a day care.

Librarians are museum curators trying to decide if their mission is to protect the exhibits or share the exhibits (note most museum curators go for "protect and hide" hence the no-photography rules at so many American museums. But I digress.)

I say this from the perspective of someone with two librarians in my family. Neither of them work as librarians any more.

What I have found about librarians is they have a natural desire to help. To share knowledge more than just information. One phone call can save hours of google searches looking for just the right search phrase. Just as going to a conference made me understand how important Goffman was when no amount of google searches would have generated pop-up box saying "no really, you need to read this one!"

So what to tell the librarians. Tell them that:

1) Librarians are Teachers – The biggest digital divide is more cultural than economic in the US at least. Having access to a free blogging platform in no way teaches the ethos and culture of the blogosphere. So they should view part of their jobs as teaching the public about social software tools. These tools are vehicles that bridge the digital divide (three of the last four people we hired were bloggers. We ask every applicant and recruit bloggers. So a librarian-teacher could help kids in the neighborhood get real jobs IF they understand social media.

2) Specialize – with the explosion of available information you can’t just be an "academic librarian" or a "community librarian". You need to specialize.

3) Virtualize – given limited budgets, they should be not only using social software tools themselves to connect to other librarians, but helping the public do the same. Form a super-librarian-group on facebook that enables them to connect people with the right librarian.

4) Ask the virtual expert – Demand relevant improvements in social
software applications. For example – on facebook I can’t ask a question
of an expert stranger without first making them a friend. This doesn’t
model typical human interaction. I go to the library. I ask my
question. They answer. They embellish (ie also check xyz). I get my
knowledge. I leave. We don’t have to be "friends" to do this. So social
software must have some expert mechanism that doesn’t degrade into
evil-expert-editors-who-roll-everything-back like on wikipedia. Someone
approachable. Librarians are approachable if the software would allow
this.

5) Enable "3rd Place" for more than just kids – yes read
to the kids. But have coffee for the high schoolers on a week night.
And have a wine dinner catered for a book club on a Friday (away from
the kids of course). But you CAN reach out to more than just the
limited groups. I read constantly but why would I read where I can’t
relax easily with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine on the weekends?
Doesn’t make sense. Reading is too important to me.

6) Recruit
non-librarians as knowledge matter experts – a librarian should be in
the know on people almost as much as books and periodicals. Knowing WHO
to ask is huge and technorati is pretty lame when it comes to
highlighting knowledge matter experts. So is google. Nobody does this
actually. Librarians could. Social software can help. If Chron.com has community bloggers, can’t a librarian have community librarians?

This does require a knowledge of sociology and psychology. Chunking theory and negotiation skills may both be needed to present information in a non-threatening manner and to convince a young man to read a particularly influential book.

7) Training – train on skills necessary in the modern wired social software world

- Time Management
- Typing
- email etiquette (can I get a decent subject line. PLEASE?)
- Leadership (give first, pay it forward, common sense, clarity of speech)

Bottom
line: Librarians are the guardians of knowledge who as curators have an
obligation to spread it. They relish their role because they didn’t go
into the profession to get rich. Social software is an enabler that
will help them interact with their publics. With a few online and
offline changes, the role of librarian in society becomes more sacred
and wonderful than ever before. Librarians rock!

THANKS SANDRA  for posting the original GN link on Facebook which got me thinking!

Folksonomies are to taxonomies what content management systems are to webmasters; they free the people. And the people do what people do. And that is good. Even for the NPTech tag stream. I say this in reaction to this riff on the limitations of folksonomies for the non profit world. From the post:

I’ve always been vaguely uncomfortable with folksonomies. There is
something about the concept that just doesn’t sit right with me. Every
time I hear people wax on about them, I fidget in my seat; I feel kind
of itchy and unsettled at the same time. Perhaps it’s my latent,
leftover librarian-like nature.

Given a tag like NPTech applies to, as Gavin notes, a "tax status", it is not surprising that it is confusing. Yet so would reading all information in a hierarchical taxonomy under "China" (sub classed in Asia in the Library of Congress if I recall Shirky correctly.) The classification is simply too large. Which is why we use multiple word phrases when we search google.

It sounds to me like the original non profit taxonomy project needs to be revived. To create a Taxonomy to be used in-addition to the folksonomy in the NPTech space. And perhaps there is a hybrid where a person can pick a dictionary of recommended tags. Similar to the synonym ring used by libraries.

Citizendium aspires to have a group of intellectuals create moderated great ideas. Like foo camp has an invited group of intellectuals.

Wikipedia aspires to have editors from the willing and takes all comers. Like bar camp has unconferences of the willing.

Some background:

Citizendium is being started by Larry Sanger, one of the cofounders of wikipedia. It is like wikipedia but with peer review. From the citizendium essay.

Imagine what is
possible with tens of millions of intellectuals working together on educational
and reference projects.

The wrench in the whole thing is that wikipedia started as a dot com called nupedia with experts and peer review (sanger) . So wikipedia started where citizendium is trying to restart. From Larry Sanger, the cofounder of wikipedia, on slashdot.

Wikipedia’s predecessor, which I was also employed to organize, was
Nupedia. Nupedia was to be a highly reliable, peer-reviewed resource
that fully appreciated and employed the efforts of subject area
experts, as well as the general public.

Is this getting recursive to anyone else?

There is a strong ideological battle going on between ultimate freedom
of content and peer review by experts.

The community may know a lot
about breast cancer. Yes they want to cure it. Yet it is also very
important to fund the people who are studying it full time with both a
financial incentive and an ideological incentive to solve the problem.
Experts have their place. What I want is a cure, or better yet a vaccine. I just want it gone. I think experts are the way to go when the stakes are high.

I like wikipedia. But I am looking forward to citizendium. And I never visit Britannica because they don’t show up anonymous in
google.

update: first – fixed "compendium" to "citizendium" – not sure what part of the brain that came from. I guess I need editors. <grin>

update2: please note Larry Sanger’s comments below.

"Knowledge is power, not
  mere argument or ornament." – Francis Bacon (link)

which of course begs the question of "how do you get knowledge"?  Which leads to:

"Knowledge acquisition is the process of absorbing and storing new information in memory, the success of which is often gauged by how well the information can later be remembered, or retrieved from memory." – Danielle S. McNamara and Tenaha O’Reilly

which is why this is a good idea.

Exam measures students’ ‘information literacy’
Friday, February 3, 2006; Posted: 9:38 a.m. EST (14:38 GMT)

(AP) — When it comes to downloading music and instant messaging, today’s students are plenty tech-savvy. But that doesn’t mean they know how to make good use of the endless stream of information that computers put at their fingertips.

Educators and employers call those skills "technology literacy," and while everyone agrees it’s important to have, it also is difficult to measure.

Now a test that some high school students will begin taking this year could help.

The ICT Literacy Assessment touches on traditional skills, such as analytical reading and math, but with a technological twist. Test-takers, for instance, may be asked to query a database, compose an e-mail based on their research, or seek information on the Internet and decide how reliable it is. (more)

Intuitively we all know this already.  Ever watch someone who doesn’t know how to construct a query in google?  It’s almost painful to watch them typing and even more painful to watch them blame the application for the unexpected results.  Which is why we need to teach technology literacy. 

On a side note, why doesn’t CNN accept track backs?  Come on folks, join the conversation!