(Continued from December 9 and 13)
What does it mean for Info Pros when our clients work with transitory "publications" assembled on their screens on the fly (think http://livingstories.googlelabs.com/)? How do we assist users who participate in scholarly forums and thus exchange ideas and observations outside the traditional publishing channels? What do we need to do differently vis a vis a younger clientele accustomed to the kind of information gathering typical of social networks?
In our current context, we are already working with the social networking tools and with the open source community in order to straddle the span from traditional publishing and dissemination mechanisms to the evolving ones. We continue to be ideally placed to act as connectors between the long established and the new means of publishing - and thus of knowledge sharing, too.
Our future challenge is assessing how best to support our clients. For example, how do we balance work to ease access to and use of scholarly publishers' materials versus work to help clients navigate the ecosystem Michael Nielsen talked about (see my November 13 post), and how do we support the educational community's need to provide for mobile learning at the same time we sustain the original academic learning environment?
One useful guiding principle could be that we strive to be viewed as information partners and "secret sauce for success" by our clients - as opposed to being seen as advocates of certain approaches to information gathering. The fact that we may demonstrate qualitative and other differences among sources of information and among tools is a strength to apply when appropriate; our message is "come talk to us, together we will work out what is best for you to save time and get what you need" rather than "we represent an official standard in information practices". (Our clients may well come to hold the view we are the gold standard, but it's best they form such an opinion on their own.)
It is equally essential for us to work closely with the developers of existing and new sharing tools, public ones as well as those intended for internal use in an organization. Herein lies a special challenge in that such developers may not leap to the conclusion - as Google is widely reported to have done - that they need librarians on their teams!
On January 21, I'll be joining colleagues on a career oriented panel event organized by the SLA Toronto Student Group: Yet another opportunity to reinforce the message "the publishing industry is on a march and we need to be in it!"
"One useful guiding principle could be that we strive to be viewed as information partners and "secret sauce for success" by our clients"
Ulla, you never cease to amaze me with your perfect descriptors.
As always, a very useful and thought provoking series.
Many thanks,
Wilma
Posted by: Wilma Macfarlane | December 17, 2009 at 06:15 PM