Some thoughts on week 1 readings

Lied Library at four years:

This was an interesting look at all of the planning and upkeep that goes into a major library's information system. My undergraduate university had many of the programs mentioned on the computers (ex. Novell ZenWorks, and a program similar to Deepfreeze). I feel like I took for granted all of the work that goes into installing and maintaining these programs. Luckily, to log into the computes you had to have a university login, preventing community use of the computers. I thought it was crafty how they were able to combat that problem with the program that kept track of who was logged in on what machine, and how long they had been logged in. It would be nice if more libraries were able to implement these improvements, but the financial constraints can be daunting for a massive project like this, especially with the pace at which technology becomes obsolete. Sometimes I wonder if it is better to continuously update, or if it is better to work with an older, but more stable format.

Information Literacy and Information Technology Literacy:

I understand Mr. Lynch's point that people are a little slighted in terms of what they actually know about information and information technology when they are finished with a formal education. I feel that the depth and breadth of knowledge he wants people to have about these areas is unrealistic and would be difficult to implement. However, things may have improved between the publishing of this article (1998) and when I graduated High School (2002). Technology moves so fast that it would be difficult for people to keep ahead of education, and it would not make much sense unless that person were an information technology professional. I think that working knowledge of complex software packages that deal with information is important, I think that it may even be very important to have a basic understanding of networks and systems. I feel that information literacy is more important than information technology literacy, but it got a minority focus in the paper. I think that people should have a greater appreciation for the scope, content, and quality of information so that they can make informed decisions about how to educate themselves, and then worry about information technology if they need to.

Content Not Containers:

This article touched on many very important innovations in the technology world that are having a deep impact on society. I was very pleased that concerns I expressed in my notes were touched upon later in the article. My main concern with the influx of “information” is the fact that it has become increasingly difficult to verify the authenticity of information available. Anybody can publish a blog, or update a wiki and fill them with half-truths, misinformation, or down right lies. People who are being raised in this world are not able to discern good information from the sea of bad information. More is not better. The survey sited that fifty percent of emails are spam emails. How much content on a blog is comparable to spam. Self-Publishing medical professionals are able to get around the politics of journal publishing and the possibility of new ideas not reaching the professional world because they are unpopular at the time (read Thomas Kuhn's the Structures of Scientific Revolutions for more on this), however, it is also a possibility that quacks are publishing information with little to no scientific basis. I like the idea of librarians acting as quality checkers of this information. The problems then become: a) how does the library provide this quality check? And b) how does the library let people know that they are available for this service? The information available needs to be put into a larger context in order to be truly useful to anybody, librarians now need to create the context.