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We the librarian
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By: Neil Ward-Dutton, Research Director, Macehiter Ward-Dutton Published: 30th January 2007 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License |
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StumbleUponDan Gillmor coined the phrase "we the media" in his book of the same name, to capture the sense of the shifts that blogging and other web-based publishing tools are gradually creating in the world of journalism. Globally-available news, analysis and comment are now not only available through the traditional "broadcast" channels; anyone (in theory, at least) can add their voice and have their say. One easy-to-see symptom of this shift is the increasing use of camera phones by regular citizens to augment major news stories—capturing images of floods, accidents, and crimes in ways that centralised news gathering organisations can't.
At IBM's Lotusphere conference in Orlando last week, the company unveiled a collection of online "social software services" called Lotus Connections. If the company succeeds as we suspect it might, this release is ushering in a new phenomenon: "we the librarian".
All five of the service components of Connections are intertwined, adding value to each other. Central to the value of all, though, is a social bookmarking service called Dogear which is designed for use within organisations. Employees use Dogear to tag resources that they want to bookmark, for later recall. These tags are defined by each individual, according to their taste (as is the case with established "public" services like del.icio.us). As is also the case with del.icio.us and other similar services, each individual's set of personal tags can be made available to the rest of the organisation. What's interesting is that Dogear goes further, offering suggestions for tags as you start to enter your own choice. You can plough your own furrow, in other words: but Dogear shows you how other people are tagging their information, gently encouraging you to share common tags for common ideas.
What no-one is saying is that what's really going on here is a reinvention of knowledge management that turns traditional thinking on its head. Traditional knowledge management relied on the skill of a privileged team of "knowledge architects" a priori defining information taxonomies, which organisations had to try and conform to in their day-to-day information creation and searching activities. The problem is that information is very rarely the kind of beast that's happy to be tamed and confined within static structures: its structure and importance morph over time. Most "traditional" knowledge management efforts failed to deliver business value. They created environments that were too brittle, and people quickly became disenchanted. The cost of knowledge contribution and categorisation was just too high.
Social bookmarking technologies like Dogear provide a tantalising way to rediscover the potential of knowledge management. With a system based on social bookmarking there is no central librarian, locked away in an office, creating taxonomies that are dead before they're even used; there is only a group of individuals, collaborating on creating a common understanding of important business information that can be shared by all, at low cost (no tedious or complex information categorisation or search tools are involved). We just tag as we go, and the tags light our way. We are the librarian.
Reader Comments
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31st January 2007: 'JJ' said:
Get your facts straight. Librarians do not create new taxonomies alone in their office. Diffused 'we' taggers do this. Taxonomies created by the library world have existed and been refined for many years and they work.
1st February 2007: 'oldfox' said:
But they don't work satisfactorily. That's why Lexis and free text searching has so changed the library world and the entire world.
Finding the right content, based on the assignment of two way-broad subject headings and one classification number pre-thought-up by Dewey, Moys, LC or some other librarian is more a matter of luck and persistent druggery than "science" or "scholarship." Just look at the changing headings for one subject, Negros, over the years to see how silly and faddish are the librarian-constructed access methods to knowledge.
12th February 2007: 'yourmom' said:
Lexis Nexis works because it relies on a standardized taxonomy created by professionals, not on words plugged in by Sally from marketing or some joker trying to sell you Viagra, oldfox.
1st February 2007: 'Dianna' said:
Your depiction of librarians and their field is rather archaic. Most of us spend out time helping others to sort through the plethora of information choices out there to arrive at the best ones so that they don't look silly when they make presentations, speeches, talk with their doctors, patients, whatever. We build websites, try all of these technologies, research, and, most importantly, help to communicate the needs for these resources from a perspective that makes sense to the user. We have a unique perspective in that we are able to understand both sides of the situation and broker a better solution between the parties in most cases. Sitting behind a desk in some dark corner creating taxonomies? I don't think so!
1st February 2007: 'Neil Ward-Dutton' said:
Oh dear... have I started a firestorm?
Perhaps I shouldn't have used the term "librarian".
The role of old I'm referring to was quite often referred to as "knowledge architect". The idea of this role was basically to try to divine a taxonomy for managing the storage and retrieval of enterprise information which would be universally applicable.
It very often failed to deliver. Why? Because people quite often don't do what they're told. They search in unpredictable ways.
What I'm seeing here is an approach to understanding information which leverages actual user activity, rather than up-front analysis and design.
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