SINTO has had coverage in national professional journals this month with pieces (and photographs of yours truely) in both Library & Information Update March 2009 and Public Library Journal Spring 2009.
PLJ features an editorial by Liz Chapman about our equity and excellence debate with Bob Usherwood and John Pateman. It also contains an article that I co-wrote with Liz Chapman on overdue fines in public libraries which is based on the annual Fines & Charges in England and Wales survey carried out by Gilly Pearce and published by SINTO.
Update has an article by Jodie Walker and Ute Manecke from the Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield, who attended the debate. Thanks to everyone who helped publicise our events. Its good to remind the profession at large that our region is a centre for professional debate.
But we have not been resting on our laurels. Yesterday SINTO hosted a talk by John Dove, President of Credo Reference. He began by stating his belief that his company was engaged in an enquiry involving three elements: librarians/libraries, users and content/technology. His talk was a part of this enquiry and he presented a list of topics and invited the audience to pick topics from the list for him to talk about.
Surprise me!
The first topic was "Surprise me!" and for this John mentioned a book he had been reading Reference services administration and management 1982. He explained that it was useful to go back to a book about reference services from a time before computers were used to extract some of the fundamental themes of providing a service.
Social media
Wikipedia could be seen as an example of the concept of the wisdom of crowds - the idea that a group of people working together can produce a better result than any one individual in that group can produce, as long as the group is organised by two principles: there should be an independence of diverse inputs and the summing up mechanism should be completely fair. Social media sites can work if there is a community of knowledgeable people (Condorcet's jury theorem) which is active in updating information. How does Wikipedia measure up to this? Many of the articles are good quality but there is a systematic anti-expert bias. Sometimes the expert contributers to Wikipedia give up in the face of opposition from others with fixed views. The summing up process is "last in, first out" which is horrible. Students at a certain level today are caught in an abyss between Wikipedia and the professional literature i.e the professional literature is too advanced but Wikipedia is not an authoritative source. Subject encyclopedia were used as an alternative in the past and on-line services such as Credo Reference are trying to fill that gap.
Google
John played a clip of Terry Winograd who is on the Credo Advisory Board to the effect that the holy grail of search engines is a machine that doesn't just search but answers questions. To do this the engine needs to collect information about you. he then played a clip by a librarian pointing out that they can do this more effectively. Google says it want to remove the intermediary between the data and the user but this is a false ideal. Google is an intermediary but the librarian can be a better intermediary of more value to the user. When a students comes up to a librarian at the enquiry desk or via a library chat room, the librarian has a huge amount of context which search engines lack.
User behaviour
John mentioned the recent British Library research into the Google generation. Credo has a model of user behaviour around reference with four areas: fact finding, exploration, deep bibliographical research and games & diversions. Users like websites that send them items of information of general interest that draws them in to deeper study. A study got people to record any questions that occurred to them as they went about their business and estimate how much they would be prepared to pay to get an answer. Each person had on average four questions a day and it was estimated that in the US this could generate $7 trillion of research per year. Another study showed that people wanted information so that they would not look stupid in public and could get one over on other people. With fact finding behaviour people want to get back to what they were doing as soon as possible
This is just a taster of John's wide ranging talk. Not only did John provide us with an feast of ideas but he also sponsored the refreshments and provided a packet of Hershey's Bliss chocolates!
Showing posts with label Wikipedia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wikipedia. Show all posts
Friday, 27 February 2009
Wednesday, 16 January 2008
Battle lines
Does Bob McKee, Chief Executive of CILIP read the SINTO blog? I am prompted to ask because in recent postings on his own blog Bob picks up on two books that I mentioned here ages ago. Pies and prejudice; in search of the North by Stuart Maconie and Bob Usherwood's Equity and Excellence in the Public Library. Of Bob Usherwood's book he says "... I commend Bob Usherwood's book to you. It is (to borrow a phrase which should resonate with Reader Development Librarians of a certain vintage) well worth reading".
Perhaps Bob has been reading my past discussions under the heading Battle lines where I have looked at the debate between the webbed and the web-sceptics. Fighting seems to have broken out again.
Helen Nicols lives in Sheffield and works in Leeds, and writes a blog called The Business of Knowing - thoughts about knowledge sharing, learning and how business can benefit from encouraging both. In a recent post she includes a video of a presentation by David Weinburger author of Everything is miscellaneous: the power of the new digital disorder. The presentation is about the organisation of knowledge and compare and contrasts the old way and the new digital way of doing this. He argues that we have been very good at organising physical objects (such as books on shelves) but that today there is no longer any need to order things in a single way. His presentation covers Aristotle, Dewey, classification and categorising, tagging, wikipedia and other miscellaneous things. He suggests that as both data and metadata are digitalised this changes the whole way we approach knowledge. There is much in this presentation that we can take issue with - his ideas on publicly negotiated knowledge (e.g. Wikipedia) for example - but if you put up with the stuttering start, this is a masterclass in the new ideas that all librarians and information managers should be familiar with.
But that does not mean we should agree with it all. Professor Tara Brabazon who holds the chair of media studies at the University of Brighton has criticised an increasing dependency on a diet of unchecked information found through internet search engines as "white bread for the mind". According to press reports in The Telegraph and The Times Prof Brabazon claims user-generated content sites such as Wikipedia are creating an age of banality by providing consensual information and stifling debate.
"I want students to sit down and read. It's not the same when you read it online. I want them to experience the pages and the print as much as the digitisation and the pixels. Both are fine but I want them to have both – not one or the other – not a cheap solution."
This view is supported in a study by Dr Ian Rowlands, a lecturer in library and information studies at University College London. It looks at how people use and search web-based information. Young people tend to use search engines such as Google and Yahoo as their first, and often only, port of call in searching for information. They have a poor understanding of their information needs and find it difficult to develop effective search strategies. They also spend little time evaluating information for relevance, accuracy or authority, it says.
Rowlands says children born after the big bang of the web lack a mental map of the information landscape, which could be affecting their ability to search for and evaluate information.
"As a kid, I grew up spending hours in the central reference library in Plymouth. This helped me form a clear understanding of the information landscape because of the physical layout of the library, and the appearance of materials. You get a sense of how big one collection is compared to another. Dictionaries, maps and official statistics all have a specific place, feel and appearance in the library and this helped me understand the concept of these sources of information and how to use them," he says.
Libraries are not keeping up with the demands of students and researchers for services that are integrated and consistent with their wider internet experience such as Google, the study says. Information consumers do not necessarily use services in the way libraries assume, and a one-size-fits-all policy towards the design of library systems will not be effective. The study recommends that libraries invest more in monitoring and evaluating the way people use their services, to ensure they stay relevant and to allow libraries to argue against static or declining budgets.
Dame Lynne Brindley commenting on the report said that libraries should also play a key role in helping to teach information literacy skills. "That the younger generation is technologically more literate but not more information literate is a challenge that must be tackled by libraries and education more widely. Students who simply want to use Google and take what it says as gospel do a real disservice to the skills people will increasingly need to survive the digital economy".
STOP PRESS. Link to BL press release and pdf file of report.
What is clear is that this battle is not a head-on conflict between two opposing concepts. The "webbed" are not promoting the use of poor quality information but their emphasis is on using technology to open up access to all information. The "web-sceptics" don't want to dismantle the new digital environment, nor (despite the headlines) do they want to ban Google and Wikipedia. Instead they want to promote a critical approach to information. There is a crying need for a synthesis between the two points of view.
Perhaps Bob has been reading my past discussions under the heading Battle lines where I have looked at the debate between the webbed and the web-sceptics. Fighting seems to have broken out again.
Helen Nicols lives in Sheffield and works in Leeds, and writes a blog called The Business of Knowing - thoughts about knowledge sharing, learning and how business can benefit from encouraging both. In a recent post she includes a video of a presentation by David Weinburger author of Everything is miscellaneous: the power of the new digital disorder. The presentation is about the organisation of knowledge and compare and contrasts the old way and the new digital way of doing this. He argues that we have been very good at organising physical objects (such as books on shelves) but that today there is no longer any need to order things in a single way. His presentation covers Aristotle, Dewey, classification and categorising, tagging, wikipedia and other miscellaneous things. He suggests that as both data and metadata are digitalised this changes the whole way we approach knowledge. There is much in this presentation that we can take issue with - his ideas on publicly negotiated knowledge (e.g. Wikipedia) for example - but if you put up with the stuttering start, this is a masterclass in the new ideas that all librarians and information managers should be familiar with.
But that does not mean we should agree with it all. Professor Tara Brabazon who holds the chair of media studies at the University of Brighton has criticised an increasing dependency on a diet of unchecked information found through internet search engines as "white bread for the mind". According to press reports in The Telegraph and The Times Prof Brabazon claims user-generated content sites such as Wikipedia are creating an age of banality by providing consensual information and stifling debate.
"I want students to sit down and read. It's not the same when you read it online. I want them to experience the pages and the print as much as the digitisation and the pixels. Both are fine but I want them to have both – not one or the other – not a cheap solution."
This view is supported in a study by Dr Ian Rowlands, a lecturer in library and information studies at University College London. It looks at how people use and search web-based information. Young people tend to use search engines such as Google and Yahoo as their first, and often only, port of call in searching for information. They have a poor understanding of their information needs and find it difficult to develop effective search strategies. They also spend little time evaluating information for relevance, accuracy or authority, it says.
Rowlands says children born after the big bang of the web lack a mental map of the information landscape, which could be affecting their ability to search for and evaluate information.
"As a kid, I grew up spending hours in the central reference library in Plymouth. This helped me form a clear understanding of the information landscape because of the physical layout of the library, and the appearance of materials. You get a sense of how big one collection is compared to another. Dictionaries, maps and official statistics all have a specific place, feel and appearance in the library and this helped me understand the concept of these sources of information and how to use them," he says.
Libraries are not keeping up with the demands of students and researchers for services that are integrated and consistent with their wider internet experience such as Google, the study says. Information consumers do not necessarily use services in the way libraries assume, and a one-size-fits-all policy towards the design of library systems will not be effective. The study recommends that libraries invest more in monitoring and evaluating the way people use their services, to ensure they stay relevant and to allow libraries to argue against static or declining budgets.
Dame Lynne Brindley commenting on the report said that libraries should also play a key role in helping to teach information literacy skills. "That the younger generation is technologically more literate but not more information literate is a challenge that must be tackled by libraries and education more widely. Students who simply want to use Google and take what it says as gospel do a real disservice to the skills people will increasingly need to survive the digital economy".
STOP PRESS. Link to BL press release and pdf file of report.
What is clear is that this battle is not a head-on conflict between two opposing concepts. The "webbed" are not promoting the use of poor quality information but their emphasis is on using technology to open up access to all information. The "web-sceptics" don't want to dismantle the new digital environment, nor (despite the headlines) do they want to ban Google and Wikipedia. Instead they want to promote a critical approach to information. There is a crying need for a synthesis between the two points of view.
Tuesday, 31 July 2007
Battle lines
One of the issues in this debate concerns the quality of information that is available with Web 2.0 in general and Wikipedia in particular. Michael Gorman in a posting titled Jabberwiki, is blunt:
"Let us ... concentrate on the central proposition that one can gain useful knowledge from texts written by any Tom, Dick, or Sally with time on his or her hands. Do we entrust the education of children to self-selected “experts” without any known authority or credentials? Would any sane person pay fees to take university courses that are taught by people who may or may not be qualified to teach such a course? "
Gorman cites Andrew Keen and his new book The Cult of the Amateur which makes similar complaints. Keen claims that "Wikipedia ... is almost single-handedly killing the traditional information business." (p127-8). and "Since Wikipedia's birth, more than fifteen thousand contributors have created nearly three million entries in over a hundred different languages—none of them edited or vetted for accuracy."(p4).
Many people defend Wikipedia. Some claim that unlike Britannica, Wikipedia’s credentials don’t come from its editors but from references and sources cited at the end of articles. However not all articles include citations and citations don't guarantee that the research is comprehensive and balanced.
Others have argued that Wilipedia articles are edited and vetted for accuracy by other Wikipedia contributors. Helen Nicols in her blog The Business of Knowing argues that regulation by a community of on-line users as with Wikipedia is equivalent to the academic peer review process as ways of establishing authority.
Wikipedians like to point out that traditional resources such as Encyclopedia Britannica contain errors which have been corrected by the on-line community.
Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia
Gorman and Keen would argue that the on-line community is just as likely to introduce errors into an authoritative article as it is to correct errors. There have been cases of individuals submitting corrections to their own biography on Wikipedia only to have other contributors deleting these corrections so as to maintain the "authority" of the original article.
Another argument used by defenders of Wikipedia is that traditional resources present a single world view that may be influenced by cultural norms while Wikipedia allows debate and the presentation of alternative views. As an illustration here is an extract from the 11th edition of Encyclopadia Britannica (1911).
"Negro
For the rest, the mental constitution of the negro is very similar to that of a child, normally good-natured and cheerful, but subject to sudden fits of emotion and passion during which he is capable of performing acts of singular atrocity, impressionable, vain, but often exhibiting in the capacity of servant a dog-like fidelity which has stood the supreme test. Given suitable training, the negro is capable of becoming a craftsman of considerable skill, particularly in metal work, carpentry and carving."
With hindsight we now see that Britannica reflected the prevailing social views and prejudices of the time. Is it not likely that today's "authoratitive" works are also biased? On the other hand there is a danger of falling into the trap of relativism - the doctrine that no absolute truth exists, but that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as language or culture. Surely most facts (the date of the battle of Hastings; the atomic weight of Hydrogen) are facts and a reference source can get them either right or wrong
Further discussion can be found in the Wikipedia entry Reliability of Wikipedia and the entry in the LIS Wiki Librarians' claims and opinions regarding Wikipedia.
I think that the TS Eliot quote is relevant:
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
There is a lot of information available from Wikipedia and the like but this is not the same as knowledge. At the very least we need to heed the advice of the Bellman "What I tell you three times is true" - and not take any information on trust until we have checked with several sources. We also need the wisdom to understand that any information can be inaccurate, incomplete or biased in some way and we should make allowances for that fact.
"Let us ... concentrate on the central proposition that one can gain useful knowledge from texts written by any Tom, Dick, or Sally with time on his or her hands. Do we entrust the education of children to self-selected “experts” without any known authority or credentials? Would any sane person pay fees to take university courses that are taught by people who may or may not be qualified to teach such a course? "
Gorman cites Andrew Keen and his new book The Cult of the Amateur which makes similar complaints. Keen claims that "Wikipedia ... is almost single-handedly killing the traditional information business." (p127-8). and "Since Wikipedia's birth, more than fifteen thousand contributors have created nearly three million entries in over a hundred different languages—none of them edited or vetted for accuracy."(p4).
Many people defend Wikipedia. Some claim that unlike Britannica, Wikipedia’s credentials don’t come from its editors but from references and sources cited at the end of articles. However not all articles include citations and citations don't guarantee that the research is comprehensive and balanced.
Others have argued that Wilipedia articles are edited and vetted for accuracy by other Wikipedia contributors. Helen Nicols in her blog The Business of Knowing argues that regulation by a community of on-line users as with Wikipedia is equivalent to the academic peer review process as ways of establishing authority.
Wikipedians like to point out that traditional resources such as Encyclopedia Britannica contain errors which have been corrected by the on-line community.
Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia
Gorman and Keen would argue that the on-line community is just as likely to introduce errors into an authoritative article as it is to correct errors. There have been cases of individuals submitting corrections to their own biography on Wikipedia only to have other contributors deleting these corrections so as to maintain the "authority" of the original article.
Another argument used by defenders of Wikipedia is that traditional resources present a single world view that may be influenced by cultural norms while Wikipedia allows debate and the presentation of alternative views. As an illustration here is an extract from the 11th edition of Encyclopadia Britannica (1911).
"Negro
For the rest, the mental constitution of the negro is very similar to that of a child, normally good-natured and cheerful, but subject to sudden fits of emotion and passion during which he is capable of performing acts of singular atrocity, impressionable, vain, but often exhibiting in the capacity of servant a dog-like fidelity which has stood the supreme test. Given suitable training, the negro is capable of becoming a craftsman of considerable skill, particularly in metal work, carpentry and carving."
With hindsight we now see that Britannica reflected the prevailing social views and prejudices of the time. Is it not likely that today's "authoratitive" works are also biased? On the other hand there is a danger of falling into the trap of relativism - the doctrine that no absolute truth exists, but that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as language or culture. Surely most facts (the date of the battle of Hastings; the atomic weight of Hydrogen) are facts and a reference source can get them either right or wrong
Further discussion can be found in the Wikipedia entry Reliability of Wikipedia and the entry in the LIS Wiki Librarians' claims and opinions regarding Wikipedia.
I think that the TS Eliot quote is relevant:
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
There is a lot of information available from Wikipedia and the like but this is not the same as knowledge. At the very least we need to heed the advice of the Bellman "What I tell you three times is true" - and not take any information on trust until we have checked with several sources. We also need the wisdom to understand that any information can be inaccurate, incomplete or biased in some way and we should make allowances for that fact.
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