Rebecca Lynn's List: Reference

• However, beyond scalability lies another, potentially even more important  and valuable prospect. If digital reference can truly scale, using its  resources to responded to ever-greater numbers of needs, then reference in  general would be able to bid for true centrality,  simultaneously woven into the fabric of libraries and the everyday  information lives of their clients, reinforcing the importance of libraries  and their services – and also the ability and even necessity of libraries  to serve people beyond the walls of their physical and necessary buildings.

• Digital reference has never been – though it often seemed like it was  – just about answering questions via email or instant messaging. Answering  questions is how it started, but in fact there is a far more intriguing  matter at its heart which has yet to be solved or appreciated for what it  could be.

   

  That matter is scalability. For its entire history, reference work  has been piece work, one person at a time, one question at a time,  individually tailored service and responses. In a strictly local and  community-based organization, that makes perfect sense.
• Contending with the vagaries of licensing  agreements has been a continuing challenge. How much, if any,  material from a licensed database or work can be sent via email or quoted in  a chat message with a user who may or may not be part of your legal service  population or community? Obviously, this issue quickly gets us into  authentication, privacy and confidentiality territory, as well.
• Give users and libraries the tools by which to communicate, and those tools  will get used for reference transactions

2 more annotations...

• How our country deals with the realities of the Information Age will have enormous impact on our democratic way of life and on our nation's ability to compete internationally.
• Ultimately, information literate people are those who have learned how to learn.
• information-dependent decisions can affect one's entire lifetime
• nformation prepackaging in schools and through broadcast and print news media, in fact, encourages people to accept the opinions of others without much thought.
• The need for people in business who are competent managers of information is important at all levels, and the realities of the Information Age require serious rethinking of how businesses should be conducted.

  • Need people with "librarian skills" in all businesses!
• Information
• is now our most important, and pervasive resource
• Moreover, most current educational and communication endeavors---with their long-standing history of pre-packaging information---militate against the development of even an awareness of the need to master information management skills.
• What is called for is not a new information studies curriculum but, rather, a restructuring of the learning process.

• Such a learning process would actively involve students in the process of:

    
   
  • knowing when they have a need for information
    
  • identifying information needed to address a given problem or issue
    
  • finding needed information and evaluating the information
    
  • organizing the information
    
  • using the information effectively to address the problem or issue at hand.

8 more annotations...

• The reassuring phrase ‘relevance ranking’, suggesting that the search is nuanced to the subject rather than simply keywords, is extremely misleading. In genuinely surveying a subject, Google remains hugely inferior to something as old-fashioned as a library catalogue itemised according to conceptual categories.
• ‘sponsored links’. “Google ads are unusually effective because most people don’t realize they’re ads,”
• Google delivers every student the same not-very-good and not-very-bad resources necessary to craft a perfectly mediocre response.
• appearance of learning
• One imprint on short-term memory, in other words, is erased if it is immediately followed by another – as happens when one progresses quickly from screen to screen
• Teaching will have to get away from the discipline of factual learning. In future, it’s going to be much more important to be able to order, rank and interpret information than the information itself, to have the appropriate critical and analytical tools.

4 more annotations...