librarian, library schools, lack of math skills

[Robert Wagers]

     I admit; I'm from a "library school" (lots of potential there for 
human interaction studies), so you can regard this reply as biased if you 
want.  Does everyone think that such studies of man-machine interaction 
should be "flowing out of schools of library science."  I grant that it 
would be nice, but it's all you folks in the libraries and other 
information use settings who have the opportunity to study such 
interactions firsthand.  Oh well, maybe we've attracted too many 
humanities types to the libraries!

R. Wagers

On Sat, 2 Dec 1995, Melissa Silvestre wrote:

> >A last comment about librarians.  I would expect vast amounts of solid
> >research findings about how humans interact with information and information
> >systems to be flowing out of our schools of library science. And of course
> >not much is . . . Why is this?  Have we attracted too many humanities types
> >into the programs?  People weak in mathematical skills?  It's 1995, for
> >heaven's sake -- by now we should have had mountains of verifiable
> >findings about how people and interfaces interact. Stuff we could use
> >in designing systems. Stuff we could give to programmers and not force
> >them to flail about.
> >
> >
> >Joe Schallan
> >Glendale (Ariz.) Public Library
> >jschall at glenpub.lib.az.us
> 
> I just graduated from UCLA's GSLIS (recently rearranged to something else)
> just a couple of years ago, and there were several courses about this
> topic by such creative minds as Marcia Bates who has researched and
> published extensively and in quite practical terms about patron use
> of search tools. But she's publishing in Library Science and Info Science
> journals, not the mainstream computer science ones, and the scholarly
> literature of our field is known for not being read by anyone out of it.
> So again, maybe at least part of the blame belongs to the programmers who
> aren't listening to us (reading our i.s. journals) and partly to
> us for not doing whatever it is we're supposed to do to encourage c.s.
> folks to read our i.s. journals.
> 
> All that aside, I am frequently depressed by the lack of what I consider
> basic statistical and technical skills of my older peers, but UCLA at least
> seemed
> to be doing a good job of forcing the humanities types in the MLS
> program to learn those basics (at least when I was there).
> 
> Isn't all this a little off the subject of web4lib (web-less)? 
> let me try to bring it back with a question:
> 
> Is anyone in library/info science doing research on usability issues in web page
> design from the perspective of web pages as an information resource in
> the library sense? Or writing about applying the past general research about
> interface design in terms that us practicing librarians/web page authors can
> use?
> Citations always welcome!
> 
> Melissa Silvestre    silvest at umslvma.umsl.edu   
> http://www.umsl.edu/~silvest/   fax: (314) 516-5853
> University of Missouri-St. Louis, Thomas Jefferson Library
> My words are my own and do not reflect the view of UM-St. Louis
> 
>